A Doll's House Summary: Ibsen's Three Acts Inside a Marriage
What A Doll's House is about
Henrik Ibsen's three-act play was published in December 1879 and premiered at the Royal Danish Theatre in Copenhagen on 20 December that year. The original Danish and Bokmål title is Et dukkehjem. It is set in a Norwegian town at around the same date, which means the world on stage was the world the first audience walked home into.
The story begins just before Christmas. Nora Helmer comes home loaded with parcels. Her husband Torvald, newly promoted at the bank, teases her for overspending and calls her his little squirrel. Money has been tight before. Last year Nora made the decorations by hand. Now, she thinks, they can relax.
Underneath the cheerful household sits a secret. Years earlier Torvald fell seriously ill and the family travelled to Italy for a rest cure. Nora told him her father paid for the trip. In fact she borrowed the money illegally, because at the time a woman in Norway could not sign for a loan or a cheque without a man's endorsement. She forged her father's signature on the bond. Since then she has been quietly working and saving to pay the debt down, and nobody knows.
The man who lent her the money is Krogstad, a junior employee at Torvald's bank. When Torvald decides to sack him, Krogstad comes to Nora and asks her to intervene. She fails. So he uses what he has: he knows about the forgery, and he says so.
The main characters
Nora Helmer is the centre of the play. She is treated as a decorative child by her husband and, more gently, by her old friend Kristine, who tells her plainly that she is like a child. Nora is offended, and lets slip that she once got money from an admirer. She is better at managing a crisis than anyone around her credits.
Torvald Helmer is the respectable man of the house. He is proud of his new position, protective of his reputation, and morally certain. He refuses to reinstate Krogstad partly for principle and partly because Krogstad is too familiar with him in front of other staff. He says a man who poisons his own children with lies makes him feel physically ill, which is an uncomfortable line given what is happening under his roof.
Kristine Linde arrives widowed and poor, looking for work. Nora asks Torvald to find her a place at the bank, and he can, because a position has just come free. Kristine's situation is the practical version of Nora's fear.
Dr Rank is the family friend who is dying. He says he feels wretched, and that like everyone he wants to go on living. He also describes Krogstad as morally diseased, setting his own physical illness against moral rot. In the second act he tells Nora he has always been in love with her, which wrecks the favour she had been building up to ask him.
Nils Krogstad is the blackmailer, and he is not a cartoon. He has forged signatures himself. He has, by Torvald's own account, been a reasonable worker who seems to have turned his life around. He is defending his place in the world.
The themes
Identity is the engine. Nora plays the role her husband wants, and the play asks what is left of a person who has only ever been a pet name. Freedom follows from it, since Nora's problem is legal as much as emotional. The law is what forced her to forge the signature in the first place.
Power runs through the marriage and the bank equally. Torvald can hire and fire. Krogstad can expose. Nora can only persuade, flirt and delay. Family is the last of the four, because every secret in the play is justified by someone as protecting a household.
How the second act closes (mild spoiler)
Krogstad tells Nora he no longer wants the balance of the loan repaid. He wants the bond itself as leverage, to force Torvald to keep him on and promote him. He writes a letter setting out Nora's crime and drops it into Torvald's locked letterbox. Nora sends Kristine to plead with him, and distracts Torvald from collecting his post. The third act turns on that letter. The ending that follows it is the most argued-over scene in modern theatre, and it is better met in the text or in performance.
Why it still matters
The play caused a storm of outraged controversy in 1879, spilling out of the theatre into newspapers and drawing rooms. Ibsen denied that he set out to write a feminist play, and the argument about that has never quite finished. In 2006, the centenary of his death, A Doll's House was the most-performed play in the world. UNESCO added Ibsen's autograph manuscripts to the Memory of the World Register in 2001. It suits readers who want a short, tightly built drama where an ordinary domestic evening turns into something far larger.
