The Unrecognized Dimensions of Nora

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In Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll House, Ibsen tells a story of a wife and mother who not only has been wronged by society, but by her beloved father and husband because of her gender. Nora left her father’s house as a naïve daughter only to be passed to the hands of her husband forcing her to be naïve wife and mother, or so her husband thinks. When Nora’s husband, Torvald becomes deathly ill, she takes matters into her own hands and illegally is granted a loan that will give her the means to save her husband’s life. Her well guarded secret is later is used against her, to exort Torvald, who was clueless that his wife was or could be anything more than he made her. However, Nora has many unrecognized dimensions “Besides being lovable, Nora is selfish, frivolous, seductive, unprincipled, and deceitful” (Rosenberg and Templeton 894). Nora is a dynamic character because her father and her husband treat her as a child and do not allow her to have her own thoughts and opinions, as the play progresses she breaks free from the chains of her gender expectation to explore the world around her.

Upon the first glance of Torvald and Nora’s relationship, Nora is returning from a day of Christmas shopping. She is acknowledged by her husband’s greetings of belittling pet names that he uses in an inconspicuous thus unnoticed form of verbal oppression and a verbal stake to claim her as his property “But if Helmer considers Nora his property, as he apparently does, Nora encourages him to do so. To him, she calls herself his little squirrel and his lark” (Dukore 121). These actions are not Nora’s fault, it appears Nora does not fight his degrading pet names because she knows no difference and also it benefits her in the ability to manipulate Torvald w...

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...in A Doll's House." Readings

On A Doll’s House. Hayley R. Mitchell. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven, 1999. 120-27. Print.

Heller, Otto. "Marriage in A Doll's House." Readings on A Doll's House. Hayley R. Mitchell. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven, 1999. 97-102. Print.

Ibsen, Henrik. "A Doll House." Portable Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing. By

Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell. Seventh ed. Boston, MA:Wadsworth

Cengage Learning, 2011. 799-851. Print.

Kelly, Katherine E. "Pandemic and Performance: Ibsen and the Outbreak of Modernism."

South Central Review. 25.1 (2008): 12-35. Project MUSE. Web. 25 Nov. 2011.

Rosenberg, Marvin, and Joan Templeton. "Ibsen's Nora." PMLA 104.5 (1989): 894-95.

JSTOR. Web. 19 Nov. 2011.

Templeton, Joan. "The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen." PMLA

104.1(1989): 28-40. JSTOR. Web. 16 Nov. 2011.

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