53 pages • 1 hour read
Henrik IbsenA Doll's House
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1879A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Summary
Act Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Quiz
Tools
BetaSymbols & Motifs
Dolls
The play’s title, A Doll’s House, comes into focus in the last moments of the final act. Here, Nora confronts an ugly truth: She’s never had the opportunity to be a complete adult person. Instead, she’s been passed from her father’s care to her husband’s. She tells Torvald, “He used to call me his baby doll, and he played with me like a doll. Then I came to live in your house…” (80). Torvald himself casually mentions that he thinks of her not as a partner but as a “treasured possession”; he intends this as a compliment (69).
Nora’s false doll-life represents the predicament of women in general in 19th-century Europe. Expected to be nothing more than charming children, women in the middle and upper classes were denied their full humanity; they were, indeed, playthings for the men around them. If Nora wants to be a real person rather than a mere doll, she has no choice but to leave her stultifying home.
The New Year’s Party
On the night Nora expects will be the last of her life, she and Torvald attend a New Year’s party. Nora is the toast of the evening, dancing a tarantella in costume and charming all the onlookers. As it turns out, this won’t be her last night alive but the first of her new life; this new year heralds the beginning of her journey as an adult human rather than a costumed doll.
In setting the play at the turn of the year, Ibsen suggests that Nora’s transformation is part of a new era for women in general. The new year is a time for the new woman, a figure who takes responsibility for herself and demands respect. At the end of the night, when Nora finally understands that her “duty to [her]self” is as sacred as—indeed, more sacred than—the bonds of marriage, she leaves behind not just her costume but a whole way of being, stepping into a truly new year (83).
The Letterbox
The letterbox symbolizes the secrecy and imbalance of Nora and Torvald’s relationship.
The family letterbox is locked, and Torvald is the only one in the house with a key. He’s thus completely in charge of the home’s communication with the outside world. When Nora tries to extract Krogstad’s fatal letter by picking the lock with a “broken hair-pin,” the symbolic weight of the letterbox becomes even clearer: Within the confines of sexist marriages, women only have frail and brittle tools with which to assert themselves (73).
The locked letterbox also gestures at the lack of communication within Torvald and Nora’s marriage. Until the end of the play, the pair never speak an honest word to each other. Everything is a performance founded on unspoken feelings: Torvald believes he is Nora’s natural superior in every way (but might also lose his superiority in the outside world if he puts one foot wrong), while Nora believes she is secretly unhappy, no matter how “gay” she seems on the outside (80).
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By Henrik Ibsen
