Doll's House Quotations

Front 1

The mutual acknowledgement that their previous selves had been entirely false.

Back 1

Once Doll’s House’s dramatic irony has been unwound and the final scene reveals to us Nora’s violent character transformation, there is a tacit acknowledgement by both players that their selves have been facsimiles. ‘You make me anxious, Nora. And I don’t understand you,’ says Helmer. ‘No, that’s just it. You don’t understand me. And I have never understood you either - until tonight,’ replies his wife. Both husband and wife have been caught in their own self-deluding concepts of self such that both have been blinded to themselves and their spouse.

Front 2

Nora realises the falsehood of her previous self

Back 2

‘I have earned my living doing tricks for you,’ Nora realises, taking a portion of blame upon herself before rightly informing Helmer that ‘[he] wanted it that way.’

Front 3

Torvald quotation on lending and its ugliness

Back 3

When asked about lending much earlier in the play he responds that ‘there is something unfree, and therefore also something ugly about a home founded on borrowing and debt.’ Perhaps if this mental association did not exist for him, he would have borrowed money for the trip to Italy in the first place.

Front 4

Commodifying Nora

Back 4

Now, as the stage directions indicate he must, Helmer stands alone. Caught in the illumination of the theatre he sets about reconstructing anew his sexual fantasy. Already having admitted at the masque ball to being desirous of a virginal bride ‘young, trembling, delightful,’ whom he can ravish, he now sets about building a Nora who is not just his wife, but who has ‘become... his child as well.’ She is claimed as ‘doubly... his property,’ and is robbed of anything that might be considered her own. An entire being is compressed into the constricted confines of one man’s personal fantasy - she is reduced to a shadow, being nothing but a manifestation of his ideals of ‘beauty’.