a doll's house drama essay

A Summary and Analysis of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

A Doll’s House is one of the most important plays in all modern drama. Written by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen in 1879, the play is well-known for its shocking ending, which attracted both criticism and admiration from audiences when it premiered.

Before we offer an analysis of A Doll’s House , it might be worth recapping the ‘story’ of the play, which had its roots in real-life events involving a friend of Ibsen’s.

A Doll’s House : summary

The play opens on Christmas Eve. Nora Helmer has returned home from doing the Christmas shopping. Her husband, a bank manager named Torvald, asks her how much she has spent. Nora confides to her friend Mrs Linde that, shortly after she and Torvald married, he fell ill and she secretly borrowed some money to pay for his treatment. Mrs Linde is looking for work from Nora’s husband.

She is still paying that money back (by setting aside a little from her housekeeping money on a regular basis) to the man she borrowed it from, Krogstad – a man who, it just so happens, works for Nora’s husband … who is about to sack Krogstad for forging another person’s signature.

But Krogstad knows Nora’s secret, that she forged her father’s signature, and he tells her in no uncertain terms that, if she lets her husband sack him, Krogstad will make sure her husband knows her secret.

But Torvald refuses to grant Nora’s request when she beseeches him to go easy on Krogstad and give him another chance. It looks as though all is over for Nora and her husband will soon know what she did.

The next day – Christmas Day – Nora is waiting for the letter from Krogstad to arrive, and for her secret to be revealed. She entreats her husband to be lenient towards Krogstad, but again, Torvald refuses, sending the maid off with the letter for Krogstad which informs him that he has been dismissed from Torvald’s employment.

Doctor Rank, who is dying of an incurable disease, arrives as Nora is getting ready for a fancy-dress party. Nora asks him if he will help her, and he vows to do so, but before she can say any more, Krogstad appears with his letter for Torvald. Now he’s been sacked, he is clearly going to go through with his threat and tell his former employer the truth about what Helmer’s wife did.

When Mrs Linde – who was romantically involved with Krogstad – arrives, she tries to appeal to Krogstad’s better nature, but he refuses to withdraw the letter. Then Torvald arrives, and Nora dances for him to delay her husband from reading Krogstad’s letter.

The next act takes place the following day: Boxing Day. The Helmers are at their fancy-dress party. Meanwhile, we learn that Mrs Linde broke it off with Krogstad because he had no money, and she needed cash to pay for her mother’s medical treatment. Torvald has offered Mrs Linde Krogstad’s old job, but she says that she really wants him – money or no money – and the two of them are reconciled.

When Nora returns with Torvald from the party, Mrs Linde, who had prevented Krogstad from having a change of heart and retrieving his letter, tells Nora that she should tell her husband everything. Nora refuses, and Torvald reads the letter from Krogstad anyway.

Nora is distraught, and sure enough, Torvald blames her – until another letter from Krogstad arrives, cancelling Nora’s debt to him, whereupon Torvald forgives her completely.

But Nora has realised something about her marriage to Torvald, and, changing out of her fancy-dress outfit, she announces that she is leaving him. She takes his ring and gives him hers, before going to the door and leaving her husband – slamming the door behind her.

A Doll’s House : analysis

A Doll’s House is one of the most important plays in all of modern theatre. It arguably represents the beginning of modern theatre itself. First performed in 1879, it was a watershed moment in naturalist drama, especially thanks to its dramatic final scene. In what has become probably the most famous statement made about the play, James Huneker observed: ‘That slammed door reverberated across the roof of the world.’

Why? It’s not hard to see why, in fact. And the answer lies in the conventional domestic scenarios that were often the subject of European plays of the period when Ibsen was writing. Indeed, these scenarios are well-known to anyone who’s read Ibsen’s play, because A Doll’s House is itself a classic example of this kind of conventional play.

Yes: the shocking power of Ibsen’s play lies not in the main part of the play itself but in its very final scene, which undoes and subverts everything that has gone before.

This conventional play, the plot of which A Doll’s House follows with consummate skill on Ibsen’s part, is a French tradition known as the ‘ well-made play ’.

Well-made plays have a tight plot, and usually begin with a secret kept from one or more characters in the play (regarding A Doll’s House : check), a back-story which is gradually revealed during the course of the play (check), and a dramatic resolution, which might either involve reconciliation when the secret is revealed, or, in the case of tragedies, the death of one or more of the characters.

Ibsen flirts with both kinds of endings, the comic and the tragic, at the end of A Doll’s House : when Nora knows her secret’s out, she contemplates taking her own life. But when Torvald forgives her following the arrival of Krogstad’s second letter, it looks as though a tragic ending has been averted and we have a comic one in its place.

Just as the plot of the play largely follows these conventions, so Ibsen is careful to portray both Torvald Helmer and his wife Nora as a conventional middle-class married couple. Nora’s behaviour at the end of the play signals an awakening within her, but this is all the more momentous, and surprising, because she is hardly what we would now call a radical feminist.

Similarly, her husband is not nasty to her: he doesn’t mistreat her, or beat her, or put her down, even if he patronises her as his ‘doll’ or ‘bird’ and encourages her to behave like a silly little creature for him. But Nora encourages him to carry on doing so.

They are both caught up in bourgeois ideology: financial security is paramount (as symbolised by Torvald’s job at the bank); the wife is there to give birth to her husband’s children and to dote on him a little, dancing for him and indulging in his occasional whims.

A Doll’s House takes such a powerful torch to all this because it lights a small match underneath it, not because it douses everything in petrol and sets off a firebomb.

And it’s worth noting that, whilst Ibsen was a champion of women’s rights and saw them as their husbands’ intellectual equal, A Doll’s House does not tell us whether we should support or condemn Nora’s decision to walk out on her husband. She has, after all, left her three blameless children without a mother, at least until she returns – if she ever does return. Is she selfish?

Of course, that is something that the play doesn’t answer for us. Ibsen himself later said that he was not ‘tendentious’ in anything he wrote: like a good dramatist, he explores themes which perhaps audiences and readers hadn’t been encouraged to explore before, but he refuses to bang what we would now call the ‘feminist’ drum and turn his play into a piece of political protest.

