A Doll's House - Portrayal of What Constitutes a Healthy Marriage

Daniel Mariano
A Doll’s House

Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House, was a “challenging” play as it evoked marriage and what was acceptable within it given the time period it was written. In the modern day, the play serves as sort of a guide of what not to do in a relationship. This is because it dances with what love is, what marriage is, and what comprises a healthy marriage. In the play, the two female protagonists, Nora and Mrs. Linde, both have different reasons for their respective marriages. While their reasons were probably normal at the time, Ibsen contrasts their relationships with their failing marriages while using appearance vs. reality to highlight this. Ibsen’s play suggests the flaws of marriages at the time, which is why it could be considered a “how-not-to” guide. It evokes the lack of communication and secrets between partners and the dependence women had at the time towards men. In this play, Ibsen highlighted the social paradigm of women and how they basically had no rights. Ibsen, with this play, challenged what was considered normal for marriages and the status of women. Ibsen also contests people’s reasons for love and marriage as well as offer suggestions to improve marriages by pointing out their flaws.

The play presents the failing marriages of the characters’ from female perspectives. We only realize how bad their relationships are when it is revealed that Nora knows this. It is at the same time that we see that she is quite aware of the role she has to play to get things from Torvald. In the beginning we see her and Torvald and while we do consider their relationship to be quite condescending and to be more of a parent-child relationship than an actual one. We see that she is fine with it. It is only when we see her talking to Mrs. Linde that we realize that she is not only aware of the fact she is playing a game with him to get what she wants, but that she is also aware of how inappropriate he is treating her. The normal thing...