A Doll's House: A Level York Notes

At the end of the play Nora leaves her husband and children. I think she does not really know what she is doing as she says she does ‘not know what will happen’ to her and her plans are a bit vague – she is going to her home town, but her parents are dead so there is nobody there for her. She is just angry and upset that Helmer did not do the ‘miracle’ she wanted and is going on an impulse. I think it was very foolish to expect the ‘miracle’. Why should Helmer take the blame for something she has done? It is not fair of her to leave him for this reason and it is typical of her selfish thinking. Nora always thinks of every situation in terms of how it affects her, like when Dr Rank is going to tell her something and she thinks he is going to talk about her and Krogstad and is ‘relieved’ when he says he is dying.

By the end of the play Nora has nobody. Mrs Linde has now got Krogstad and his family to care about, and she deserves it because she has worked hard and travelled miles to find him again. I think that Ibsen put Mrs Linde in the play as an image of what a woman could gain from all the changes that were taking place in the nineteenth century. Mrs Linde travels, and has a job and is independent. So it is not that Ibsen thought women should know their place, or that they will lose too much if they try to cope on their own. Mrs Linde is like an alternative Nora. But Ibsen has chosen to make his central character a selfish heroine who loses everything through her own fault.

Helmer says that he ‘has the strength to change’. This may well be true, he really loves Nora. He likes giving her presents and she says that he has always been ‘kind’ to her, so we should take this idea seriously. Nora does not really give him a chance. She says that she does not love him any more, but what she really means is that she will not forgive him for the one time he says something selfish, about how he is ‘saved’. Helmer is willing to forgive Nora for going to Krogstad. This shows that she is throwing away the relationship without trying, while Helmer is willing to try.

Nora loses her children as well. We know that she loves them and we see that she sees a lot of them normally. She refuses to see them in the last scene, and I think it is because it would be too painful. She is not really thinking the situation through. We get an idea about what she is losing though, because Ibsen has put the nurse in the play. The nurse had to give up her baby and did not have any choice because society was very hard on unmarried mothers.

Nora asks her about it, so she knows that not everybody is as lucky as she is. The nurse loves Nora and does not say how much it hurt to lose her baby because that would hurt Nora, but the audience understands. Nora says that the children are ‘in better hands than mine’, by which she means the nurse, and she is right to trust her, but does not think about the pain it will cause.

Nora does gain her independence. She says that she can get work and we know that she has managed to work and save in the past. But she has not always been very intelligent. She should have known that the forged signature was a silly idea and that she would get found out. She says that she has been brought up by her father to be like a little doll and this is probably true, but she has not learnt very much yet.

When she talks to Mrs Linde about earning money it is in a very childish way, about ‘things called quarterly instalments’, so she may not actually be as fit to work as she thinks she is. Krogstad has to explain a lot of things to her about the law that seem very obvious, like forging a signature being a crime. Nora does tell a lot of lies – like about the macaroons – which is also childish. She does not really face up to the truth of things. Some of this is to protect Helmer, like about the holiday, but it seems to be her instinct to dodge any difficult confrontations. She would rather get the money out of Rank than tell Helmer the truth, and when this does not work the only answer she can think of is killing herself. I think Nora may not be ready for the world yet and is going to regret leaving.