2 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House”

This powerful play foretold the 1960’s monumental epic of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, A similar awakening for middle class women, of their unnamed discontent within a marriage. Both paved the the way to the Feminist Movement of the 1970’s where with increased consciousness of economic inequities, women rebelled, just as Nora had done. Homage is owing to both Ibsen in his era and Friedan in hers. Today there are increasing numbers of women serving as Presidents of their nations and in the USA a female Vice-President recently elected to that prestigious office.

I remember reading the play while being a college student. It seemed so sad but at the same time so close to real life. Maybe our lives are quite sad after all.

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A Doll’s House Essay

A Doll’s House was written by Henrik Ibsen in 1879. A Doll’s House is not only one of Henrik Ibsen’s most famous plays, but it has also been seen as the starting point for realist drama. A Doll’s House, along with Brand and Peer Gynt, are often considered to be the first modern plays written in Europe. A Doll’s House is a play about power, money, guilt, duty, and family relationships.

A Doll’s House starts with Mrs. Nora Helmer who decides that her family should have an evening at home to celebrate Torvald’s birthday even though there are various outside activities planned earlier on that day. After getting all the children to bed Nora makes some coffee and brings some cake for herself and Torvald. She notices that the maid is not coming in to clear the table, despite several requests. As it turns out, Aune (the maid) is sick and unable to come to work. Nora remarks on Aune’s “poor condition”, saying she will take up Aune’s duties while Aune is ill.

Eventually, Nora forgets about Aune entirely as she becomes engrossed in her own thoughts of how their life together has become stifling; all play rather than essential sustenance of family life had ceased, with Torvald preferring to read newspapers alone in his study each evening rather than engaging with his wife or children. Nora decides she must break free from the chains that bind her. Aune, who turns up at one point is too sick to help with Nora’s children. Nora promises Aune that she will hire a nurse for Aune once Aune has recovered from her illness.

Aune leaves and Torvald enters. He asks about Aune, not believing that an important event would prevent Aune from attending work. The two converse until Nora suggests that they go out to visit Mrs. Linde (who had earlier announced temporary departure due to poor health). Torvald becomes irate over this suggestion as he does not have time to waste on “unimportant” people currently immersed in newspaper reading. He complains of the dinner being cold, further displaying his ignorance of his family and Aune’s conditions.

Nora sees past Torvald’s narrow-mindedness and decides to sit down and play the piano without his permission. He becomes even angrier because Nora has lost track of time while playing; instead of taking up Aune’s duties, she should be finishing the housework such as what Aune would typically do. Nora sees that her husband is quite ignorant in not understanding why Aune is unable to come into work, yet he will not allow Aune a few days’ leave when needed. She tells Torvald about Aune’s illness, but he does not believe it to be a serious affliction.

Not wanting to argue with him so late night, Nora decides to postpone Aune’s endeavor to find a nurse for Aune. The play moves to the following morning, as Nora narrates her daily routine (how she is to be “the perfect wife”). She is aware of Torvald’s explicit caresses every time he returns home from work, but his attentions are merely symbolic gestures signifying their financial arrangement. Aune enters, having recovered from her illness enough to return to work.

Aune relates that one of Mrs. Linde’s family friends has offered Aune a better-paid position in another town. Aune asks Nora whether she believes she is doing the right thing by leaving Nora in need of help with the children and housework. Aune also asks Nora if Torvald will speak to Aune about her departure. Aune requests that Nora not mention Aune’s leaving to Torvald, because Aune does not want him to feel obliged to give Aune a reference. Aune also discloses why she has taken the position, stating she is leaving for “personal reasons”.

Mrs. Linde enters, stating that an old friend of hers who works as a lawyer in Rome has offered her well-paid work caring for his motherless daughter. She requests permission from both Aune and Nora before accepting the job offer. The two are supportive; they will need help while Aune is gone. Mrs. Linde remarks on how overjoyed she is by the prospect of finding employment once again after such a long period of unemployment. Aune also shares her plans of finding a nurse for Aune, but Nora is reluctant to share the news, Aune, leaving with Torvald because he will be disappointed at Aune’s departure.

Aune warns Mrs. Linde that she must not mention Aune’s departure to Torvald either. Aune leaves and Mrs. Linde takes over Aune’s duties in the kitchen while Nora continues playing the piano. Torvald once again returns from work, ruining his routine when he finds no one in the sitting room waiting for him. He calls out “Nora”, and Nora responds by going into her bedroom where Torvald sits on a chair reading a newspaper. She tells him about Aune having left the house. Aune, Nora points out, will definitely provide a reference for Aune.

Torvald begins to worry about Aune leaving, citing that Aune’s work has been outstanding and she would be an exceptional nurse even to his children. He accuses Nora of not being considerate enough towards Aune in allowing Aune the choice of whether or not to stay. Torvald proceeds with his newspaper reading while Nora returns to playing the piano; he comments on how well-played the piece is and praises her talent at playing it so excellently together with such speed and agility. Torvald remarks that Nora never ceases to amaze him (“”Det star mig sa n? som for/Og det driver mig saa forf? rdeligt til vanvidd””).

Aune returns from the kitchen, where Aune has been packing her belongings. Aune asks Nora if she could have a few moments alone with Torvald to say goodbye. A few minutes later Aune asks Mrs. Linde to take a peek at Aune and Torvald to see whether they are finished talking yet because Aune cannot hear anything from Aune’s bedroom. Mrs. Linde enters first before calling for Aune; she tells Aune that it would be best for Aune not to come inside as it appears that there is trouble between them.

Aune stays anyway, deciding that enough time should have passed by now as Mrs. Linde re-enters Aune’s room. Aune enters the bedroom to see Torvald embracing Aune; they are back in love. Aune overhears that Torvald has no idea Aune is leaving until Aune hears Torvald describe how it feels like Aune has left him all alone with three children—he knows exactly how much Aune means to Nora (and vice versa); he wants Aune to stay, even though he can offer her very little except for his gratitude and admiration of Aune’s work.

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Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House

Analysis of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 27, 2020 • ( 0 )

Whether one reads A Doll’s House as a technical revolution in modern theater, the modern tragedy, the first feminist play since the Greeks, a Hegelian allegory of the spirit’s historical evolution, or a Kierkegaardian leap from aesthetic into ethical life, the deep structure of the play as a modern myth of self-transformation ensures it perennial importance as a work that honors the vitality of the human spirit in women and men.

