Rebellion In A Doll's House

Although Henrik Ibsen presents Nora as an innocent character at the beginning of the play A Doll´s House, there were signs of rebellion that made the audience somehow foresee the final act. But to recognize these signs of insurgence, we must to take into consideration – throughout the following essay – that this play took place during the 1870s. At that time, women had fewer rights than men. They were dependent, as they had to live their entire life under the shadow of men. Women themselves passed from their father’s responsibility to their husband’s responsibility, and so did their rights . Nora puts this idea forward in the phrase: “I mean that I simply transformed from papa’s hands into yours. You arranged everything according to your own

The protagonist seems as if she is completely dominated by her husband and as if he has full control over her. Ibsen first presents Nora as a child that does not have any knowledge about the real world outside her house. However, we can admire certain signs of rebellion presented in Nora throughout the play, which helped the public predict the final outburst. These situations made by Nora include the eating of the macaroons, she getting a loan and, finally, the poor relationship with her children. The final rebellion at the end of act three was not an expected way of reacting of a woman against his husband. This is the reason why I can consider Nora’s rebellion not only as a rebellion against her husband, Torvald, but also as an uprising against society. Emancipation against the expectations that people of her surroundings had build up of her. That is why, in the middle of the fight, she says, “It is no use forbidding me anything any longer. I will take with me what belongs to myself ”; deciding not to let any other man “(…) to educate me into being a proper wife (…) ”, nor control anything of her

Because of her being part of one of the highest upper social classes, she was expected to have a nurse that takes care of the housework; but that did not mean that she had to stop acting as a mother with them. For example, “Nora takes off the children’s things and throws them about (…)” . This is not a decent mother’s anticipated behavior, which would have instead been to accommodate the coats in a proper manner for Anny, the maid, to put them in the right place. The standards of society represent women as housekeepers which have to complete the role of taking care of their children . As Nora does not satisfy any of these roles, we can conclude that she is rebelling against these expectations of society, because she is not taking care of her three children as she ought to. Moreover, Nora treats her children as dolls, by only using them to show off with visitors. This is one case of situational irony, where Nora treats her children the same way Torvald treats her, even when she explicitly criticizes that