My Little Nora

In Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” Nora is treated as a child for her beliefs even though in many ways she is merely idealistic and sometimes ahead of her times. Hardly an exchange passes without someone referring to Nora as “my little,” even a “child”, and sometimes cutesy nicknames like skylark and squirrel.

This infantilizing stems from Nora’s idealistic beliefs of how the world *should* operate. She believes that ultimately the law cannot prosecute her for forgery because “it must say somewhere that… a wife [is] entitled to save her husband’s life.” When she decides to take the safe course of action and ask Helmer to reinstate Krogstad, he informs her that “Little song-birds must keep their pretty little beaks out of mischief; no chirruping out of tune.” One can almost hear the patronizing tone that the actor playing Helmer adopts to speak to his trophy wife, perhaps as he stoops down and squeezes her cheak. Upon concluding that Krogstad cannot make due on his threats because she has “three small children,” Ibsen immediately follows the passage by having the nursemaid, a servant of the house, call her mistress “my poor little Nora.”

As the play unravels, Nora reveals a truly modern attitude and is once more debased for it. Her intentions to pursue her “sacred duty” to herself over her duty to her husband and children prompt Helmer to accuse or of thinking and talking “like a stupid child.” However her decision to pursue her own life goals instead of those that society has imposed upon her demonstrate a modern feminism thinking that was decried at the time, leading to Ibsen’s “barbaric outrage” of rewriting the ending so that Nora does not leave.