—Errol Durbach, A Doll’s House : Ibsen’s Myth of Transformation

More than one literary historian has identified the precise moment when modern drama began: December 4, 1879, with the publication of Ibsen ’s Etdukkehjem ( A Doll’s House ), or, more dramatically at the explosive climax of the first performance in Copenhagen on December 21, 1879, with the slamming of the door as Nora Helmer shockingly leaves her comfortable home, respectable marriage, husband, and children for an uncertain future of self-discovery. Nora’s shattering exit ushered in a new dramatic era, legitimizing the exploration of key social problems as a serious concern for the modern theater, while sounding the opening blast in the modern sexual revolution. As Henrik Ibsen ’s biographer Michael Meyer has observed, “No play had ever before contributed so momentously to the social debate, or been so widely and furiously discussed among people who were not normally interested in theatrical or even artistic matter.” A contemporary reviewer of the play also declared: “When Nora slammed the door shut on her marriage, walls shook in a thousand homes.”

Ibsen set in motion a transformation of drama as distinctive in the history of the theater as the one that occurred in fifth-century b.c. Athens or Elizabethan London. Like the great Athenian dramatists and William Shakespeare, Ibsen fundamentally redefined drama and set a standard that later playwrights have had to absorb or challenge. The stage that he inherited had largely ceased to function as a serious medium for the deepest consideration of human themes and values. After Ibsen drama was restored as an important truth-telling vehicle for a comprehensive criticism of life. A Doll’s House anatomized on stage for the first time the social, psychological, emotional, and moral truths beneath the placid surface of a conventional, respectable marriage while creating a new, psychologically complex modern heroine, who still manages to shock and unsettle audiences more than a century later. A Doll’s House is, therefore, one of the ground-breaking modern literary texts that established in fundamental ways the responsibility and cost of women’s liberation and gender equality. According to critic Evert Sprinchorn, Nora is “the richest, most complex” female dramatic character since Shakespeare’s heroines, and as feminist critic Kate Millett has argued in Sexual Politics, Ibsen was the first dramatist since the Greeks to challenge the myth of male dominance. “In Aeschylus’ dramatization of the myth,” Millett asserts, “one is permitted to see patriarchy confront matriarchy, confound it through the knowledge of paternity, and come off triumphant. Until Ibsen’s Nora slammed the door announcing the sexual revolution, this triumph went nearly uncontested.”

The momentum that propelled Ibsen’s daring artistic and social revolt was sustained principally by his outsider status, as an exile both at home and abroad. His last deathbed word was “ Tvertimod !” (On the contrary!), a fitting epitaph and description of his artistic and intellectual mindset. Born in Skien, Norway, a logging town southwest of Oslo, Ibsen endured a lonely and impoverished childhood, particularly after the bankruptcy of his businessman father when Ibsen was eight. At 15, he was sent to Grimstad as an apothecary’s apprentice, where he lived for six years in an attic room on meager pay, sustained by reading romantic poetry, sagas, and folk ballads. He later recalled feeling “on a war footing with the little community where I felt I was being suppressed by my situation and by circumstances in general.” His first play, Cataline , was a historical drama featuring a revolutionary hero who reflects Ibsen’s own alienation. “ Cataline was written,” the playwright later recalled, “in a little provincial town, where it was impossible for me to give expression to all that fermented in me except by mad, riotous pranks, which brought down upon me the ill will of all the respectable citizens who could not enter into that world which I was wrestling with alone.”

Largely self-educated, Ibsen failed the university entrance examination to pursue medical training and instead pursued a career in the theater. In 1851 he began a 13-year stage apprenticeship in Bergen and Oslo, doing everything from sweeping the stage to directing, stage managing, and writing mostly verse dramas based on Norwegian legends and historical subjects. The experience gave him a solid knowledge of the stage conventions of the day, particularly of the so-called well-made play of the popular French playwright Augustin Eugène Scribe and his many imitators, with its emphasis on a complicated, artificial plot based on secrets, suspense, and surprises. Ibsen would transform the conventions of the well-made play into the modern problem play, exploring controversial social and human questions that had never before been dramatized. Although his stage experience in Norway was marked chiefly by failure, Ibsen’s apprenticeship was a crucial testing ground for perfecting his craft and providing him with the skills to mount the assault on theatrical conventions and moral complacency in his mature work.

In 1864 Ibsen began a self-imposed exile from Norway that would last 27 years. He traveled first to Italy, where he was joined by his wife, Susannah, whom he had married in 1858, and his son. The family divided its time between Italy and Germany. The experience was liberating for Ibsen; he felt that he had “escaped from darkness into light,” releasing the productive energy with which he composed the succession of plays that brought him worldwide fame. His first important works, Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867), were poetic dramas, very much in the romantic mode of the individual’s conflict with experience and the gap between heroic assertion and accomplishment, between sobering reality and blind idealism. Pillars of Society (1877) shows him experimenting with ways of introducing these central themes into a play reflecting modern life, the first in a series of realistic dramas that redefined the conventions and subjects of the modern theater.

The first inklings of his next play, A Doll’s House , are glimpsed in Ibsen’s journal under the heading “Notes for a Modern Tragedy”:

There are two kinds of moral laws, two kinds of conscience, one for men and one, quite different, for women. They don’t understand each other; but in practical life, woman is judged by masculine law, as though she weren’t a woman but a man.

The wife in the play ends by having no idea what is right and what is wrong; natural feelings on the one hand and belief in authority on the other lead her to utter distraction. . . .

Moral conflict. Weighed down and confused by her trust in authority, she loses faith in her own morality, and in her fitness to bring up her children. Bitterness. A mother in modern society, like certain insects, retires and dies once she has done her duty by propagating the race. Love of life, of home, of husband and children and family. Now and then, as women do, she shrugs off her thoughts. Suddenly anguish and fear return. Everything must be borne alone. The catastrophe approaches, mercilessly, inevitably. Despair, conflict, and defeat.

