The plays of Henrik Ibsen have a strong social content, indicating the views of the playwright on some matters, and more directly showing the way different social issues were developing in the society of his time and the way those issues were in turn shaping that society. He wrote about women's rights, the plight of "whistleblowers," the meaning of social responsibility, the effects of corruption. Ibsen's views and his challenging dramatic methods made him something of a social outcast even as he was becoming one of the world's major playwrights, a voice that would speak to subsequent generations perhaps even more strongly than he did to his own. In A Doll's House, Ibsen challenges some of the essential tenets his society believed necessary to bind itself together, and he questions the degree of sacrifice women were expected to make to serve as wives to men who see them as property, more servants than equals, and more pampered than empowered. The slamming of the door at the end of the play thus signaled a sort of social revolution, with this one small action heralding a massive change to come.
In A Doll's House, Ibsen challenges the assumptions about the place of women in society. Harold Clurman notes,
If A Doll's House is read without preconceptions the implication is clear that men cannot be "free" (or authentic) persons unless women are equally free (Clurman 109).
Whicher traces this to tensions within Ibsen himself over his observations of society and further emphasizes that Ibsen was a man with violently conflicting emotions. Whicher believes that the man would have been destroyed by them had he not been able to discharge this energy into his plays:
A fierce revolt and protest lies at their heart, a savage demand for freedom at all costs--matched by an iron conscience that told him all the revolt must be paid for. the closing-in, opening-out character of Ibsen's landscapes mirrors his inner country (Whicher 170...