Theme of identity in A Doll’s House

The title of the play is the first indication that individual identity might be suppressed in the story. A Doll’s House is a stage on which children can enact their own idealised vision of life. The owner of the house controls all that happens and can create the narrative of his or her choosing. This is certainly the case at the start of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Torvald runs his house to suit his way of living and expects its inhabitants to conform to his views and attitudes. At the end of the play, when Nora stands up to Torvald, she tells him, ‘Our home has been nothing but a playroom. I have been your doll-wife’.

Nora

At the start of the play Nora seems unwilling or unable to express her sense of self, an impression conveyed by her secretive nature and her desire to conform to her husband’s expectations of her. When we first meet her, Nora is in high spirits. She is returning from a Christmas shopping trip and has several parcels and a Christmas tree, carried by a porter. Nora’s first word in the play is ‘Hide’, as she orders her maid to conceal the tree for now. ‘Hide the Christmas tree carefully, Helen’. This is symbolic of Nora’s nature for most of the play. She endeavours to hide her actions, her strength and her true self from a husband whom she rightly suspects is incapable of understanding them.

Nora generously tips the porter who carries the tree into the Helmer home. She is happy and laughing as she eats a couple of macaroons from a bag in her pocket. However, this sense of joy quickly fades as Nora ‘goes cautiously’ to the door of her husband’s study and listens to see if he is in. It is odd to think that a wife should behave like an errant child rather than an equal in a relationship, and we wonder why it is that Nora’s vivacity (cheerfulness) and confidence erode so soon after she arrives home.

Torvald, Nora’s husband, calls his wife in a way that at first appears to be in an affectionate manner. However, the language he uses to describe Nora shows that he does not view her as an adult or an individual in her own right, and we see that he is a great challenge to any hope Nora has of exerting herself and expressing her true identity. He speaks as if she is a creature he owns calling her ‘my little squirrel’ and ‘my little skylark’. As soon as he emerges for his study, Nora hides the bag of macaroons in her pocket and wipes her mouth to erase any traces that might give her away. Torvald continues to address Nora in possessive and demeaning terms, calling her ‘my little spendthrift’ and ‘little featherhead’. He uses the word ‘little’ a great deal when addressing Nora, as if by doing so he can make her less worthy of the respect due to an equal. He accuses her of being an ‘extravagant little person’ and asking ‘What are little people called that are always wasting money?’ even though Nora has explained the trouble she has gone to to secure bargains when Christmas shopping. In quick succession, he calls Nora, ‘my dear little Nora’, ‘sweet little spendthrift’, ‘off little soul’, and ‘my sweet little skylark’. When he suspects Nora of eating sweets, Torvald wags his finger at her and asks, ‘Hasn’t Miss Sweet Tooth been breaking rules in town today?’ Torvald has effectively robbed Nora of any individuality and any sense of her adult identity by forcing her to behave exactly as he wants.

This is a continuation of the situation in Nora’s family home: her father controlled every aspect of her life and viewed her as his ‘doll-child’ and Torvald does the same.

It is easy and over simplistic, to blame Torvald for his treatment of Nora, but his attitude merely reflects the views of the patriarchal society of that time. Ibsen wrote in a note on the play that women cannot express their true identity in an ‘exclusively male society, with laws made by men and with prosecutors and judges who assess feminine conduct from a masculine standpoint’.

Nora is not a typically meek, subservient woman of the Victorian era. We learn that she has taken the unusual step of secretly taking out a loan to pay for a trip to Italy to restore Torvald’s failing health. This is quite a strong statement of her own identity, even if she does have to keep it a secret. It shows that Nora has a will of he own and the ability to make decisions without her husband’s permission. As he even has the final say on whether or not she can eat macaroons, it is obvious that if this expression of her identity came to light, Nora would be in deep trouble.

When Torvald discovers the truth about the loan, he is furious. He cannot believe that Nora has behaved so irresponsibly and, although he earlier expressed a wish to save her from an imagined danger, he now turns on her and shows that he never really loved her. Soon after this, a letter arrives from Krogstad and Torvald learns, to his relief, that he has withdrawn his threat of blackmail. Now Torvald tells Nora that all is well and that their marriage can continue as before. He assures her that he has forgiven her and that from now on she can lean on him completely. Torvald does not believe his wife should act on her own in the future and he says that he will be her will and her conscience. She will be ‘both wife and child’ to him and he will control her even more than he did before.

This is a turning point for Nora, and she finally decides that she must become her own person. Torvald is bewildered by her decision to leave and cannot see why she would be unhappy with his proposal for the future of their relationship. Nora explains that when she lived at home with her father, he told her ‘his opinion about everything’ and so she had the same opinions. She was never allowed to form her own identity. Torvald simply took over this role when he married her. She says that the time has come for her to educate herself and that, as she is ‘a reasonable human being’, she now wants the chance to examine the fundamental questions of life and decide for herself what she thinks about them. Torvald is shocked and no amount of explanation can make him see the value in Nora’s idea.

Despite Torvald’s pleas for her to stay, Nora leaves the man she now views as a stranger. She can no longer love her husband after he has shown that he puts himself first and foremost and loves her only when she conforms to his idea of what a perfect wife should be. Nora admits that she does not know exactly what she is going to do when she leaves Torvald, but she is nonetheless ready to face that challenge. As the door closes behind her, we feel that, for the first time, Nora has a chance to have a meaningful, fulfilling life and a better future.