t of a pattern of awakening in When We Dead Awaken, and more generally to A Doll House as emblematic of the "direct ethical confrontation and collision . . . with the protagonists taking on a single identity" (51). Such a reading of A Doll House is therefore consistent with the consequences of an environment in which (Hegelian) Reason is Lawgiver and a Test of Love. Undoubtedly, Torvald personifies such Reason in his relationship to Nora, although by the end of the play it becomes clear that Torvald is "more subtly the puppet of others' expectations, namely of his co-workers at the bank and, in a larger sense, of public opinion, of what they think" (Fjelde xxvii).
The action of the play concerns real-world issues such as modern (i.e., 1879) marriage, the legal position of women, and the state and emergence of the human spirit. A Doll House explores the confrontation of Nora's spiritual, however unrealistic, ideal, with social reality, which is most obviously represented by Torvald. Torvald, a member in good standing of the conventional community, gives concrete expression to Ibsen's comment on the inferior position of women. Indeed, the house and what is in it seem very much Torvald's own. Torvald seems conscious of owning what he sees--furniture, books, study, mailbox, wife, wife's (as he thinks) thoughts and opinions, the marriage itself. "Is that my squirrel, my lark," he asks in the first scene. In this proprietary domain, he subscribes to and enforces the norms of the society of which he is a member. He is also responsible to those norms, which helps explain his protectiveness toward wife and family in the early part of the play and his fear of Krogstad later.
Torvald's character appears to be elaborated with great coherence and subtlety, although it would be inaccurate to say that Torvald experiences character development as such. That dynamic belongs to Nora, whose psychological, rational, and emotional changes are document...