Guy Tiphane
Prof. A. Davaran
EN 215
March 24, 2004

A Doll’s House: Synopsis

Nora is a happy housewife in a small town of late 19^th Century Norway. It is the day before Christmas and she has made some purchases for the celebration, within the limits of her budget which is still limited but to be expanded greatly due to her husband’s new job as the bank manager. Torvald, her husband, appears to be constantly worried about Nora’s spending beyond their means.

A long-lost friend from Nora’s home town, Kristine, visits them unexpectedly. She is in need of a job and Nora immediately shows that she can influence her husband to give her one at the bank. Kristine has had a difficult life, having had to marry for the sole purpose of providing for a sick mother and young brothers. For that, she finds little sympathy from Nora who tries to compare her comfortable difficulties to Kristine’s. Nora starts to disclose her little secret, boasting that she had saved her husband’s health by finding an enormous sum of money to pay for a one-year trip to Italy. Nora’s secret lies at this point in the fact that she has never disclosed it to Torvald who would be very upset by it.

Enters Krogstad. He is an employee at the bank about to be fired by Torvald. He is also the one who loaned the money to Nora. He absolutely wants to save himself and his sons by keeping his job at the bank, and at this point his only hope is to threaten to expose Nora’s forgery of her father’s signature on the loan contract. At first, Nora believes she could be saved and protected by her husband as she always has been. But she learns from Torvald’s own words that he does not tolerate anything of the sort and that the mere possibility that people could associate Krogstad with him at the bank is what really motivated him to fire Krogstad. This intolerance worries Nora: she may not only be scolded but also disowned by Torvald and punished by the law.

Having failed to save Krogstad and herself, Nora tries to delay the discovery. She also finds renewed hope in the fact that Kristine is interested in renewing a lost relationship with Krogstad. So Nora delays by distracting Torvald. In that we find that she would even rely on Torvald to teach her a dance she should perform at the neighbors’ party. Being such a doll all night even arouses Torvald’s sexual interest in her, but she is afraid of leading him on this path while she considers ending her own life. The news of their friend Dr. Rank’s imminent death cools them down, and Torvald discovers Krogstad’s letter. His ire shocks Nora beyond her expectations, as he worries mostly about himself, his reputation and that of his children, not considering as she does that love is more important. For that she decides to leave him, even if they receive a notice from Krogstad that cancels everything.

The play highlights by the examples of others that it is possible to accept to live with hardships and to overcome them. Kristine and Krogstad reunite to correct their hardships. Dr. Rank accepts his early death inherited from his father’s careless life. But Torvald is sure that he will not fall off the honorable path of his life and reacts violently when his hardship presents itself. Since it is not his own doing, he wants to punish his wife and isolate her from him and his children as if her mistake was a sickness already inherited from her father.