A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen

Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen examines the plight of a ninteenth-century housewife. The text reads fluidly and compellingly, with little action but with much poignant conversation. Despite the brevity of the play and Ibsen's economical style, the characters are intimately drawn, and drastically altered by the end.

Nora, the housewife, feigns a carefree devotion to her husband and children, but she harbors secret obligations. When, years before, her husband Torvald had fallen so ill the doctor insisted he must go abroad, Nora forged her father's signature and obtained a loan so they could travel. By cajoling money from her husband under the pretense of frivolity, she has almost managed to pay her debt. But the man who holds the bond, Krogstad, is fired by his manager, Nora's husband, and so he threatens to expose her forgery, impugning both the couple. Nora confesses to Torvald, privately hoping he would recognize her love for him and take the blame upon himself, but he rages against her instead. They discover Krogstad has sent them the bond, releasing them, and so Torvald apologizes, expecting they can continue on as before. But Nora has discovered that her relationship with him is fundamentally grounded in deception, and so, to discover how to live in uninhibited truth, she leaves.

While it is morally reprehensible for a mother to abandon her family under such a tenuous pretense, the essential theme is very revealing. Ibsen identifies the dilemma that women have spent the better part of the 20th century trying to solve: What is the female's position in society? Nora, sheltered, petted, and coddled all her life, knows only what has been dictated to her. She feels, and rightly so, as any educator would tell you, that she needs to discover knowledge on her own. Unfortunately, once she married, and more importantly, once she bore children, she really relinquished her rights to explore the world on her own. She has a duty to herself as a human being, certainly, but she has a greater duty to her children, who have all the same rights as individuals added to the dependency of juvenility. To marry and to procreate may not have been entirely of her own volition, but that does not negate the responsibility that she bears as a wife and mother.

Discovering oneself and establishing a satisfactory position in society is honorable, but not worth dissolving one's family for. The relationship between parent and child is the most fundamental, organic one in all the world, and to violate it constitutes one of the most damaging, far-reaching sins. Nora needed a measure of self-actualization, but she should have remained with her children to discover it, because that is where she would have found it evetually, if she sought honestly and deeply.