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Women in the 19th Century

So enormous is her grief at the realization that her husband is alive and that the vision of a long and solitary (and free) life is gone that she dies of a broken heart. .
             When Ibsen created the character of Nora for The Doll's House, he created an intelligent, high-spirited young woman whose submission to her husband's repellent combination of baby-talk and bullying is hard to understand. She simultaneously reacts against and accepts this treatment, humiliating herself by stealing cookies, begging for money, and playing "larks and squirrels" for her husband's benefit. Her role as the female captive in a "doll's house" is a role that has been both forced upon her by her husband (and the society in which they live) and her own response adopted to cope with the pressures exerted by that outside world, including her husband, while she lives a highly secret life of her own.
             When Nora tells her husband that a "great injustice was done to me, Torvald. First by Father and then by you ," she is commenting upon the fact that she has never been allowed to live and function as an independent adult.(Ibsen Act 3) She states that she has passed from the hands of one dominant male who felt her had both the right and the responsibility to tell a dependent woman how to feel and think and act in all situations. In return for food and drink, and social approval, she performed tricks for the delight of this all-powerful male. In the process, of course, she becomes the "doll" of the play's title and even more significantly becomes (at least superficially) unworthy of greater respect and better treatment.
             Nora's argument against her marriage and her childhood is that she has been not only socially but intellectually stifled. Her final rejection of the tomb-like world represented by her husband's house takes the form of physical abandonment. Her inability to sustain the myth of the tiny, dependent, and subservient wife is a result of her having been "caught" in financial activities that are damaging to her husband and his reputation.


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