'A Doll's House' A Feminist Play with Social Realities

Henrik Johan Ibsen (1828-1906) was a great and prominent playwright of 20^th century. His plays deal realistically with psychological and social problems. His themes are mainly concerned with the topics like women’s position in marriage and society, hypocrisy in women, relationship between truth and justice, freedom and duty etc.

‘A Doll’s House’ is a protest against fatally false view of women that turns marriage into a bargain between a beautiful slave and a kind slave owner. Ibsen has delineated the character of Nora in order to justify his point of view. Through a story of three days in which the action passes through, Nora develops from a child to woman and the writer gets a chance to expose a number of realities pertaining to married life and the role of woman as a better half in the drama of so called happy married life.

In ‘A Doll’s House’, Nora’s husband’s health suffers badly and she needs money to get her husband well soon. Her husband (Torvald) is a very honest person and abhors malpractices. But the irony of fate is that his wife (Nora) forges her rich father’s fake signatures to obtain money for the treatment of her ailing husband. Ultimately, the disclosure of her guilt, the gravity of which she was not conscious of and its consequences she was ignorant of, brings her face to face with the grim realities of life which the writer targets at. Through the character of his heroine, Ibsen (the writer) has tried to illustrate some fundamental problems of society and the share of women in the creation of such issues.

During the first act, Nora appears to be a very submissive, selfish and foolish woman but at the same time we find that this is not her real disposition. When she asks Torvald for more money despite having on a spending spree, she appears selfish and grasping. Nora says speaking quickly;

“You might give me money, Torvald. Only just as much as you can afford; and then one of these days I will buy something with it.”

But soon we discover through her conversation with Mrs. Linde that she is not squanding money to satisfy her own desires but using it to pay off the loan she took out in order to save her husband’s life. In doing so she was putting her own desires off having new things so that her husband and children could have all they needed. Her arrangement of loan, trip to Italy and her careful management of money and her secret – all these collaboratively endow an astonishing strength to her character. But Nora does not dare to acknowledge her own strength because the society in general and her beloved Torvald in special would not comfortably accept such strength in a woman. Nora is not an object ‘a doll’ but she was dealt with like the one throughout her life.

Ibsen does not absolve Nora from the duties of motherhood. Rather he shows that to become a successful mother, a woman like Nora should follow her heart and learn what it is like to be an individual instead of a doll or toy. Nora hides the fatal truth that might bring havoc in their lives just because she holds a greater character and this becomes quite transparent and obvious through her discussion with Mrs. Linde.

Mrs. Linde: “And since then have you never told your secret to your husband?”

Nora: “Good Heavens, no! How could you think so? A man who has such strong opinions about these things! And besides, how painful and humiliating it would be for Torvald, with his manly independence, to know that he owed me anything! It would upset our mutual relations; our beautiful happy home would no longer be what it is now.”

Nora knew very well that what could be the consequences if Torvald comes to know that Nora has committed a blunder which he will never spare and their matrimonial and conjugal life will lose happiness.

To conclude, we may say that Ibsen has succeeded in producing the atmosphere of horror, sympathetic feelings and a dreaded climax. He was not altogether a feminist or proponent of women’s emancipation.