A Doll's House

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1879

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Act Summaries & Analyses

Acts 1-3

Character Analysis

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Acts 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Act 1 Summary

The play opens in a comfortable middle-class living room in late 1800s Norway. It’s Christmastime, and the young mother of the family, Nora, comes home with a tree and presents, ready to prepare festivities for her children. She’s also bought herself some macaroons on the sly—a treat her husband Torvald usually forbids her.

Torvald greets her and affectionately (if condescendingly) teases her over the money she spent for Christmas. But he becomes sterner when she asks for her own Christmas present: “You could always give me money, Torvald. Only what you think you could spare. And then I could buy myself something with it later on” (4). Torvald scolds that Nora just fritters away the money he gives her and withdraws to his study to meet with his friend, Dr. Rank.

A visitor arrives. Nora doesn’t recognize her at first but soon realizes she’s an old school friend, a widow named Kristine Linde. Kristine looks thin and pale, and has obviously fallen on hard times, but Nora can’t quite summon any sympathy for her. She’s too excited to tell Kristine about Torvald’s new job. He’s been promoted to bank manager, and their family will be comfortably well-to-do.

Kristine already knows about Torvald’s promotion and has come to see if he might offer her a job. Since her husband and her mother died and her two sons grew up and left home, she’s been impoverished and at loose ends; she needs both some money and something to do. Nora is eager to help, but she also feels stung when Kristine observes that Nora hasn’t really had it so hard. Trying to prove that she’s struggled, too, Nora lets slip a little secret: Not so long ago, she concocted a secret scheme to pay for a trip to Italy, a trip she credits with saving Torvald from a dangerous bout of illness. She’s coy about the details but suggests she might have gotten some funds from a wealthy admirer—a thought Kristine finds alarming.

Before the two women can talk more, Dr. Rank and Torvald appear. They briefly discuss a man named Krogstad, an employee of Torvald’s whom Dr. Rank calls “rotten to the core” (18). Seeming uncomfortable, Nora changes the subject, encouraging Torvald to offer Kristine a job. Torvald seems amenable to this suggestion—especially because he plans to fire Krogstad and will need someone to fill his position.

Everyone leaves, and Nora is playing happily with her children when she’s interrupted by a less welcome visitor: Krogstad himself. This is the very man Nora borrowed the Italy money from. Now, he’s come to blackmail Nora into persuading Torvald not to fire him. He’s noticed that Nora’s father, who was supposed to have witnessed a document recording the loan he made her, “signed” that document several days after his death! Nora admits that she forged the signature and begs Krogstad not to reveal her secret to Torvald. Krogstad threatens to do just that and to turn Nora in for fraud if she doesn’t help him keep his job.

Torvald returns, and Nora asks whether he’s going to fire Krogstad, and why. Torvald tells her that Krogstad committed fraud; he disgustedly reflects on how Krogstad’s moral turpitude will poison his children.

As the act ends, a troubled Nora imagines that her fraud might also poison her family. But she shakes this idea off: “It’s not true! It could never, never be true!” (34).

Act 2 Summary

Christmas passes, and Nora is waiting for the other shoe to drop, jumping when the mail comes or when somebody knocks on the door. She has withdrawn from her children; their nursemaid, Anne Marie, tells Nora that they pine for her, but Nora is haunted by the idea that she might poison them with her moral failings and refuses to see them.

It turns out that Anne Marie was Nora’s nurse as a child too; she took the position when she got pregnant out of wedlock and needed a job. She has only heard from her own daughter a couple of times in her life: “She wrote to me when she got confirmed, and again when she got married” (36).

Nora tries to distract herself from her worries by preparing for a new year’s costume ball. She’s going through a box of clothes when Kristine drops by. Kristine thinks she’s guessed Nora’s secret, but she’s guessed wrong: She thinks Dr. Rank was the mysterious donor of Nora’s Italy money. Nora pooh-poohs this idea.

Torvald comes home, and Nora sends Kristine to play with the children while she talks to him. She begs Torvald not to fire Krogstad, warning him that Krogstad (who’s a journalist on the side) will slander him in the papers. Torvald takes offense at Nora’s “management” and sends off a letter firing Krogstad on the spot. He plans to hire Kristine in Krogstad’s place. Nora is distraught. Torvald, taking some pity on her, tells her he’s strong enough to deal with any consequences.

