The main themes of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House revolve around the values and the issues of late 19th-century bourgeoisie, namely what looks appropriate, the value of money, and the way women navigate a landscape that leaves them little room to assert themselves as actual human beings.
The interwoven themes of A Doll's House recur throughout most of Ibsen's works. The specific problem of this drama deals with the difficulty of maintaining an individual personality — in this case a feminine personality — within the confines of a stereotyped social role.
Lesson Summary
Despite not being a feature of a well-made play, A Doll House also ultimately serves as a feminist parable, meaning that it's concerned with women's rights. These themes are mostly explored through the interactions between characters like Torvald, his wife Nora, her debtor Krogstad, Mrs. Linde and Dr.
The doll's house itself is a symbol of the Burnell family's societal position. When it is brought into the Burnell courtyard, it becomes, literally, a house within a house, a mirror of the Burnell's home.
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In A Doll's House, Ibsen is concerned with the problem of women's position in society. The theme that is more interesting to him in this play is the duties towards oneself and achieving the individuality and individual rights in the society.
Both Helmer and Rank use the metaphor of corrupt behaviour as moral sickness. For Helmer its source is the home, and the sickness invariably spreads. He lectures Nora about 'mothers who are constitutional liars', who infect their children with 'the germs of evil' (Act One, p.
The first instance of female sacrifice is seen in Act 1 through the interaction between Torvald and Nora, where Nora sacrifices her opinions and desires to satisfy her husband. Nora puts on a submissive façade, whose characteristics are similar to a child.
In his A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen employs dramatic and situational irony to highlight the contrast between Nora's true independent personality and her obsequious facade around Torvald, demonstrating the restraints of a typical Victorian marriage that inhibits women's individuality.
Nora says that she realizes that she is childlike and knows nothing about the world. She feels alienated from both religion and the law, and wishes to discover on her own, by going out into the world and learning how to live life for herself, whether or not her feelings of alienation are justified.
Krogstad is the antagonist in A Doll's House, but he is not necessarily a villain. Though his willingness to allow Nora's torment to continue is cruel, Krogstad is not without sympathy for her.
Dr. Rank is unmarried and lonely, and over the course of the play it is revealed that he is in love with Nora. Cynical about life, he rejoices when he finds out that his illness is terminal, and insists that neither Torvald nor Nora visit him in his dying days.
After Nora rather easily admits to her forgery, we learn that Krogstad's bad standing in society, the cause of his moral disease, results from committing the same crime. He tells her that “what I once did was nothing more, and nothing worse, and it destroyed me” (Ibsen 166).
A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen is a significant work as a model play in the rise of feminism of 19th century. Nora, the central female character, acts as the harbinger of feminism here. She is seen in the play as a rebellious female for establishing her own recognition as a human being.
Torvald treats Nora as if she was a child, like a doll. Nora feels imprisoned in a doll's house. Portraying sexist society where women are looked more down upon than men, Ibsen engages Nora in a household where little authority is given to her.
At first, Nora's interaction with Dr. Rank is similarly manipulative. When she flirts with him by showing her stockings, it seems that she hopes to entice Dr. Rank and then persuade him to speak to Torvald about keeping Krogstad on at the bank.
What secret has Nora been keeping from Torvald? She was in love with his brother before she married him. She borrowed the money they used to take a trip to Italy. She had an affair with Krogstad five years earlier.
Torvald then retires to his study to work. Dr. Rank, the family friend, arrives. Nora asks him for a favor, but Rank responds by revealing that he has entered the terminal stage of his disease and that he has always been secretly in love with her.
Ibsen finalizes the play by depicting all the women characters as feminists who abandon their 'doll' lives to leave like free, significant, and responsible in their societies. Nora, Linde, among others, begin as slaves but end a feminists. This renders Ibsen's 'A Doll's House' a feminist essay.
This is not to say that Ibsen was an "arrant" feminist, nor to say that the play is only about women. But it is about women, or in that neutral sense, a feminist play, because it deals primarily with the desire of a woman to establish her identity and dignity in the society.
The playwright Henrik Ibsen, born in this era, wrote this feminist play, through Nora's eyes, to support women under the male dominion. The hypocrisy of Nora helps to showcase the fact that women of the Norwegian epoch had no individual identity, no rights of their own and needed a revolt.
Nora is a victim of the male-dominated society of the nineteenth century. To save her husband, Torvald, she borrows money so that he might be able to recover from a life-threatening illness in a warmer climate.
Soon after hearing Torvald's thoughts, Nora encourages him to read Krogstad's letter, believing that he actually would sacrifice himself for her. There is something indescribably wonderful and satisfying for a husband in knowing that he has forgiven his wife – forgiven her unreservedly, from the bottom of his heart.
Nora believes herself to be a doll because the men in her life see her more as a toy than a human being.