To tell his modern tragedy based on gender relations, Ibsen takes his audience on an unprecedented, intimate tour of a contemporary, respectable marriage. Set during the Christmas holidays, A Doll’s House begins with Nora Helmer completing the finishing touches on the family’s celebrations. Her husband, Torvald, has recently been named a bank manager, promising an end to the family’s former straitened financial circumstances, and Nora is determined to celebrate the holiday with her husband and three children in style. Despite Torvald’s disapproval of her indulgences, he relents, giving her the money she desires, softened by Nora’s childish play-acting, which gratifies his sense of what is expected of his “lark” and “squirrel.” Beneath the surface of this apparently charming domestic scene is a potentially damning and destructive secret. Seven years before Nora had saved the life of her critically ill husband by secretly borrowing the money needed for a rest cure in Italy. Knowing that Torvald would be too proud to borrow money himself, Nora forged her dying father’s name on the loan she received from Krogstad, a banking associate of Torvald.

The crisis comes when Nora’s old schoolfriend Christina Linde arrives in need of a job. At Nora’s urging Torvald aids her friend by giving her Krogstad’s position at the bank. Learning that he is to be dismissed, Krogstad threatens to expose Nora’s forgery unless she is able to persuade Torvald to reinstate him. Nora fails to convince Torvald to relent, and after receiving his dismissal notice, Krogstad sends Torvald a letter disclosing the details of the forgery. The incriminating letter remains in the Helmers’ mailbox like a ticking time-bomb as Nora tries to distract Torvald from reading it and Christina attempts to convince Krogstad to withdraw his accusation. Torvald eventu-ally reads the letter following the couple’s return from a Christmas ball and explodes in recriminations against his wife, calling her a liar and a criminal, unfit to be his wife and his children’s mother. “Now you’ve wrecked all my happiness—ruined my whole future,” Torvald insists. “Oh, it’s awful to think of. I’m in a cheap little grafter’s hands; he can do anything he wants with me, ask me for anything, play with me like a puppet—and I can’t breathe a word. I’ll be swept down miserably into the depths on account of a featherbrained woman.” Torvald’s reaction reveals that his formerly expressed high moral rectitude is hypocritical and self-serving. He shows himself worried more about appearances than true morality, caring about his reputation rather than his wife. However, when Krogstad’s second letter arrives in which he announces his intention of pursuing the matter no further, Torvald joyfully informs Nora that he is “saved” and that Nora should forget all that he has said, assuming that the normal relation between himself and his “frightened little songbird” can be resumed. Nora, however, shocks Torvald with her reaction.

Nora, profoundly disillusioned by Torvald’s response to Krogstad’s letter, a response bereft of the sympathy and heroic self-sacrifice she had hoped for, orders Torvald to sit down for a serious talk, the first in their married life, in which she reviews their relationship. “I’ve been your doll-wife here, just as at home I was Papa’s doll-child,” Nora explains. “And in turn the children have been my dolls. I thought it was fun when you played with me, just as they thought it fun when I played with them. That’s been our marriage, Torvald.” Nora has acted out the 19th-century ideal of the submissive, unthinking, dutiful daughter and wife, and it has taken Torvald’s reaction to shatter the illusion and to force an illumination. Nora explains:

When the big fright was over—and it wasn’t from any threat against me, only for what might damage you—when all the danger was past, for you it was just as if nothing had happened. I was exactly the same, your little lark, your doll, that you’d have to handle with double care now that I’d turned out so brittle and frail. Torvald—in that instant it dawned on me that I’ve been living here with a stranger.

Nora tells Torvald that she no longer loves him because he is not the man she thought he was, that he was incapable of heroic action on her behalf. When Torvald insists that “no man would sacrifice his honor for love,” Nora replies: “Millions of women have done just that.”

Nora finally resists the claims Torvald mounts in response that she must honor her duties as a wife and mother, stating,

I don’t believe in that anymore. I believe that, before all else, I’m a human being, no less than you—or anyway, I ought to try to become one. I know the majority thinks you’re right, Torvald, and plenty of books agree with you, too. But I can’t go on believing what the majority says, or what’s written in books. I have to think over these things myself and try to understand them.

The finality of Nora’s decision to forgo her assigned role as wife and mother for the authenticity of selfhood is marked by the sound of the door slamming and her exit into the wider world, leaving Torvald to survey the wreckage of their marriage.

Ibsen leaves his audience and readers to consider sobering truths: that married women are the decorative playthings and servants of their husbands who require their submissiveness, that a man’s authority in the home should not go unchallenged, and that the prime duty of anyone is to arrive at an authentic human identity, not to accept the role determined by social conventions. That Nora would be willing to sacrifice everything, even her children, to become her own person proved to be, and remains, the controversial shock of A Doll’s House , provoking continuing debate over Nora’s motivations and justifications. The first edition of 8,000 copies of the play quickly sold out, and the play was so heatedly debated in Scandinavia in 1879 that, as critic Frances Lord observes, “many a social invitation in Stockholm during that winter bore the words, ‘You are requested not to mention Ibsen’s Doll’s House!” Ibsen was obliged to supply an alternative ending for the first German production when the famous leading lady Hedwig Niemann-Raabe refused to perform the role of Nora, stating that “I would never leave my children !” Ibsen provided what he would call a “barbaric outrage,” an ending in which Nora’s departure is halted at the doorway of her children’s bedroom. The play served as a catalyst for an ongoing debate over feminism and women’s rights. In 1898 Ibsen was honored by the Norwegian Society for Women’s Rights and toasted as the “creator of Nora.” Always the contrarian, Ibsen rejected the notion that A Doll’s House champions the cause of women’s rights:

I have been more of a poet and less of a social philosopher than people generally tend to suppose. I thank you for your toast, but must disclaim the honor of having consciously worked for women’s rights. I am not even quite sure what women’s rights really are. To me it has been a question of human rights. And if you read my books carefully you will realize that. Of course it is incidentally desirable to solve the problem of women; but that has not been my whole object. My task has been the portrayal of human beings.

Despite Ibsen’s disclaimer that A Doll’s House should be appreciated as more than a piece of gender propaganda, that it deals with universal truths of human identity, it is nevertheless the case that Ibsen’s drama is one of the milestones of the sexual revolution, sounding themes and advancing the cause of women’s autonomy and liberation that echoes Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and anticipates subsequent works such as Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.

