Ibsen\'s a Doll\'s House Henrik Ibsen\'s Play

Ibsen's a Doll's House

Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House dramatizes its heroine's dilemma by providing an example of what fate might possibly await her: the subplot involving Mrs. Linde is designed by Ibsen as a deliberate contrast and warning to Nora, the "little doll" of the play's title (Ibsen 84).. I hope by an examination of the different uses Ibsen makes of his counterplot to demonstrate that Ibsen intends the ultimate effect of A Doll's House upon the audience to be an open-ended one that is rife with competing possibilities. To some extent, Mrs. Linde's fate represents one available option for Nora among many. But in the end I think Ibsen makes Mrs. Linde more dynamic, by offering a new behavior in her final appearance which indicates a complication to her own motives.

The play introduces us to Nora as she presents a too-generous poirboire to a Porter who has arrived with a Christmas tree, as she tells "keep the change" (Ibsen 5). From this we get Torvald's stern admonishment of Nora for her fiscal irresponsibility, delivered with full paternalistic condescension: "What are little people called that are always wasting money?" (Ibsen 8). It thus is only likely that the audience is intended to interpret Mrs. Linde's threadbare poverty after her husband's death as a grim warning to Nora: women must rely on men for financial security. The irony, of course, is that Mrs. Linde still feels confident enough to admonish Nora along the same lines that Torvald just did: "Nora, Nora, haven't you learnt sense yet? In our schooldays you were a great spendthrift" (Ibsen 12).

This accusation must particularly sting for Nora, because it leads her to confess her secret, the fact around which the entire plot of the play is closely based: the two hundred and fifty kronor she borrowed to fund Torvald's medicinal stay in the Italian climate (which has arguably saved his life). Yet this makes things awkward when we realize that Mrs. Linde has not come for Nora's breathless personal confessions, although Nora misunderstands this. I suggest Ibsen means us to interpret Mrs. Linde's revelations about the lovelessness of her marital life, and the utter lack of emotion with which she faced widowhood, with "not even any sorrow or grief" over Mr. Linde's death as being as emotionless as she describes (Ibsen 12). Crucially it is Nora who misinterprets this unfeeling revelation as something which must have sentimental meaning, or this is how I think we must view Nora's decision to confess.