What Is Nora's Sacrifice

When she discovers the true nature of her husband, Nora realizes she is being used all of these time and the person she admired more than her own life doesn’t care whether she lives or dies. In the play, Nora wanted her husband to take her place of her crime and to accept his fall of reputation. Again, she planned to take her own life and tells Mrs. Linde to make the true statement on behalf of her so Torvald can be saved. Nora was desperately waiting for a miracle “but it’s so awful” (Ibsen 888). In the meantime, she tells Mrs. Linde that "it’s a wonderful joy, this waiting” (Ibsen 890) indicates Torvalds will soon learn all of her sacrifices which she made until now only to save him. But reality is very cruel, when Torvald learns about

When Krogsted returns with Nora’s forge stamp, Torvald says “Nora, I’m saved” (Ibsen 901). Surprised Nora asks her husband what about me? He quickly replies we both saved. That moment Nora realizes though she stayed with Torvald in his deepest need, Torvald never realizes her as a partner instead these whole eight years that she suffered for his sake, Torvald only cares for his social status. He also set Nora “at a distance by choosing ‘I’” (Karpel, Individuation: from fusion to dialogue:807). In her paper “I'll Explain It to You” author Deborah Tannen illustrates an experiment, where a female student expresses her thinking about a story of a poor wife, who died during her facial operation. To the student, “the issue was interdependence: The woman was inextricably bound up with her husband, so her behavior could not be separated from his” (Tannen, I’ll Explain it to You:63) which means, because her husband did not like her face the poor wife also began to hate it. In the play the same thing happens with Nora, she realizes her life with Torvalds is no different than with her father. Nora says she “lived by doing tricks for Torvald“(Ibsen 904) and her Papa. They both buried her personal feelings by their own and ruined her process to find her own identity. Nora then says “I’ve been wronged greatly, Torvald- first by papa