A Doll's House Letter

I can quite understand your disappointment at a married woman abandoning her husband, children and home. However, I write this letter to you to provide you with perhaps a fuller understanding and awareness of why Nora had little choice but to abandon her husband, children and home. I fear that had she remained behind her very sanity, indeed, if not her life, were in jeopardy.

You must understand the constraints and confines on women and their roles in the Victorian era. Women were viewed as no more and no less than a reflection of their father or spouse. There was no room in polite society for a woman who refused to be bound by the limitations or such roles. Nora was such a woman. As she herself tells husband, "a great wrong was done to me Torvald. First by Papa and then by you" (Ibsen 104). This wrong is that Nora has sacrificed her entire life and being to please the men in her existence, leaving no room for her own desires, needs or development.

Despite sacrificing her life for her father and her husband, Nora asked for very little for herself. She contented herself to playing larks and squirrels for Torvald, keeping his house, and tending to their children. The only thing she ever asked for from Torvald was for a trip to Italy but he refused her even this pleasure. He told her such a trip was "frivolous" and that it was not his position to "pander to her mood and caprices," despite the fact that she catered to his every mood a

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hen it no longer amuses him to see me dance and dress up and play the fool for him" (Ibsen 105). As Nora matured, she came to understand Torvald's limitations and her own capacity for self-fulfillment. She became conscious of the masculine oppressive mechanisms suffocating her and making her miserable. As her intellectual maturity developed, she began to see the limitations of her husband's capacity to permit her to be a woman in her own right, one of dignity and worth with her own ideas and desires. This is why Nora had to slam the door on her existence; one she felt confined her to an intolerable role of "doll" that permitted her no self-expression or room for growth. All of her life, Nora sacrificed her own autonomy for that of her father's and husband's. Though it was a terribly difficult emotional experience for her to choose to leave her husband, children and home, she knew she would succumb to despair and possibly insanity if she stayed behind playing only a role that was unfulfilling for her true self. Quite frankly dear friend, if Nora did not choose this difficult emotional choice, I am certain she would have succumbed to despair and insanity. We see that her existence of being treated like a "doll," one that h

Category: Literature - A