A Doll's House

“You could always give me money, Torvald. Only what you think you could spare. And then I could buy myself something with it later on.” 

Nora is requesting not just money but also agency. Torvald is happy to give her little sums for “housekeeping,” but when she wants money to spend as she pleases, he becomes withholding and condescending. The money he refuses her here is a symbol of power and freedom.

“Tell me, is it really true that you didn’t love your husband? What made you marry him, then?” 

When the widowed Kristine appears looking worn and thin, Nora first regales her with tales of Torvald’s recent success, then abruptly starts asking her tactless questions like this one. Nora’s flighty behavior suggests that her life as a cosseted housewife has left her childish in more ways than one.

“[W]hen Torvald isn’t quite so much in love with me as he is now, when he’s lost interest in watching me dance, or get dressed up, or recite. Then it might be a good thing to have something in reserve…. What nonsense! That day will never come.” 

“Mrs. Helmer, it’s quite clear you still haven’t the faintest idea what it is you’ve committed. But let me tell you, my own offense was no more and no worse than that, and it ruined my entire reputation.” 

The parallel between Krogstad’s and Nora’s fraud casts Nora’s ignorance as its own kind of criminality. Confined in domesticity, with only the most basic understanding of how the world works, Nora unwittingly commits the same fraud Krogstad committed knowingly. Treated as a child, using money like a game counter, she can’t fully or sensibly participate in society.

“Nobody’s got such good taste as you. And the thing is I do so want to look my best at the fancy dress ball. Torvald, couldn’t you give me some advice and tell me what you think I ought to go as, and how I should arrange my costume?” 

Flustered and frightened after Krogstad’s first visit, Nora turns back to what she knows. She seeks solace in a familiar relationship, asking Torvald to tell her what to “be” for the fancy New Year’s ball. Literally letting her husband dress her up like a doll, she both returns to a safe pattern and slyly distracts Torvald from her un-doll-like behavior around Krogstad.

“Corrupt my children…! Poison my home? It’s not true! It could never, never be true!” 

In the last line of Act 1, Nora foreshadows the play’s ending. Disturbed by Torvald’s idea that Krogstad’s immorality has “poisoned” his family, Nora fears that she too has become a poisonous influence. While she rejects the idea here, by the end of the play, she’s convinced that it’s completely true—not because of her financial fraud but because of her emotional fraud.

“Oh no, she hasn’t. She wrote to me when she got confirmed, and again when she got married.”

Nora’s old nursemaid (and now her children’s nursemaid) Anne Marie replies to Nora’s guess that Anne Marie’s daughter must have forgotten her by now. As we learn in this brief exchange, Anne Marie had to give up her daughter—born out of wedlock—to take a position as Nora’s surrogate mother. This line exposes the hypocritical, sexist cruelty of a “polite society” that can force a mother to give up her child just to survive—an issue that arises again at the end of the play, when Nora must make a similar choice for opposite reasons.

“He’s got something seriously wrong with him, you know. Tuberculosis of the spine, poor fellow. His father was a horrible man, who used to have mistresses and things like that. That’s why the son was always ailing, right from being a child.” 

When Nora tells Kristine about Dr. Rank’s illness, she attributes his physical ailment to an emotional one. Here, male awfulness becomes both a moral and a bodily disease able to “infect” and even kill. The idea of morally poisoned families hearkens back to Nora’s fear that she herself will injure her children through her behavior.

“If a little squirrel were to ask ever so nicely…? […] Please, if you would only let it have its way, and do what it wants, it’d scamper about and do all sorts of marvellous tricks. […] I’d pretend I was an elfin child and dance a moonlight dance for you, Torvald.” 

Before Nora renews her pleas for Torvald to give Krogstad his job back, she plays on all his ideas of her as a twinkly, magical little being. But there’s a desperation in her pretty pictures here, and Torvald’s unimpressed responses suggest that Nora is only really allowed to use her feminine wiles on his terms. Her “power” in the household is utterly illusory.