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A Doll's House

Henrik ibsen, everything you need for every book you read..

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

A Doll's House: Introduction

A doll's house: plot summary, a doll's house: detailed summary & analysis, a doll's house: themes, a doll's house: quotes, a doll's house: characters, a doll's house: symbols, a doll's house: theme wheel, brief biography of henrik ibsen.

Historical Context of A Doll's House

Other books related to a doll's house.

• Full Title: A Doll’s House (Norwegian: Ett dukkehjem )
• When Written: 1879
• Where Written: Dresden, Germany
• When Published: Published and first performed in December 1879
• Literary Period: Realism; modernism
• Genre: Realist modern prose drama
• Setting: A town or city in Norway
• Climax: When Torvald discovers the letter from Krogstad revealing Nora’s secret
• Antagonist: At first Krogstad, then Torvald

Extra Credit for A Doll's House

A True Story: A Doll’s House is based on the life of Ibsen’s family friend Laura Kieler, whose actions inspired the story of Nora’s secret debt. In reality, however, Kieler did not forge a signature, and when her husband, Victor, discovered her secret, he divorced her and forced her to be committed to an insane asylum. Ibsen, appalled by Kieler’s committal, wrote A Doll’s House in part as a way of defending her. After two years in the asylum Kieler returned to live with her husband and children and became a famous author in Denmark.

Scandalous: When it was first performed and for many years afterwards, A Doll’s House caused quite the scandal for its criticism of 19th-century marriage customs and portrayal of a woman abandoning her family in order to gain a sense of self. Pressured by several theatres and even the actress who was supposed to play Nora in a German production of the play, Ibsen wrote an alternative ending, in which Nora, upon seeing her children, changes her mind and stays with Torvald. He later regretted doing this, calling the adapted ending “a barbaric outrage.”

• A Doll's House

Henrik Ibsen

• Literature Notes
• Theme of A Doll's House
• Play Summary
• About A Doll's House
• Character List
• Summary and Analysis
• Character Analysis
• Nora Helmer
• Torvald Helmer
• Christine Linde
• Henrik Ibsen Biography
• Critical Essays
• Dramatic Structure of A Doll's House
• Essay Questions
• Cite this Literature Note

Critical Essays Theme of A Doll's House

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. The problem is personified as Nora, the doll, strives to become a self-motivated human being in a woman-denying man's world.

Refusing to be considered a feminist, Ibsen nevertheless expressed his view of a double-standard society. As he once forced a female character in an earlier play, The Pillars of Society , to cry out, "Your society is a society of bachelor-souls!" he seems to have personified this male-oriented viewpoint by creating Torvald Helmer. In his notes for A Doll's House, Ibsen writes that the background of his projected drama "is an exclusively masculine society with laws written by men and with prosecutors and judges who regard feminine conduct from a masculine point of view." Since a woman is allegedly motivated out of love for her husband and children, it is unthinkable to her that laws can forbid acts inspired by affection, let alone punish their infraction. The outcome of this tension is that "the wife in the play is finally at her wit's end as to what is right and wrong"; she therefore loses her foothold in society and must flee the man who cannot dissociate himself from the laws of society. She can no longer live with a husband who cannot accomplish the "wonderful thing," a bridge of the mental gap which would bring his understanding and sympathies into agreement with her point of view.

It is quite impossible, however, to write a whole play with such a specific problem in mind. As characters and situations are formed by the dramatist's imagination, a more general, abstract thesis develops, with the specific problem becoming only a part of the whole. Thus A Doll's House questions the entire fabric of marital relationships, investigates the development of self-awareness in character, and eventually indicts all the false values of contemporary society which denies the worth of individual personality.

Previous Dramatic Structure of A Doll's House

Henrik Ibsen’s History of “A Doll’s House” Drama Essay

So you want to know more about how and why I wrote “A Doll’s House”. Many people have asked me about this play and about my ideas, why I made this play the way I did. They said I was too bold, I was immoral and I was contributing to the breakdown of my society. I tell you, though, my society was already broken before I ever arrived and my play did not serve to break it, but to bring ideas that needed to be discussed out into the open. They also applauded me and welcomed me at their meetings, saying I was their hero, one of the champions of the woman problem, but I was not that either. I admit I had some influence in the development of the theater. I did not choose to follow the same lines as my predecessors and present a hero character who would champion the accepted ideas of what was right and good. But again, this was not necessarily my intention. And so, I will tell you what I was thinking, as well as I might recall, what things were like in my time and society that helped me determine the direction I would take and why I took this direction dramatically-speaking, which helped to change the course of future theatrical productions.

In writing “A Doll’s House,” I, of course, knew about the woman problem, the question of whether women should be given more rights, perhaps even rights equal to the rights of men. I knew how they felt. I saw the problems in the streets. My primary concern, though, was in describing the human condition as well as I might. The issues of women really were not much concern of mine, but they could heighten the dramatic effect of the primary questions that were then weighing on my mind. I believe it was Joan Templeton (1989) who said “Nora’s conflict represents something other than, or something more than, woman’s” (28). I like this way of putting it. I wrote the play considering the problem of becoming an individual. Everyone grows older, takes on professions, struggles through life as best they may and often find themselves disappointed with what they have. But what did it mean to be truly alive, actually fulfilling the ideas of self that one harbored – courageous, brave, steadfast, loyal, clever, etc.? This kind of questioning was not unique to me alone. In my time, life was changing rapidly in every possible way. It seemed all of Europe was engaged in busy activity, there was a sense of a perfect way of living and of life and a realization that this form of life was not realized by most, if any. It seemed we were constantly greeted with new and more amazing advances in technology and scientific thought. Philosophy advanced tremendously as we became more informed thanks to the wonders of the discoveries made.

