Themes in A Doll's House Essay

A Dolls House Passage Essay # 1

Passage End of Act I:

Helmer The mother is nearly always the root of itI honestly feel sick, sick to my stomach, in the presence of such people.

Ibsen collaborates the themes of ignorance, lying, and deceit to form a dramatic play. Nora, the main character, is the mother of three children and the wife of Torvald Helmer, who recently became successful in his career as a banker. It seems ironic that every character is egotistical and interested only in how they can personally benefit from other people, while Nora is blamed for an illegal act that she committed out of love and kindness for her husband. Nora committed a selfless act of forgery to save her husbands life. Her family was struggling financially and Helmer was sick to the point where he was almost dying. They needed to move and get help for Helmer so the family could move on with their lives and Helmer could focus solely on recovering from his illness. Nora took out a bank loan to obtain the money necessary to move to another town in Italy; however, she told her husband that she obtained the money through inheritance from her father so Helmer would not feel as if he has failed his family by not earning a sufficient living.

Nora is generally a caring wife and mother to her children, while she is also interested in materialism and desires large amounts of money from her husband now that he is successful in business. Krogstad, a deceitful and shady character in the play who works for the same bank as Helmer, only he does not have as prestigious of a position at the bank as Helmer, approaches Nora to help his uneasy situation at the bank. Krogstad was also involved in an illegal act along the lines of forgery and people are well aware of his wrongdoings. He has a poor reputation among his peers. His job is at risk at the bank and he asks Nora to put in a good word to Helmer for him so he feels more inclined to allowing him to keep his job at the bank. When Helmer discovers that Krogstad came to visit Nora, Helmer knows immediately what agenda Krogstad had in mind. Helmer says to Nora that Krogstad is a selfish and deceitful person and an immoral man. He feels sick to [his] stomach in the presence of such people. These statements give Nora a guilty conscience because Nora committed the same illegal act and Helmer is ignorant of it. Krogstad, on the other hand, knows about Noras act of borrowing money to move with the family and threatens Nora that he will reveal this secret to Helmer. Later on in the play Krogstad places a letter in the Helmers mailbox with Noras illegal act written on the letter to notify Helmer of what had happened.

There is an interesting juxtaposition after Helmers words to Nora of how basically all criminals grew up with mothers who are deceitful and lie. The next event to occur in the household is Noras children entering the room, so the reader is able to sense the feeling of guilt that Nora has having kept the forgery incident a secret from her husband, making Nora a lying mother herself.

Eventually Helmer discovers Noras illegal act and becomes infuriated with her. He looks beyond the fact that she did it only to help the family because she cares so greatly about her husband, and he accuses her of being a deceitful person. Ignorance is bliss, although ignorance does not necessarily include total honesty in certain situations such as Noras. Helmer treats his wife as a possession rather than a loving partner. Their relationship lacks equality and suffers because Helmer has a chauvinistic view on life. Also, Helmer is more concerned with what he is viewed as in the public eye than he is with his personal happiness. In the end of the play he tells Nora that she is not to leave the household, she is not to spend any time with their children, and nobody is to find out about the forgery incident. The culmination of the play depicts perfectly how skewed Helmers view on reality is, and that inevitably all of the deceit was recognized and Nora suffers greatly from it.