A Doll's House Marriage Analysis

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Recommended: Analysis of Doll's house by Henrik Ibsen

Brenda Wong
Mrs. Bowden
IB English HL 1
9 March 2014
Breaking Free From the Enclosure Called Marriage: A Marriage without Love
A doll may look like a beautiful figure, but within a doll’s house, the beauty is sealed within the inside of the house, which the beautiful doll is useless. Within the doll’s house, the doll is not fulfilling its potential for why it was created, to be attained to- it is merely a household decoration. In Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House, Nora is the doll, and her marriage is enclosed in the doll’s house. As a person, Nora is considered to be a beautiful creature who entertains her husband within the beautiful images of a docile wife. However, she is not who she seems to portray as. There is a dark secret within her. She’s a desperate creature longing to explore the outsides of her marriage outside of the doll’s house. In a society that is dominated by men, the expectations that Nora must handle, she must choose between the obligations that is determined by her role as a wife in opposition to the obligations of self, by focusing in her true identity. Divined with the context of her love, she commits forgery, and through the hardships and deception that she goes through, she realizes that her marriage is nothing more than an illusion, and she is nothing more than a doll within Torvald’s house.
The characters can be seen as hiding from each other and trying to seek the truth within another. The game of hide and seek can be seen between Nora and her children, as well as Nora and her husband. She hides her true personalities and her actions from him. On the other hand, Torvald also hides his life from Nora. Torvald keeps all the business of their relationship intact from Nora. Although Nora hides secr...

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...more money to Nora so she feels happy again, rather than discussing their financial situation and trying to work things out. He hides business away from Nora, just like she hides from him.
Nora is aware that both she and her husband are hiding things from each other. Although she does indeed hide from him, she also seeks the truth. She is playing the game on either end. She hides, she seeks. She is trying to learn about life altogether. Can there be a life where she does not have to hide from the one she should be closest to? Nora wants to be able to stop hiding, to stop lying. In order to accomplish that, Nora must be treated like an equal. Being treated as an equal is something that Torvald would never do for her. He would not “sacrifice his honor for the one he loves” (Ibsen 58). Nora realizes that “[Torvald was] not the man [she] had thought [him]” (Ibsen 57).

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