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Claire Bloom has her title wrong. She didn't leave the doll's house. Philip Roth threw her out. This was after eighteen years of living together. Bloom's portrayal of Nora in Ibsen's Doll House, a play written over a hundred years ago, was one of her greatest successes, but Nora
had more gumption. Once she realized what her husband was, she left. Bloom would have stayed no matter what, if only Roth would have her. So much for women's progress.
Of course, the title refers not only to Bloom's place in Roth's house but to her whole life. There is a sense too (although she doesn't mention this) in which the (Connecticut) doll house was Roth's as much or more than hers, not simply because he owned it but because he regressed in it, became a child again, both pitiable and tyrannical; “feral, unflinching, hostile, accusative,” in Bloom's words. Since the image of the doll house is central in Bloom's book, it is fitting, if not symbiotic, that Roth's recent work Sabbath's Theater should feature a puppeteer. Roth evidently sees this profession, with its manipulation of dolls, as analogous to that of a novelist handling characters, to say nothing of a man in relation to women. Despite his readers' suspicions, Roth has always self-righteously denied that his fiction is autobiography. Now we have fewer doubts. And since she was taught by a master, we might legitimately wonder whether Bloom's autobiography isn't fiction—at least in part—since it reads midway between a Harlequin romance and True Confessions.
While nothing about Roth that comes through here may surprise us, some revelations about the beautiful and gifted Bloom might. All her life Bloom was obsessed with literary heroines, of the wrong kind, first through the influence of the fairy tales that her mother read to her—one way in which the culture influences the unconscious—then through her own reading and acting. Though Roth the author is no Flaubert, Claire Bloom is definitely something of a Madame Bovary, with regar