Blog 12: A Doll’s House

In the next instalment in what is turning into a monthly series, we look at Ibsen’s dramatic masterpiece (and possible feminist manifesto): A Doll’s House.

With all of these blog posts, I’ll be highlighting three important things to consider to elevate your exam responses.

Key Character

Nora. Her actions are at the centre of the play, after all, and she is at the centre of the work’s central allegorical conceit: the Helmer house as a claustrophobic setting ('a doll’s house’) in which Nora is incarcerated, and is Torvald’s plaything: his ‘squirrel’, as he puts it in one of his many diminutive references to his wife.

Key Theme

Struggle. Ibsen’s play should be appreciated as a product of its time: one of a swathe of realist dramas (along with the work of Chekhov, Strindberg, and others) that focused on the real-life struggles of lower-to-middle-class Europeans in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the aftermath of Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto of 1848, the struggles of ordinary people came to be seen, increasingly, as appropriate dramatic material for works of literature.

Key Quotation

‘I believe that first and foremost I am an individual, just as you are’ says Nora to Torvald at the denouement of the play, and explaining her self-emancipation. In spite of what Joan Templeton (1989) described as an anti-feminist ‘backlash’, it is clear that this statement of female autonomy backed up the growing movements towards universal suffrage in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century.

📌 If you want more of this focus on character, theme, language, and context to prepare you for your exams, get in touch.