literature analysis

“A Doll House” by Henrik Ibsen, is a play about a wife, Nora Helmer, who is hiding a big secret from her overprotective husband and at last realizes that she might worth more than she has been given credit. Nora Helmer and her husband, Torvald Helmer have been married for eight years, yet she is hiding something from Torvald that she thinks it would ruin everything if he found out. The play is combined with three acts; it opens up with Nora coming home with a Christmas tree, and making preparations for Christmas on Christmas eve The first line of the stage directions gives an impression that the Helmers are happy, “a comfortable room, tastefully but not expensively furnished” (798). Nora is first projected as a wife who loves her husband’s money. However, as we go further to the conversation between Nora and Kristine Linde, her friend that she hasn't seen for ten years, it reveals that there is a reason behind her need of money. Later on, Krogstad blackmails her for her forgery. Nora expects that her husband would save her somehow but it does not turn out to be true. By that time, she realizes that Torvald is not the man she thought he was, thus she made an extraordinary decision. Under a series of extreme circumstances and her interactions with other characters, Nora’s character goes through a dramatic change throughout the play, she transforms from a playful housewife to a serious lady.
In the beginning of the play, she seems happy and pleased with the society that her husband, Torvald Helmer, has created for her inside the house. For instance, she obeys her Torvald’s rules, like not eating macaroons. And from how Torvald and Nora interact with each other, such as Torvald calling Nora lark and squirrel, we can feel that they a...

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...ll that is too fragile to do anything serious, and so brittle to be troubled with real business. She was a wife, a mother and also a homemaker. The only things she was considered as capable of were running the home, raising the children and looking pretty. This was a common stereotype for women in the 1880s, that women were treated as possessions, instead of people. Women had a specific role they had to fill. They had to look just so, act just so, raise the children in a certain way, and keep up the house in a perfect way. Many women tried to fill this position of the “perfect housewife”. They wore corsets that pressure on their internal organs just to look the way men wanted them to (Finch). In this play, Nora has walked out for her feminine role, she makes this decision that is so shocking in that era, and takes her first step to be an independent individual.