At the same time, the society of my youth was not the society I knew as an old man. By the time I reached my advanced age, life for myself and my countrymen, regardless of which country I lived in, had become focused more upon the active life of the city than it had been in my youth, and the problems of the city had become much more defined. Our cities continued to grow, but they were ill-equipped to handle such growth. They were often dirty and grimy, full of poor people seeking aid of some sort and urchins in the streets running about. There were also plenty of respectable people as well, of all classes and education levels. But the cities also offered many more opportunities for people to work together in new and unique ways. Although Nora was seen by my critics as an unusual woman because she found a means of earning money of her own and used this money to pay back a loan she’d kept hidden from her husband for several years, she was not. This was what my audiences recognized in her. It was scandalous to bring this conversation into the open, but it was known to have occurred in at least one household within a given circle. Between everyone questioning the strictures of society I had grown to know as a child and my own questions regarding what it meant to truly become what one was meant to be, it should not be surprising that a character such as Nora should come to be.

While my primary aim was to investigate the question of what it meant to exercise one’s choice, it cannot be denied that I was probably influenced by the woman problem. It would have been hard to avoid as it was talked of loudly. Viewing the streets as I made my way through each day, it was impossible not to see the hopeless condition of some of these women or to realize that they were in such a condition not as the result of their own lack of effort or moral adherence, but instead because of strict rules of society that prevented them from gaining appropriate education, adequate employment or sufficient familial support and protection. While I desired Nora to become a type of Everyman in the exploration of the development of the individual as a real and valid human being, this type of exploration was only possible within this sort of framework. Let me try to explain in another way. Had I placed the questions I was asking within the framework of a male character, shaped and molded to a small frame by the workings of society and then constrained within this form as a caged bird, my story would not have been believed. Nor would it have served a double benefit of bringing these questions into the open while suggesting further social investigation. It was denied in my day that men of any kind were limited in what they could do, particularly as our economic base was so quickly shifting that poor men became rich and rich men became poor seemingly overnight in a variety of new fields that also seemed to spring up suddenly (Greenblatt, 2005). However, it could not be denied that women were very rigidly constrained within a certain ideal.

In deliberating these questions within my own mind and with my friends and colleagues, I determined that at least some portion of who we became, or perhaps didn’t become, was due to the effect of the various constraints our society places on us. What if we didn’t wish to become a lawyer, a doctor or a pharmacist? What if what one wanted to do with his or her life was to become a writer? More than a selfish wish or a hedonistic dream, what I propose here is that perhaps we have been given by God certain talents that we must utilize in order to bring about the changes and discussions that must take place to further society in the direction God intends. If this one, with a talent for bringing together ideas and words in some format, were intended to write about social issues and were prevented, through the constraints of society, from doing so by becoming a chemist instead, these ideas and words would never be placed before the public and God’s plan would thus be thwarted. These were the thoughts that helped to inform the production of “A Doll’s House.” It was not the question of providing equal rights for women per se, but was rather a question of what it meant for a person to find the strength within themselves to become the person they wanted to be and the opportunity to be recognized for this effort, to be permitted to exercise their abilities to explore their talents and abilities, that brought me to write this play.

Perhaps you will notice some similarities between my thoughts, above, and my life. Anyone who has read even the smallest amount of detail about me will know that I was born to a well-respected and ancient family, but that I grew up in a household without a great deal of money (Merriman, 2006). I left home early as an apprentice to a chemist despite the fact that this was not where my heart lie. I enjoyed using my brain, but only to the pursuit of the lives I saw around me rather than the mixing of chemicals to produce what we might hope were healing effects. However, I must admit, my experiences here might have had some bearing upon the way in which I approached the world, with a more analytic, somewhat objective eye toward presenting things as they really were rather than how we might like them to be. This, too, was a sign of the times. It is a set of ideas and concepts that is today referred to as Modernity. “Modernity is a project, and not only a period, and it is, or was, a project of control, the rational mastery over nature, the planning, designing and plotting which led to planomania and technocracy” (Beilharg, 2001: 6). The basic concepts of modernism were to take a hard and fast look at various social processes to determine the universal truths of existence. These could then be canonized and applied across all cultures, individuals and time periods as a means of progressing toward a more ideal civilization. We were attempting, through such approaches, to expose the real essence of the truth, which required intense and detailed investigation of what was in front of us rather than what we would choose to see.

In terms of dramatic approach, I find I usually prefer to work with the point of the story that traditionally contains the most impact. This is usually considered the climax and occurs, in most plays, much later in the story. Anyone who studies Shakespeare is familiar with the approach in which the character slowly builds up his mistakes until he is finally brought to an appropriate final moment of reckoning and then the playwright ties up any loose ends in a resolution (Lee, 1910). In presenting my story, I prefer opening the curtain upon approximately the last moment possible before the climax hits and closing it as soon as possible afterward. My plays, including “A Doll’s House”, are concerned, as I have previously discussed, with the psychological elements of the human mind and what it means to ‘become’. As a result, I place the entire structure within a limited space that also helps to illustrate the limited space allowed the main character. Nora is constrained in mind, body and soul and this is depicted explicitly within the frame of the stage as everything occurs in the one room. At the same time, by concentrating on presenting the climax and conclusion only of the story within the frame of the play, the ‘action’ can only occur within a constrained time – here the course of two days. At the same time, there is the tension of knowing that there is a tremendous story leading up to the opening of the play that is never told, nor is the intriguing story of what occurs immediately after the play and therefore, time also is not constrained. This underscores the idea that Nora also may seem constrained at first glance but is at heart, constrained only as much as she allows herself to be.

What thrilled me so much about this condensed approach to the story was the way in which it changed the focus of attention. Rather than focusing on the broad view of what brought the character to a particular end, this condensing of the time and space available within the play forces attention to shift to understanding just how the individual’s mind exerts itself in a moment of crisis. Just how a person responds to a moment of truth reveals much about the true nature of that character. Some have suggested that perhaps Nora, having had her fit of anger at Torvald and stormed out of the house in childish indignation, might have then turned around and slunk back home again, begging his forgiveness and again adopting the role of housewife and mother. And well she might. That is not how I envisioned her, though. For a person to realize their own internal value, to have established a sense of worth within themselves such as Nora has, to then be told these efforts meant nothing, to lose that value, is a difficult thing. I provided Nora with the opportunity to make the decision for herself. She could have kept Torvald from opening the envelope that revealed her secret, but she did not. She could have accepted Torvald’s reaction and resumed her ‘proper’ position, but again she did not.

