Henrik Ibsen's: A Doll House - Research Paper Example

Throughout the play, Nora is played in the context of varied relations and the readers comes across her relationship with her children, her relationship with the money lender Krogstad, in her relation with her friend Christine Lind, in her relation with her admirer and secret lover Doctor Rank, in her relation with the old nurse and above all her relationship with her husband. While Nora emerges to be a happy and carefree woman at the beginning of the play, near the end of the play she transforms into a serious and somber woman, who leaves her husband’s home to face a life of uncertainty (Yuehua 79).

Nora is depicted to be a wife who is entirely devoted and self sacrificing. She committed an act of forgery and all these years she felt glad in the realization that she had been able to rescue her husband’s dwindling health by taking him away to a warm climate in Italy, even though it involved borrowing money for this purpose and even though this necessitated the commitment of forgery on her part. She is shown willing to live a life of scarcity and willing to do whatever work comes her way so as to be able to make payments for the money she borrowed to help her husband.

She is never shown ready to intimate her husband regarding the loan she availed or the signatures she forged because she never wanted her husband to live under the realization that she had gone to these extremes to save his life (Sjolyst-Jackson 146). Hence, in the play Nora comes out as a devoted and loving wife. Nora also happens to be a devoted and loving mother. She almost dotes upon her children. There is a scene, though quiet a short one in Act II, in which the writer reveals as to how much Nora loved her children though the care of the children is actually trusted to the old nurse and it is she who looks after the children and is largely responsible for their care and upbringing.

The children in this scene are shown to express great pleasure in the company of their mother and Nora comes out as a mother who is supremely happy while spending time with her children. The extent of Nora’s devotion as a mother is such that when it dawns upon her that she may have to leave her home, she requests the old nurse to continue to look after her children as she was already doing. However, an unpleasant trait of Nora’s character is that she has a tendency to tell lies, which rushes the pace of distress in her married life.

Many a times in the play, Nora is shown to lie though often out of benign reasons that safeguarded her husband’s poise and her family reputation. In the alter side of Nora’s personality, her propensity to deceive and to prevaricate rather amazes and also confuses the readers. Some critics believe that Nora’s conversion from a passive kind of wife to a woman capable of mature thinking who is willing to leave her husband and children so as to leave an independent life is too sudden to come out as being dramatically credible (Rekdal 150).

However, there is another group of critics who hold that Nora’s transformation at the end of the play is both dramatically credible and psychologically convincing. Inherently speaking, her act of leaving her children in no way brings the blemish of being inconsistent and fickle. There are many people who by nature happen to be visibly rebellious, self assertive and defiant and who do