A Doll No More

In “A Doll’s House” we see Nora in the first scene portrayed as a frivolous spender and a sickeningly sweet wife. This first impression of her sticks with her through the play until the very end. Even when confronted with Krogstad’s blackmail she remains on the whole the same character. Through the play she dances and flirts and acts as childish as her never seen children all in an attempt to get what she wants. She even flirts with a man to whom she is not married in an attempt to procure a large sum of money to pay off her debts. Nora, although the focus of the play, becomes in the reader’s eyes an almost despicable character whose antics grate on our very nerves. Nora is the “typical” woman as described by Ibsen’s play and in the time period the typical woman was dependent on her husband for everything and had endless time to practice dancing or shop. From the beginning we see Nora as a very silly thoughtless woman who does not take the time to think about the consequences of her actions, and would not know about those consequences if she were to actually think about them.

In the third act of the play we see Nora break out of her role as the doll and become an independent woman who must rely on her own abilities to survive. She quickly finds out that, because she could not save his job, Krogstad intends to reveal her illegal money borrowing to her husband and she knows that she can not pay off her debt in time to save herself. Her naiveté leads her to believe that getting the money back will solve all her problems but she fails to realize that Krogstad, who has been accused of fraud, has lost his job and is in very little position to acquire a new one. When she learns that even had she paid him back he would have kept the IOU she begins her change from the “little squirrel” to the independent woman she becomes. Once Torvald finds out about the whole affair Nora is catalyzed into her change and she realizes that the reason for all this trouble was her attitude in general. She was so used to being the “little spendthrift” that she had assumed all aspects of that role, but she realizes that there is more to life than being your husband’s “kitten.” In the end we find Nora leaving Torvald because of the mess she has made and not the other way around. Nora stands up for herself and makes the biggest decision of her life to not be an unthinking shopaholic but to be a woman who makes her own way in the world. Nora evolves, though slowly, over the course of the play into a woman who can bravely leave her husband and children and start anew. (483)