Freedom or Death

One of the underlying themes and meanings of Ibsen’s play is Nora’s search for freedom. Not the sort of freedom granted to her by a national authority, not the sort of freedom that the greatest country on earth, America, grants to its citizens, but freedom from her worries and responsibilities. Worries and responsibilities that do not come from her role as a woman in the household—she doesn’t even raise her own children—but rather worries and responsibilities that she has set upon herself by forging her father’s signature and illegally borrowing money from a less-than-beneficent moneylender, Krogstad.

Throughout most of “The Doll House,” Nora feels that if she can simply pay off the money she owes to Krogstad, her problems will simply disappear. What she does not realize, however, is that the money she owes is not the source of her problems, but rather to whom she owes to money. Krogstad uses Nora’s debt as a way to ruin her. When Krogstad is fired, he gains revenge on Torvald by revealing the truth about Nora’s past activities, thus ruining Nora’s life, and by extension Torvalds.




But by the time Krogstad ruins Nora and Torvald, Nora has already realized that she cannot gain personal freedom by paying back the money. At this point she has even realized that it is not the blackmail power that Krogstad held over her that prevented her from being free to live her life. She has realized that it was her relationship with her husband that was her biggest impediment to living a life free from worry and meaningless responsibilities. She no longer wants to be a “little squirrel” or any other diminutive form of cute animal: she had been treated like that her whole life.

Nora’s father treated her like a dumb kitten, and Nora’s husband treated her like a dumb kitten. The blackmail situation with Krogstad only served as a catalyst for her to realize that she wanted to be free from her persona as an empty headed girl. The threat of her husband leaving her and divorcing her due to her actions led her to consider a life without her husband. Were Nora to lose her husband, she would, for the first time in her life, not be associated with a dominating, condescending male figure.

At the final scene, Nora gains the strength to say that for once in her life, she will “make sense of [her]self and everything around her.” She leaves Torvald to pursue her own destiny for the first time in her life. The divorce from her husband means a divorce from her entire life as a “little spendthrift” and a start to a new life as her own person.