To both her father and to Torvald, she has been a plaything—a doll. She realizes she has never been happy in Torvald's dollhouse but has just been performing for her keep. She has deluded herself into thinking herself happy, when in truth she has been miserable.
In Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, Nora Helmer spends most of her on-stage time as a doll: a vapid, passive character with little personality of her own. Her whole life is a construct of societal norms and the expectations of others.
She lives like a doll in a doll-house, and her character serves as a symbol for every oppressed woman who is restricted from living a free life. In the beginning of the play, Nora is shown as rather a submissive, childish woman, who enjoys being patronized, pampered and treated like a defenseless animal.
By leaving her family and disregarding societal norms, Nora completes the change from being a skylark, squirrel, or doll into a “reasonable human being” who can make something of her life.
Nora is like Torvald's doll—she decorates his home and pleases him by being a dependent figure with whose emotions he can toy. Read an in-depth analysis of Torvald. In addition to being something of a doll to Torvald, Nora is also like a child to him.
Nora has lived like a doll for her entire life, concerned only with her appearance and entertaining others instead of bettering herself. I believe that I am first and foremost a human being, like you – or anyway, that I must try to become one.
Nora leaves the role of the doll child and doll wife she played her whole life, and becomes an independent self-thinking adult, when she realizes that the world is different than she always thought it was, and that she herself is not who she thinks she is.
Nora believes herself to be a doll because the men in her life see her more as a toy than a human being. They view her as a pretty object without any thoughts of her own that they can use as they want.
Nora says that she realizes that she is childlike and knows nothing about the world. She feels alienated from both religion and the law, and wishes to discover on her own, by going out into the world and learning how to live life for herself, whether or not her feelings of alienation are justified.
A Doll's House ends with the slamming of a door. Nora turns her back on her husband and kids and takes off into the snow (brr) to make her own way in the world (brrrrr). It's a pretty bold decision, to say the least.
Indeed, the need to lie about something so insignificant—Nora lies twice about the macaroons, once to Torvald and once to Dr. Rank—speaks to the depths of both her guilt and the tension in her relationship with Torvald.
Nora is a victim of the male-dominated society of the nineteenth century. To save her husband, Torvald, she borrows money so that he might be able to recover from a life-threatening illness in a warmer climate.
The first instance of female sacrifice is seen in Act 1 through the interaction between Torvald and Nora, where Nora sacrifices her opinions and desires to satisfy her husband. Nora puts on a submissive façade, whose characteristics are similar to a child.
The doll's house itself is a symbol of the Burnell family's societal position. When it is brought into the Burnell courtyard, it becomes, literally, a house within a house, a mirror of the Burnell's home…
The play was so controversial that Ibsen was forced to write a second ending that he called “a barbaric outrage” to be used only when necessary. The controversy centered around Nora's decision to abandon her children, and in the second ending she decides that the children need her more than she needs her freedom.
The main themes of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House revolve around the values and the issues of late 19th-century bourgeoisie, namely what looks appropriate, the value of money, and the way women navigate a landscape that leaves them little room to assert themselves as actual human beings.
Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House ends with an infamous door slam. Nora Helmer, a housewife in Norway, leaves her husband, Torvald Helmer, in a dramatic exit that rocked audiences when the play debuted in Copenhagen in 1879 and continues to divide viewers today.
As Nora realizes, “It is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.” Maybe you already knew that regret is a waste of time; I hear it constantly.
She left her children with Torvald, a man she called a stranger. Although one can see Nora's pain in living with a man who didn't love her, her leaving was still premature. At the end of Ibsen's play, A Doll's House, Nora decides to leave Torvald because she doesn't know who he is anymore.
Why doesn't Nora want to see her children at the end of Act 1? She feels bad about forging the signature. What final arguments does Helmer make to Nora as reasons for firing Krogstad? It would make Helmer look bad if he changed his mind at that point.
After many years of maintaining her “perfect” life, Nora could no longer live like this. She finally stands up for herself and makes a choice to leave her family. This decision is completely reasonable. It is unimaginable to think anyone could treat another person so crudely.
What secret has Nora been keeping from Torvald? She was in love with his brother before she married him.
Nora comes to realize that in addition to her literal dancing and singing tricks, she has been putting on a show throughout her marriage. She has pretended to be someone she is not in order to fulfill the role that Torvald, her father, and society at large have expected of her.
Torvald Helmer
He treats Nora like a child, in a manner that is both kind and patronizing. He does not view Nora as an equal but rather as a plaything or doll to be teased and admired.
Nora even goes as far as calling her baby her sweet little baby doll. Her throwing the childrens things around shows her carelessness to realize that she is the mother of her children, not their owner like one who owns toys. She acts like a kid playing with her toys, not as much as an adult taking care of her children.