“Do you want me to make myself a laughing stock in the office? … Give people the idea that I am susceptible to any kind of outside pressure? You can imagine how soon I’d feel the consequences of that!” 

In his reply to Nora’s pleas, Torvald displays his fundamental insecurity. His masculinity, like Nora’s femininity, is a posture. And postures don’t hold themselves. Just as Nora plays into the role of magical elfin juvenile earlier in this scene, Torvald has performances of his own to maintain. This moment foreshadows Torvald’s eventual craven cowardice when he learns of Nora’s fraud.

“The whole damn thing is ghastly. But the worst thing is all the ghastliness that has to be gone through first. I only have one more test to make; and when that’s done I’ll know pretty well when the final disintegration will start. There’s something I want to ask you. Helmer is a sensitive soul; he loathes anything that’s ugly. I don’t want him visiting me […] On no account must he. I won’t have it. I’ll lock the door on him.—As soon as I’m absolutely certain of the worst, I’ll send you my visiting card with a black cross on it. You’ll know then the final horrible disintegration has begun.” 

Dr. Rank’s desire to spare the “sensitive” Torvald his grisly tubercular decline reveals both men’s insecurity. Like Nora and Torvald, Dr. Rank can’t quite bear reality—even if he’s grimly realistic about how terrible his death is going to be. Unable to let even his oldest friends share his burden, he concocts this rather Gothic calling-card scheme rather than allow anyone to see him at his weakest.

“Oh, how could you be so clumsy, Dr. Rank! When everything was so nice.” 

Nora’s response to Dr. Rank’s confession of love is blackly comical. Rather than take her dying friend’s feeling seriously—or even be truly angry with him—Nora becomes pettish and unserious. To the dying Dr. Rank, of course, “everything” is pretty far from “so nice.” But even as she begins to grapple with real-world troubles, Nora still can’t quite take matters of life and death seriously.

“When I was a girl at home, I loved Daddy best, of course. But I also thought it great fun if I could slip into the maids’ room. For one thing they never preached at me. And they always talked about such exciting things.” 

As Nora tries to explain her feelings about Torvald to Dr. Rank, she unwittingly reveals a lot about her psychology and situation. Torvald, as she says again at the end of the play, has stepped seamlessly into the role of “Daddy,” the best-loved but stern father figure. In this model of the world, there is no room for complex adult relationships. Dr. Rank can only step into the role of the “maids,” playing harmlessly (and meaninglessly) with little Nora.

“Under the ice, maybe? Down in the cold, black water? Then being washed up in the spring, bloated, hairless, unrecognizable…” 

Krogstad’s spiteful, hideous vision of Nora’s imagined suicide suggests that he’s got more than a financial stake in making Nora feel terrible. He needles her in exactly the way she’s least equipped to deal with; a sweet little “squirrel” doesn’t have much cause to imagine her own bloated corpse. Krogstad’s cruelty here feels personal, far beyond the bounds of his efforts to regain his job and support his family.

“Five. Seven hours till midnight. Then twenty-four hours till the next midnight. Then the tarantella will be over. Twenty-four and seven? Thirty-one hours to live.” 

Nora’s quiet calculation comes after a scene in which she rehearses a manic, desperate tarantella (and ignores Torvald’s protestations that she mustn’t go so fast). In her despair, the fundamental split in Nora’s life becomes painfully clear. Around Torvald, she’s still a giddy, wayward child; privately, she’s a woman preparing for suicide.

“When you’ve sold yourself once for other people’s sake, you don’t do it again.” 

When Kristine returns to Krogstad, he’s incredulous that she would want to come back to him after he’s fallen so far in the world. He doubts her intentions, wondering whether she’s just trying to rescue Nora. This quiet reply from Kristine sets up the play’s ending. She’s self-aware enough to know that she’s “sold herself”—the same truth that Nora is about to discover.