Torvald leaves, and Dr. Rank drops by to tell Nora some terrible news: He’s dying of spinal tuberculosis. Seemingly relieved that the terrible news isn’t about her own problems, Nora waves off Dr. Rank’s misery as mere gloominess. Dr. Rank asks her to help hide his decline from Torvald, saying he’ll send her a card with a black cross on it to let her know he’s dying. Nora is about to request a favor in return when he abruptly confesses that he’s in love with her. Nora scolds him for his frankness, though she seems pleased at the compliment.

Just then, a maid whispers to Nora that Krogstad is at the door. Nora sends Dr. Rank to go talk to Torvald and braces herself for a confrontation.

Krogstad tells her he’s not going to expose her—not yet. Instead, he’s going to show Torvald her forged IOU and insist that Torvald create a new job for him, a better position than the one he was fired from. He taunts Nora, telling her she doesn’t have the courage to do anything about her situation—not even to take her own life. As he leaves, he drops his blackmail letter to Torvald into the locked mailbox, to which only Torvald has a key.

Kristine returns to find Nora in despair. Nora confesses everything and makes Kristine promise that if anything happens to her, Kristine will explain to the world that the whole mess was solely Nora’s fault. Horrified, Kristine vows to talk to Krogstad; they were involved in the past, and she thinks she can talk him down.

Torvald appears with Dr. Rank, and Nora tries to distract him by making him promise he’ll help her rehearse a tarantella for the party. Torvald slowly discerns that there’s already a letter from Krogstad in the mailbox, but Nora makes him promise not to look, and Dr. Rank tells him it’s best if he doesn’t go against Nora’s wishes.

Kristine returns and says that Krogstad has already left town, but she left him a note telling him to meet her when he gets back. Nora privately calculates: “Five. Seven hours till midnight. Then twenty-four hours till the next midnight. Then the tarantella will be over. Twenty-four and seven? Thirty-one hours to live” (61).

Act 3 Summary

The night of the costume party arrives. While Torvald and Nora attend the party upstairs, Kristine has a clandestine meeting with Krogstad downstairs. It turns out that the two were once in love, but Kristine rejected Krogstad for a loveless marriage to a rich man who could support her children and her sickly mother. Now, she proposes that she and Krogstad get back together, so he won’t be destitute and so she’ll have someone to live for. Krogstad questions her motives, but Kristine tells him, “When you’ve sold yourself once for other people’s sake, you don’t do it again” (65).

Overjoyed, Krogstad vows to ask for his (still unopened) letter back, but Kristine tells him not to, believing that Torvald and Nora need to hash things out honestly. Krogstad leaves, and Kristine is there to greet Torvald and Nora when they come down from the party. Kristine privately tells Nora that she must confess to Torvald, and Nora replies, “Now I know what’s to be done” (68).

Excited by the success of Nora’s tarantella, Torvald flirtatiously chases her around the room; she’s miserable and glad when Dr. Rank knocks on the door and interrupts. Dr. Rank is in a frenetic mood and briefly engages them in an energetic chat before departing. As Torvald sees him out, he notices a broken hat-pin by the letterbox; someone has been trying to break in. When he opens the box, he finds Dr. Rank’s calling card with the ominous black cross. Nora tells him that the cross means Dr. Rank is dying. After some perfunctory regret, Torvald seems relieved by this news and withdraws to read the rest of his mail.

Nora, crazed and miserable, throws on her shawl to drown herself in the night. But Torvald returns and holds her back; he’s read Krogstad’s letter now, and he’s utterly disgusted with her. He lays out his plan: They must keep up appearances, so Nora will have to keep living with him, but only in a sham marriage. He won’t even let her raise her children any more.

At this moment, a maid appears with a new letter from Krogstad. Torvald reads it and is overwhelmed with joy; Krogstad has sent him Nora’s IOU and a note of apology. Torvald rapturously forgives Nora, who is still grim and frozen, and only begins to take off her costume. Torvald waxes rhapsodic on the joys of forgiveness and promises that everything will be just the same between them.

