Victim or Failure?

In what ways do you find Nora a victim? In what ways at fault?

Upon reviewing the first two acts of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, I have come to the conclusion that Nora is primarily a victim of a series of circumstances outside of her control. She does what she thinks is right. Her poor judgment of what is righteous and appropriate—not any evil intention—is her primary character flaw. When she asks Krogstad, “Isn’t a daughter entitled to try and save her father from worry and anxiety on his deathbed? Isn’t a wife entitled to save her husband’s life?” she seems to be asking two completely sincere, rational questions. She steps out of the boundaries drawn for her as a woman by society. But she also crosses another boundary; she seems to have no sense of guilt at the time that she forges her own father’s name to receive the money that she is not allowed to receive. In these ways, she is at fault. Yet she reacts sensibly and in a way that anybody can relate to. She is facing extraordinary circumstances—a dying father and an ill husband, both of whom she at least thinks she loves very much—and she reacts with extraordinary, but in her mind necessary, measures. Nora is in many ways a victim of society. The measures she takes would have been unnecessary if she were a man in the same time and place, because women were not allowed to sign the document that Nora needed signed. Her dishonesty is of course less than admirable, but I believe that it is the price she had to pay to save at least her husband. Her behavior would certainly have been hard to understand in that time period, but that is precisely Ibsen’s point. He resents the extreme actions a woman like Nora would have to make to accomplish the same thing that a man could accomplish very easily. To interpret Nora as a villain who did an evil thing is to miss Ibsen’s primary message of A Doll’s House. Sure, she was dishonest, and maybe she should have felt more guilt at the time. But she was a victim more of society than of her own personal flaws.