I did attempt to provide hints within the play that Nora was not intended to be the kind of character that simply threw a childish tantrum and will soon repent after the curtain falls. For example, the name of the play and numerous hints within it suggested that what was contained within was a passing trifle, a child’s plaything that couldn’t possibly last. The title makes direct reference to the doll’s house and the way Torvald speaks to his wife is also very much like a child speaking to a favorite toy. Nora brings home with her in the first act a small doll and her bedstead. In itself, the presence of this toy should remind the audience of the nature of the room they are viewing and the people who act within it. Nora then provides the key link when she tells Torvald, “they [the doll and bed] are very plain, but anyway she will soon break them in pieces” (Act 1). Nora herself breaks the house in pieces when she leaves, something that cannot be undone or repaired and is, perhaps, not something worth repairing as it prevents each of the characters within it from becoming fully as human as they might.

They say that this approach has founded a new approach to theater, bringing the traditional art form into the modern age. I will admit that I consciously stripped the play down to its constituent elements, focusing on what was real and relevant and focusing upon the development of the soul as it is defined in a moment of crisis. It must also be acknowledged that prior to my plays, there were not many within the theater world that were directly challenging the issues of the day, at least not in such a direct way. From what I understand, this has been a tradition in theater since my time. I must say it is gratifying to realize that I was able to have some effect, presumably to the good, in bringing about necessary discussion and investigation into long-standing assumptions and beliefs and present day social issues.

Works Cited

Beilharz, Peter. The Bauman Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.

Greenblatt, Stephen (Ed.). “Introduction: The Victorian Age.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. 8. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005.

Ibsen, Henrik. “A Doll’s House.” Four Major Plays: A Doll’s House, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder. James McFarlane (Trans.). Oxford University Press, 1998.

Lee, Jennette. “Relation of Symbol to Plot in Ibsen’s Plays.” The Ibsen Secret: A Key to the Prose of Drama of Henrik Ibsen. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1910: 86-113.

Merriman, C.D. “ Henrik Ibsen. ” Online Literature. Jalic, 2006. Web.

Templeton, Joan. “The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen.” PMLA. Vol. 104, N. 1, (January 1989): 28-40.

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IvyPanda. (2021, August 14). Henrik Ibsen’s History of “A Doll’s House” Drama. https://ivypanda.com/essays/henrik-ibsens-history-of-a-dolls-house-drama/

"Henrik Ibsen’s History of “A Doll’s House” Drama." IvyPanda , 14 Aug. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/henrik-ibsens-history-of-a-dolls-house-drama/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Henrik Ibsen’s History of “A Doll’s House” Drama'. 14 August.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Henrik Ibsen’s History of “A Doll’s House” Drama." August 14, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/henrik-ibsens-history-of-a-dolls-house-drama/.

1. IvyPanda . "Henrik Ibsen’s History of “A Doll’s House” Drama." August 14, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/henrik-ibsens-history-of-a-dolls-house-drama/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Henrik Ibsen’s History of “A Doll’s House” Drama." August 14, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/henrik-ibsens-history-of-a-dolls-house-drama/.

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A Doll's House Henrik Ibsen

A Doll's House essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House.

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A Doll’s House Essays

Reflections of social problems of modern people in the play “a doll's house” murat salar college, a doll's house.

From the beginning of the mankind, people have faced with so many problems. It seems that just surviving and sleeping with a full stomach are not the main problems of developed civilizations since the first formations of societies. ‘Surviving in a...

Reactions to Abuse in “POOF!” and “A Doll House” Katie Davis College

Loureen, the protagonist of Lynn Nottage’s play, “POOF!”, and Nora, the main character of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll House”, are both abused by their husbands. While Nora’s abuse is primarily emotional and Loureen’s is physical, their abuse led them...

The characterization of Nora, Mrs. Linde and the nurse as a theme for female sacrifice in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House Anonymous 12th Grade

Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House follows Nora Helmer’s stifled life within the confines of society’s patriarchal edifice and her own household. The depiction of Nora, her childhood friend Christine Linde, and the nurse Anne within this structure is...

Influence of Antigone on A Doll's House Anonymous

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Burning Down the Doll House Noah David Safford

'Until death do us part.' Well, not always. Everywhere one looks, divorce is plaguing society, and it has become widely accepted throughout the world. Now the violent shredding of a family is shrugged off like the daily weather, and the treasured...

Ibsen's Portrayal of Women Emma Young

'Ibsen's knowledge of humanity is nowhere more obvious than in his portrayal of women' (Joyce). Discuss and illustrate:

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Dressed to Impress: The Role of the Dress in Cinderella and A Doll's House Sarah Scudder

The donning of her [dancing] dress has brought about the turning point of her life.

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Dress and outward appearance have historically played a significant role in the plot development of fairy tales. Perhaps the most famous dress in...

A Doll's House: Revolution From Within Ryan Schildkraut

When Nora Helmer slammed the door shut on her doll's house in 1879, her message sent shockwaves around the world that persist to this day. "I must stand quite alone," Nora declares, "if I am to understand myself and everything about me" (Ibsen...

A Doll's House: Breaking With Theatrical Tradition Kristen Roggemann

In A Doll's House by Ibsen, the author takes the preconditions and viewer expectations of the play format established by earlier writers and uses them to shock his audience rather than lull them into oblivion with simple entertainment. Ibsen...

Analysis of Ibsen's A Doll's House: Feminist or Humanist? Ashley J. Smith

Henrik Ibsen's well known play, A Doll's House, has long been considered a predominantly feminist work. The play focuses on the seemingly happy Helmers, Nora and Torvald, who appear to have an ideal life. Nora is charming, sweet, and stunningly...

A Doll's House: Jungian Analysis Anonymous

In Ibsen's A Doll's House, the path to self-realization and transformation is depicted by the main character, Nora Helmer. She is a woman constrained by both her husband's domineering ways as well as her own. From a Jungian perspective, Nora's...

Truth or Illusion? Hadeel Asaad

Truth or illusion? When the fantasy world people create in order to cope with the absurdity of life is brought too far into reality, it becomes hard to distinguish between authenticity and fiction. This ambiguity is apparent in both Edward Albee's...

Ibsen and Larsen and Women Kathleen M Dooley

Though written almost fifty years apart, and by two authors from completely different backgrounds, Nella Larsen's novel Quicksand and Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House (also known by the title A Doll House) address similar issues concerning the...

