Five-minute digest

A Doll's House and Other Plays

Henrik Ibsen

Summary

The title play, A Doll's House (1879), takes place over three days of Christmas in the comfortable Norwegian home of Torvald Helmer, a newly appointed bank manager, and his wife Nora, whom he treats as a charming pet, calling her his songbird and squirrel. Years earlier, when Torvald was gravely ill and doctors advised a year in Italy, Nora secretly borrowed the money from the lawyer Krogstad, forging her dying father's signature as guarantor. She has been paying the debt in secret from her housekeeping and copying work. Krogstad, now an employee at Torvald's bank and about to be dismissed, threatens to reveal the forgery unless Nora secures his job. Nora's widowed school friend Kristine Linde arrives seeking work, and the family friend Dr Rank, who is dying of a disease inherited from his father's dissipation, declares his love for Nora. Torvald fires Krogstad, who leaves a letter exposing her. Nora waits for what she calls 'the wonderful thing', the hope that Torvald will take the blame upon himself. Instead, on reading the letter, he rages that she has ruined him; when Krogstad, reconciled with Mrs Linde, returns the bond, Torvald instantly forgives her and resumes his patronising tenderness. Nora sees that their marriage has been a performance. In a celebrated final scene she tells him she has been his doll-wife as she was her father's doll-child, that her first duty is to herself, and she leaves, closing the door behind her. Modern collections pair it with other prose plays of the same period; editions differ, but they commonly include Ghosts (1881), in which Helene Alving, having kept up the public reputation of her debauched late husband, watches her son Osvald succumb to inherited disease and is left holding the morphine he has asked her to give him, and An Enemy of the People (1882), in which Dr Thomas Stockmann discovers that the spa baths on which his town's prosperity depends are contaminated, and is declared an enemy of the people when he insists on telling the truth. The plays share Ibsen's concern with secrets, inheritance and the cost of social respectability.

Top Lessons

A marriage can be a performance
Nora and Torvald play roles that suit social expectations rather than knowing each other. The play argues that equality and honesty, not protection and charm, are the basis of real partnership.
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Respectability can conceal harm
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Truth-telling has a cost
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Verified Quotes

Frequently cited

“Mother, give me the sun”

"Mother, give me the sun" — Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House and Other Plays, Ghosts, Act 3 (final scene), trans. William Archer.

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Medical Lens

Three physicians or medical plots in one volume. Dr Rank attributes his fatal spinal disease to his father's youthful excesses, which most critics read as congenital syphilis (often discussed as tabes dorsalis or spinal tuberculosis; Ibsen does not name it). Ghosts is a landmark of medicine in drama: Osvald's disease, presented as the inheritance of his father's debauchery, is generally read as congenital syphilis leading to general paresis, reflecting 19th-century hereditarian ideas that blurred infection and 'degeneration'. His request that his mother give him a lethal dose of morphine powders makes the play a touchstone in euthanasia debates. An Enemy of the People dramatises a physician whistle-blower on contaminated water, written at the height of the bacteriological revolution and sanitation reform.

Syphilis Venereal Heredity Degeneration Tuberculosis Consumption Physicians Doctors Opium Laudanum Death Dying Medical Ethics Public Health Sanitation Madness Psychosis Fever Infection

A Doll's House, Act 1
Nora reveals that Torvald's life was saved by a year in Italy prescribed by doctors, paid for with the secret loan.
A Doll's House, Act 2
Dr Rank speaks of the inherited disease destroying his spine and of the final examination he is making on himself.
A Doll's House, Act 3
Rank leaves his visiting card marked with a black cross to announce his approaching death.
Ghosts, Act 2
Osvald recounts the Paris doctor's verdict that he was born with a worm-eaten constitution, and reveals he carries morphine powders.
Ghosts, Act 3
Osvald's mental collapse at sunrise; his mother stands with the morphine he made her promise to give him.
An Enemy of the People, Acts 1–4
Dr Stockmann's laboratory analysis of the spa water, suppression of his report, and the public meeting that brands him an enemy of the people.

A Doll's House and Other Plays

Summary

Top Lessons

A marriage can be a performance

Respectability can conceal harm

Truth-telling has a cost

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens