Based on Henrik Ibsen’s ‘A Doll’s House’

When Henrik Ibsen wrote A Doll’s House in 1879, the role of women in society was very different from what it is today. Around the world, women weren’t able to vote, own land, and in some places, they couldn’t even get a job. They were expected to stay home, help raise their children, and be there for whatever their husbands needed. Unsurprisingly, there were lots of women who didn’t agree with these restrictions around their role in society. Suffrage fighters like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, Zitkala-Ša, and more publicly fought for women’s rights, both in the home and workplace. For other women, fighting for their rights came in much smaller, less noticeable ways. A demonstration of how this may have happened in many households around the world is presented in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, though the main character Nora may not have been the best representative of why a woman would leave her family during this time period.

In an analysis of A Doll’s House, Bernard Paris writes “One of the major objectives of women’s liberation movements has been to free women from the cultural demand for self-effacement and to establish their right to full human development.” (1) This idea is reflected in A Doll’s House at the very end, when Nora tells her husband she is leaving him so she can find herself away from any men trying to tell her what to do. However, the reason Paris uses the word “objective” in his analysis is because not every woman would have had the means or opportunities to do this. Nora doesn’t really discuss how she plans to live on her own. She doesn’t have a job, though without a family to take care of, she might be able to find one as a typist or a housemaid. Either way, while in A Doll’s House, Nora makes the act of leaving and starting her own life seem simple, in reality it wouldn’t have been for a majority of women trapped in her situation.

Paris also makes the point that “Nora experiences genuine growth at the end of the play, but she is not as clear-headed as she thinks she is. She fails to see, for example, that she has also participated in the creation of her destructive relationship with her husband and that Torvald has been no more of a real person for her than she has been for him.” (1) Nora spends a majority of A Doll’s House manipulating Torvald and purposely playing into his image of her as a sweet child he must provide for, instead of a wife that treats him like an equal. She uses both her words and physical actions to distract Torvald from thinking too deeply into what she is saying.

“Nora: [playing with his coat buttons, and without raising her eyes to his]. If you really want to give me something, you might—you might—

Helmer: Well, out with it!

Nora: [speaking quickly]. You might give me money, Torvald. Only just as much as you can afford…” (Act I, 974)

Even the small action of not meeting Torvald’s eyes when she is asking him for money shows how Nora plays into the character of meekness and childishness – the image of a child ducking their head when asking for something they know they can’t have is one every parent has seen, and is imitated almost exactly with Nora in this scene.

At the end of the play, Nora tells Torvald the main reason she is leaving is because she is tired of him running her life. She criticized Torvald for not treating her as an equal, and tells him “In all these eight years —longer than that—from the very beginning of our acquaintance, we have never exchanged a word on any serious subject.” (Act III, 1027) However, while Nora treats this like it is entirely Torvald’s fault, she fails to acknowledge that, at least in what we see in the play, she makes no attempts to start any serious conversations either. The one time we see anything close to a serious conversation – other than the last act, of course – is when Torvald criticizes Nora for spending money and tries to explain why they can’t spend his paycheck before they have it. Nora immediately switches back to playing the character of a naive woman and refuses to listen to Torvald talk about the consequences of her actions. Paris adds to this by writing “Nora’s relationship with her husband is based on a bargain she has made in her own mind. She will be a charming, obliging, self-sacrificing wife, and Torvald will love and protect her. (2) This is, in many ways, the opposite of what women fighting for equal rights at the time would have been pushing for. Torvald truly seems to love Nora, and there is little throughout the play to show that he wouldn’t have supported her had she tried to work towards a more equal marriage. When she finally tells him about the loan she took from Krogstad to save Torvald when he was ill, Torvald is angry for a moment, but quickly forgives her once he knows Krogstrad is no longer pursuing repayment. He tells her “You have loved me as a wife ought to love her husband. Only you had not sufficient knowledge to judge of the means you used. But do you suppose you are any the less dear to me, because you don’t understand how to act on your own responsibility… I have forgiven you, Nora; I swear to you I have forgiven you.” (Act III, 1026) As Paris says, Nora has an image of what her marriage is in her mind, and she doesn’t seem to be able to break free of that, even when Torvald shows willingness to let her.

This is where Nora splits from suffragists of her time. Suffragists were fighting for the right to break free from men who wanted them to be silent and in the background. They fought against men who didn’t want to hear the opinions of women or see them lead successful lives on their own. However, Torvald seems more concerned about Nora’s wellbeing and the wellbeing of his family than he is of keeping her trapped for no reason. He states his concerns about Nora leaving clearly to her, but she refuses to hear them. Even after learning all the secrets his wife has hidden, Torvald isn’t casting her out of the house or treating her badly. When she asks for a serious conversation, he gives her one, and he is not wrong to worry about Nora’s prospects on her own.

While Ibsen may have written Torvald’s character to represent men of that time period, he misses the target with Nora’s. If he was trying to create a character that would inspire or be relatable to women in similar situations to Nora’s, then she needed to have less of a hand in her own entrapment. Paris raises the point of the speed of Nora’s transformation – “Indeed, the most difficult thing to understand about Nora is the speed of her transformation from a submissive, self-sacrificing woman who lives only for love and family into a self-assertive person who rejects all responsibility to her husband and children in the name of her duty to herself.” (1) To other characters in the play, Nora’s decision seems sudden and almost on a whim, and even to the audience, her decision doesn’t leave us feeling confident in her future at the end of the play. Nora, in her own ways, could be classified as a suffragist, but in reality, she isn’t fighting the patriarchy, but instead her own image of what her life is and has to be.