Example Of Literature Review On Character Analysis: Nora In The Play A Dolls House

In the play A Doll’s House, Nora Helmer is a discontented housewife in an upper middle class household during the Victorian Era of the late-19th Century, and eventually decides to escape from her husband and her unhappy situation. She did not imagine at first that she would ever take such a drastic step, for this was a period of history when divorce or separation was very uncommon, particularly for ‘respectable’ people of the middle and upper classes. Women had very limited educational and economic opportunities at this time, and did not even work outside the home unless they had no other choice. As the play indicates, some women like Christine Linde had to work when their husbands died, and widowhood was actually very common in this era, yet the type of jobs they could find generally paid very little. In fact, she has appeared at Nora’s house in Act I of the play in hopes that her husband Torvald will find her some kind of position. Nora still seems happy in her marriage at this point in the story, without any thought of leaving Thovald and striking out on her own, and both she and Christine are well-aware that they are living in a world where law, government and society are controlled by men. Women cannot even borrow money without their husband’s permission, and in these matters Torvald was as authoritarian as any Victorian husband. Nora has a strong independent streak, however, and reveals that she has in fact borrowed a large sum of money by forging Torvald’s signature. Even though she did if for her husband’s benefit and had very great repaying it, all the subsequent action in the play will center on this loan, and it the end it leads Nora to walk out on her husband.
In the second scene of Act I, Nora meets with her old school friend Christine, and reveals the great secret of the borrowed money to her. This is very much a capitalist society in which money is a primary concern, and women on their own are always in danger of sinking into poverty unless they were left an estate by their fathers. Neither Christine nor Nora ever received any such inheritance, and Nora lied to Torvald when she told him her late father had left her a bequest. Christine married a man she did not love because she was already a widow and needed a man to support her and her sons, but he left her nothing when he died, “not even any sorrow or grief to live upon.” At this early point in the paly, though, Nora believes her own prospects are brighter became Torvald had just been made manager of the Bank, so she fantasizes that “for the future we can life quite differently” and “it will be splendid to have heaps of money and not need to have any anxiety.” Christine, on the other hand, has been having great difficulty since she had to support her sons and her elderly, ailing mother, which she managed by running “a small shop, a small school, and so on.” At this point, Nora reveals the secret that will cause her so much trouble in the near future and lead to the end of her marriage. She borrowed the money because Torvald’s health was so poor that the doctors told her he would die if they did not relocate to Italy for a time. Women could not borrow money on their own, and Torvald refused to take out a loan for travel purposes, telling Nora that she was “thoughtless and that it was his duty as my husband not to indulge me in my whims and caprices.” He did not know how serious his condition really was, so to save his life Nora forged his signature and borrowed the money, which would later cause Krogstad to blackmail her.
Nora has scrimped and saved to make the regular payments on this loan, keeping it secret from her husband and everyone else. He often criticized her for being extravagant and a spendthrift, although the scene in Act I actually reveals her to be a very dutiful and altruistic wife, according to Victorian conventions. She took out this loan because the doctors told her that the trip was necessary to save her husband’s life, and she risked not only a scandal but actually going to prison to do so. After all, obtaining money with a forged signature is a serious crime, and Torvald was predictably enraged when he found out what she had done, since his reputation would have been ruined and he would have lost his job at the Bank, nor would he ever have been able to find a similar position in the future. Even middle class life was very precarious in those times, since a death in the family, an illness or sudden financial reversal could send a family down into poverty or the ranks of the working class. This was especially true for women, since they mostly lacked education, connections and financial resources and depended on husbands and fathers for their survival. This was the only world that Nora had ever known, and she accepted it without question, at least at the beginning of the play. Already in Act I, however, the seeds were being sewn that will in the end cause her to make a radical break with her husband and middle class life as she had known it.