Bravo, Ibsen. Bravo.

I’m going to be perfectly honest: Nora bugged me for most of “A Doll’s House.” I’m sorry to be so curt and unprofessional about the matter, but it’s true. She was flat, two-dimensional, self-centered, child-like, and blissfully ignorant of the world around her for a vast portion of the play. Everything was a game, from her marriage, to her relationships with other people (such as with Christina and Dr. Rank.) Such tendencies bother me to my core. I can’t stand people who allow people to walk all over them! Unlike apathy, Nora exhibited just sheer ignorance to the world around her. Up until the beginning of the third act, I couldn’t stand Nora when she was onstage. Almost everything she said was either so uninformed or so self-centered that I wanted to cry out in frustration! Now, I know that having been raised in modern society have influenced this view. I’ve always been told to stand up for myself and that my ideas were as valid as any man’s. So, to find a character who exhibits such tendencies that so completely counteract my own justifiably set me on edge. I understand that “A Doll’s House” is set in the mid to late 19th century, when society’s views on women were drastically different than today’s, yet I still could not comprehend how she could idly sit back and allow herself to be a almost a plaything for her husband. Although on the surface, Nora seemed happy, and the play had an easy-going tone, I was disturbed by the scenes unfolding on the pages in front of me. It was not until the last act that I felt any sort of emotion towards Nora other than disgust and annoyance. These feelings that had overshadowed almost all others for a good part of the play, and had undeniably distorted my perceptions of all of her actions were suddenly overturned. From being heavily biased against Nora, and everything that she did, to unexpectedly seeing a human character emerge within the last twenty pages actually threw me for a loop.

Nora as a human, and no longer a ‘doll’ wearing a façade of happiness was a pleasant surprise. I was happy to see her actually stand up for herself, and against her husband, whereas she’d been a pushover for the rest of the play. Realizing that her husband was not the man she thought him to be, Nora’s reaction was exactly what I would’ve hoped. She was intimidating, powerful, and assertive, all characteristics which made up a woman whom I felt a connection to; she was scared and soon-to-be alone, but she held her head high and honestly answered Torvald’s arguments. Suddenly, the character I disliked most was not Nora, but her once-doting husband. How could he treat someone he claimed to love with such contempt? I was at a loss for words.

Then, looking over the rest of the story, I realized that Ibsen had been giving us, as readers, clues as to the true nature of this almost disturbingly twisted relationship all throughout the play. Little things, once regarded as perfectly normal, took on a more disturbing tone: his forbidding Nora to have macaroons or holding on to the letterbox keys helped show us the extent of the secrecy and lies in the marriage. His childlike pet names for Nora no longer symbolized the love and affection that we had come to expect from Torvald, but rather illustrated his perception of Nora as no more than a simpleton with whom he could toy. This almost idyllic husband became a symbol for everything that was wrong with Norwegian society concerning the role of women at the end of the 19th century. At the end of the play, as Nora was shedding her costume, as well as her previous life, I realized that I no longer hated her. This character, whom I once detested, was suddenly the character that I was rooting for! She became a character with a backbone and a sense of what was right for her own self emerged as the final scene unfolded. As she turned her back on this past chapter of her life, she became a beacon for women everywhere that there is no point in life too late to make a change. As the door slams behind her in the final scene, we realize that we have seen the full transformation of a woman, from her childlike tendencies in the first act, to the awareness she begins to comprehend of the gravity of the situation in the second act, to the mature woman we see leave her husband in an attempt to better her own life in the third act. I, for one, was happy for as well as proud of Nora; emotions which I never would have thought I’d experience while reading this play. (807)