Nora comes back into the room in her normal clothes and sits Torvald down for a serious talk—one they’ve never had in their eight years of marriage. She tells him that he and her father have both wronged her. She was passed from her father’s protection to Torvald’s, living as a “doll wife” who was never truly happy, “just gay” (80). She can no longer live this way—and she can no longer raise her children, treating them as playthings just as she was treated. She has to leave to figure out how the world really works.

She says that Torvald’s behavior just now has made her fall out of love with him. She’d been on the point of suicide to protect his honor, believing he’d immediately take the blame for her error; she’d never expected that he’d just accede to Krogstad’s blackmail. Torvald counters that no one gives up their honor for a loved one. Nora replies, “Hundreds and thousands of women have” (84).

Firmly resolved, Nora returns her wedding ring, absolves Torvald of any responsibility for her, and leaves, saying that only in a “miracle of miracles” could she ever return, and only if she and Torvald could “make a real marriage of [their] lives together” (86). Torvald weeps as Nora leaves but holds hope for a moment—before he hears the door slam behind her.

Acts 1-3 Analysis

A Doll’s House is a story of an awakening. The childish, sometimes callous Nora we meet at the beginning of the play goes through a crucible of consequences and realizations, emerging not quite as a whole adult but as a person on her way to becoming one.

Nora’s dilemma is one that Ibsen felt was all too common for women in the world around him. When Ibsen wrote this play at the end of the 19th century, middle- and upper-class European women were often treated as “dolls,” mere decorative playthings and status symbols for the men who passed them around. Lower-class women were even worse off, with neither social status nor legal rights. That Ibsen calls this play A Doll’s House rather than The Doll’s House suggests that the case he’s examining here is one among a multitude. If the reader finds the action here broad, it’s worth noting that the characters and events are closely based on a real-life incident in a family that Ibsen knew personally.

When the play was first performed, the ending (in which Nora leaves not only Torvald but also her children) so scandalized audiences that Ibsen was forced to write a softened version for the German premiere. His grudging revision there is telling. In the bowdlerized ending, Torvald leads Nora upstairs to look at her sleeping children, and she’s so overcome by her maternal instinct that she collapses on the floor—obviously not going anywhere. That ending was meant to assure squeamish audiences that, after all, women are still women, right?

Ibsen hated this ending and disavowed it later in life, rededicating himself to his play’s revolutionary message: that self-knowledge, rather than duty or convention, might be the foundation of a just and sane society. The idea that every human has a responsibility to know themselves, that this responsibility might override even the most hallowed and ancient social bonds, and that women in particular were being held back from their duty to themselves by sexism, all flew in the face of 19th-century European convention, which held the traditional, hierarchical family unit sacred.

In Ibsen’s view, Nora’s position isn’t just bad for Nora but for the world. If half the population is kept in a state of perpetual childish dependence, if men and women live together in falsity, how is the “society” Dr. Rank speaks of to hold together in the long term? Ibsen explores this idea even more deeply through Kristine. Widowed after a marriage of convenience, left alone by the family she sacrificed her real feelings for, and forced to beg for a menial job, Kristine has had a lot more contact with the “real world” than Nora. But she, too, is trapped in the whirlpool of sexist expectations. Even when she returns to her former lover Krogstad, she seems more excited about having someone else to live for than about satisfying her own desires.

But sexism doesn’t just hurt the women in this play. All the men are in some way stunted by societal expectations too. Torvald’s manly bluster conceals his deep moral cowardice; he doesn’t even think of standing up for Nora when he first discovers her fraud, but merely plans to imprison her in her own home. Krogstad’s desperation over not being able to fulfill his masculine “duty” and provide for his family curdles into real cruelty. And even Dr. Rank, in his efforts to conceal his fatal illness from Torvald, avoids the honest confrontation with reality that grounded selfhood allows—the kind of confrontation that Nora and Torvald reach at the end of the play.

Nora and her infantilized femininity might be the most famous part of this play, but its message is an even bigger and more bracing one. The individual soul, Ibsen suggests, demands cultivation; the self must know and be loyal to the self to enter any kind of true and honest relationship.