“How things change! How things change! Somebody to work for…to live for. A home to bring happiness into. Just let me get down to it…” 

While Kristine’s earlier declaration that she’ll never sell herself again is stirring, her reflections after Krogstad leaves introduce unease to this new life. Here, all her reflections are still about what she can do for others. And while she and Krogstad do seem to care for each other, Krogstad’s sadistic cruelty only a few scenes ago suggests that “working for” a relationship with him might one day become another kind of thankless self-sacrifice.

“Can’t I look at my most treasured possession? At all this loveliness that’s mine and mine alone, completely and utterly mine.” 

After the New Year’s party, Torvald is practically lust-drunk on Nora—and on the success of her costumed performance as the tarantella-dancing Capri girl. It’s clear that a great part of Torvald’s “love” is merely the thrill of possessing an object that other people want. The limited extent to which he truly “treasures” Nora becomes painfully clear as the final act unfolds.

“The thing must be hushed up at all costs. And as far as you and I are concerned, things must appear to go on exactly as before. But only in the eyes of the world, of course. In other words you’ll go on living here; that’s understood. But you will not be allowed to bring up the children, I can’t trust you with them […] All that we can do is save the bits and pieces from the wreck, preserve appearances…” 

When Torvald reads Krogstad’s blackmail letter, he immediately changes his tune toward his “most treasured possession.” The vision of the future he proposes here is one of eternal shame and misery for Nora; he imagines holding her prisoner in her own home, just “keeping up appearances” so he won’t lose face in the outside world. His cowardice is clear to Nora—but so is the true nature of their past life together, which differs from Torvald’s proposed solution here only in surface particulars.

“The agonies you must have gone through! When the only way out seemed to be… No, let’s forget the whole ghastly thing. We can rejoice and say: It’s all over! It’s all over! Listen to me, Nora! You don’t seem to understand: it’s all over! Why this grim look on your face? Oh, poor little Nora, of course I understand. You can’t bring yourself to believe I’ve forgiven you. But I have, Nora, I swear it. I forgive you everything. I know you did what you did because you loved me.” 

It only takes Krogstad’s second letter for Torvald to reverse his attitude yet again. This passage reveals that sexist pressures infantilize not just women but also men. Torvald’s moral understanding is about a centimeter deep; his entire world is built on how he appears to other people, and he can’t understand why Nora doesn’t fall back into his arms mere seconds after he threatened to imprison her in a false marriage.

“I’ve been greatly wronged, Torvald. First by my father, and then by you. […] You two never loved me. You only thought how nice it was to be in love with me. […] It’s right, you know, Torvald. At home, Daddy used to tell me what he thought, then I thought the same. And if I thought differently, I kept quiet about it, because he wouldn’t have liked it. He used to call me his baby doll, and he played with me as I used to play with my dolls. Then I came to live in your house…” 

Nora’s awakening gives the play its title. As she realizes that she’s only been a decorative plaything for all the men in her life, Nora sees herself as a doll—and her home as a mere doll’s house. Ibsen’s choice to call the play A Doll’s House rather than The Doll’s House makes a bigger societal point: Nora and Torvald’s false home is only one among millions.

“I thought I was [happy], but I wasn’t really. […] No, just gay. […] I have been your doll wife, just as at home I was Daddy’s doll child. And the children in turn have been my dolls. I thought it was fun when you came and played with me, just as they thought it was fun when I went and played with them. That’s been our marriage, Torvald.”

Nora’s earlier concerns about “poisoning” her children return as a grim reality. She understands that she has hurt her kids through her fraud—but not the kind of fraud she was originally worried about. The real “fraudulence” in this play is the fraudulence of a false self.

“I have another duty equally sacred. […] My duty to myself.” 

Nora’s reply to Torvald’s insistence that her most sacred duty is to her family could stand as an epigraph for the whole play. Ibsen suggests that true, honest selfhood is not self-indulgence but the foundation of a just society. If women aren’t allowed to be human—if they’re only little dolls—then they’ll raise doll children and marry doll husbands, and society will be founded on fraudulent relationships concerned entirely with external appearances. The difficult work of soul-making, Ibsen suggests, is everyone’s first and most sacred duty.