53 pages • 1 hour read
Henrik IbsenA Doll's House
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1879A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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Objectification and Sexism
The play criticizes the dynamics between men and women, particularly through the example of Nora and Torvald’s marriage. Their relationship is not a union between equals but a transaction in which Torvald possesses Nora, who exists to suit her husband’s whims. Torvald’s objectification of Nora is clear from the start, as he addresses her with dehumanizing epithets like “little singing bird” and “little squirrel of mine,” which cast Nora more as a pet, as a thing to be kept, than as a person with autonomy (3).
While Nora becomes increasingly aware of this sexist treatment, Torvald remains static in his casual misogyny. After the final New Year’s party that they spend together, Torvald can’t get over how adorable Nora was in her costume—or, indeed, how adorable everyone else at the party thought she was. He asks, “Can’t I look at my most treasured possession?” when a weary Nora tries to get him to leave her alone (69). His pleasure isn’t in Nora’s talent or charm but in the fact that other people see that charm, but don’t get to possess it. To Torvald, Nora is “[his] and [his] alone, completely and utterly [his]” (69). For Nora, however, this evening catalyzes a personal and emotional awakening, as she realizes her unhappiness and mistreatment: “I have been your doll wife, just as at home I was Daddy’s doll child. […] That’s been our marriage, Torvald” (80-81).
This reduction of women to decorative objects, A Doll’s House argues, is soul-killing. Treated like a little doll all her life, Nora never has the chance to develop adult human sense or empathy. Only a major crisis in her domestic life frees her from a lifetime of foolishness and waste, enabling her to recognize that she is more than a doll, more than a wife, more than a mother. As Nora tells Torvald, “I have another duty equally sacred. […] My duty to myself” (82).
The play asserts that sexist objectification also damages men’s souls. Torvald’s whole identity rests on being respected, admired, and powerful—and he’s entirely willing to throw his “little squirrel” under the bus to preserve his own ego. A system in which women are pretty dolls and men are powerful paternal figures, Ibsen argues, is one that eats at both souls and societies.
Fraud and Fraudulence
Nora and Krogstad have something in common: They’ve both committed a crime. As Krogstad puts it, “my own offense was no more and no worse than [yours], and it ruined my entire reputation” (29). Their shared “offense” is fraud and forgery. But as it turns out, their financial fraud is only a miniature version of bigger frauds they’re committing every day.
Nora’s choice to deceive Torvald in the first place comes from an essentially fraudulent marriage. We can see this in every interaction the couple have: as soon as Torvald comes on stage, Nora puts on her best Marilyn Monroe voice, twittering and simpering; when he leaves the room, her mood ranges from empty, manic cheer to depression. And Torvald, too, is a fraud, pretending to be a masterful husband when really he’s a little boy terrified of losing his veneer of power.
The financial fraud that drives the play’s plot reflects a bigger societal fraud: the fraudulence of people who must play assigned roles to be accepted. In this, Ibsen seems to agree with Dante, who puts the fraudulent in the lowermost pit of his Inferno: spiritual fraudulence is a cancer on society. But it’s also a cancer that society seems to nourish and even demand. Nora’s eventual decision to give up her fraudulent role in a fraudulent marriage—to insist, “I am an individual, just as much as you are—or at least I’m going to try to be”—is both a righteous and a dangerous path in a world that often prefers falsity to authenticity (82).
Death and Decay
Just beneath the glittery Christmastime surface of A Doll’s House lurks the specter of death. Dr. Rank knows he’s about to die of spinal tuberculosis, and it won’t be pretty; Krogstad menaces Nora with a vision of her “bloated, hairless, unrecognizable” body washing ashore in the spring after her suicide (54). These are images not just of death but of the grisly bodily reality of death. There’s no romantic wasting away here, only coughing up blood and bloating in ice water.
These sharp, shocking images of death make it clear that the question of whether or how to be a real, complete person goes beyond being truly “happy” rather than falsely “gay” (80). Rather, it’s a matter of how humans can best use their time alive. Death is all too real, all too grisly, and all too final. Nora’s determination to find out whether what her pastor told her is “right for [her]” also hints that, in Ibsen’s view, religious consolation for death only works to the extent that a person can incorporate it into their true and complete self (83).
The play’s morbid imagery also affirms Ibsen’s belief that the strict rules governing both men and women were contributing to social decay and stunting the formation of fully realized personal identities, especially among women. Ultimately, the play brings death so vividly into the picture to emphasize that Nora’s quest is one of the utmost seriousness—and one all humans should take up.
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