The Role of Women in "A Doll's House" and "Ghosts" Danielle St. George

The Role of Women in "A Doll's House" and "Ghosts"

The role of women has changed significantly throughout history, driven in part by women who took risks in setting examples for others to follow. During the Victorian era, women were beginning to...

A Defense of Torvald Helmer Colter Ross Brown

A predicatable response to reading Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House might be a distaste for Nora's feeble-minded obsession with money, possessions, and culture through the first two acts that is then, suddenly and unexpectedly, reversed as those...

A Doll’s House and the Escape From Ideological Suffocation Timothy Sexton

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Existential Models of Love in A Doll's House and The Seducer’s Diary Anonymous

According to Soren Kierkegaard, there are three categorizations of people based on their motive and actions: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. In The Seducer’s Diary , Kierkegaard presents the character of Johannes as a typical...

Gender and Theatricality in A Doll's House Anonymous

The play A Doll’s House, by Henrik Ibsen, offers a critique of the superficial marriage between Nora and Torvald Helmer. Written in 1879, the play describes the problems which ensue after Nora secretly and illegally takes out a loan from a local...

Aristotelian Themes in A Doll's House Anonymous

Considered the precursor of Western dramatic criticism, Aristotle’s notes on The Poetics arms modern readers with the language by which tragedy is evaluated and judged. In this essay I will examine how Aristotle’s classical vision of tragedy...

The Hollowness of Conventional 19th Century Christian Morality in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll’s House and Emile Zola's Therese Raquin. Ryan N Skaria

Both Ibsen and Zola were firm believers in portraying their characters and works from a realistic perspective. Zola founded the naturalist movement in fiction and shared the same general perspective on society as Ibsen, who was the first of a new...

Male and Female Space, Onstage and Off, in Ibsen's A Doll's House Anonymous College

In “Space and Reference in Drama,” Michael Issacharoff argues that diegetic space is offstage space and mimetic space is onstage space. Issacharoff argues that “dramatic tension is often contingent on the antinomy between visible space represented...

A Study of the Significance of Mrs. Linde and Krogstad's Confrontation in Act III to the Plot Development and Thematic Ideas of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House Anonymous College

As one of the leaders of the realist movement in drama, Henrik Ibsen earned his reputation for creating plays that accurately depict the details of ordinary peoples' lives. The first two acts of A Doll's House are safe territory, following the...

Ibsen versus Society: Three Breakthrough Dramas Hannah McComb College

Henrik Ibsen was born in 1828 to a merchant family in the small Norwegian town of Skien. After his family fell into poverty, he was forced out of his education and, at 15, worked as an apprentice in a pharmacy. It was here that he began writing...

Social Criticism in A Doll's House and Look Back in Anger Megan Shannon 12th Grade

The term "social criticism" refers to a type of condemnation that reveals the reasons for malicious conditions in a society which is considered deeply flawed. Indeed, both Ibsen and Osborne, in their respective plays A Doll’s House and Look Back...

Doll's House, A

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A Doll’s House: Critical Analysis

Henrik Ibsen is one of the greatest dramatists of English literature . He is the first man to show that high tragedy can be written about ordinary people in ordinary everyday prose . His contribution to the theatre is memorable. His A Doll’s House is a beautiful drama .

A Doll’s House is a problem play or thesis play. Here Ibsen presents the problem and leaves the solution to the readers. The problem is – what is the position of woman in relation to her husband and her home? The play focuses our attention on the conjugal life of a middle class couple. It shows the sad consequences of the subordination of a married woman to the control of her husband.  It again shows the method to get out of that predicament. Thus marriage is the major theme of this play. Ibsen is in favour of Nora, the heroine of the play. She wins our sympathy also. Thus it can be said that A Doll’s House  is a feminist play.

Ibsen is popular as a dramatist of social realities.He was interested in women’s independence. In A Doll’s House we find that. When the play was staged, it had the effect of bombshell. This theme was completely new to the 19th century Europe. Nora does not only defy her husband at the end of the play but also makes him dwarf. The play had a message for the society. The message was that if a woman is not allowed to establish her own identity, she could not be happy. Thus this play pointed out a particular weakness and flaw in the social fabric. The dramatist diagnosed the malady and lifted the cure to others.

When the play opens, we find that Nora has been leading a life of a pet in her husband’s home. Though her husband loves her, but it seems a love of a superior for somebody lower in rank. He insists that she should exercise economy. He always speaks like a moralist. He advises her not to eat sweets because they would spoil her teeth. He says that she has inherited her habit of extravagance from her father. When she recommends Krogstad’s case to him, he speaks again like a moralist.

As a wife Nora has been very devoted to her husband, Helmer. When he falls ill, she takes him to Italy under medical advice. For that she has to borrow money and has even to forge her father’s signature. But she does not tell her husband about her sacrifice for a long time. She hides it because it would heat Helmer’s self respect and ego. Nora feels that Helmer loves her with equal devotion. She firmly believes that if the worst happens, Helmer would take her whole guilt upon his own shoulders.

There are two reasons that lead to whole trouble between Helmer and Nora. The first reason is that he regards her as his property. He has possessive attitude towards her. The second reason is that when Helmer reads Krogstad’s letter, he becomes furious. His behaviour shows that he is absolutely selfish and self centred. Nora is completely disillusioned about Helmer. That is why she decides to leave Helmer. She gives her reason for leaving. She tells him that first her father and then her husband wronged her. Her father used her as his baby doll and her husband has been treating her as his doll wife. Now she wants to establish her own identity. Thus she takes back her wedding ring and steps out of the house.

At the end of the play our sympathies are largely with Nora. We feel that she is right. Why should a wife be subordinate to her husband? Why should a wife be always servile to her husband? By leaving her house Nora compels husbands to examine their relationship with their wives. On the basis of these facts it can be said that A Doll’s House  is a feminist play. It suitably advocates the rights of women.

Thus A Doll’s House  is a beautiful play. The play deals with the woman’s predicament. The subject of the play is nothing but the disillusionment of a wife. The play ends with the drastic step taken by a wife. It is the woman in the play who wins our maximum sympathy. In short, it is a problem play or thesis play because it gives rise to a problem in our minds.