Krantz
Reading Guide
Drama Questions

A Doll House

1. List the names that Torvald uses to address Nora. What do they suggest about the relationship the two have?
2. At the start of the play, what seems to be Nora’s attitude toward money? Toward debt? What is Torvald’s attitude toward these?
3. What does Torvald think Nora does with the money he gives her? Where do we see her using money wisely? Where does she squander it at the beginning?
4. How does Nora hint at the start of the play that she has a significant secret?
5. How do we see Torvald’s controlling character? How can he be seen as morally good? As morally rigid?
6. Where do we see Nora’s lying? What does the play suggest might have happened if Torvald had known how sick he was and of the necessity for going south?
7. How do we know Nora is a very hard worker?
8. What does Kristine Lund mean when she says “Not even a sense of loss to feed on”?
9. Why did Mrs. Lund have to marry to save her family, especially her younger brothers?
10. What makes Nora’s pleading for Kristine to Helmer different from Desdemona’s pleading for Cassio?
11. In what ways might we say Kristine is a survivor? How is Nora like her? How unlike her?
12. Torvald’s attitude towards his wife is mirrored by how their 19th century culture viewed women. What does the inability of women to borrow money without their husbands’ consent say about the legal status of women? (Men could, of course, borrow money without anyone’s consent.)
13. What is Nora’s own sense of her relationship with Torvald? Upon what does she think it depends?
14. What specific ways did Nora get the money to pay down her debt?
15. What is suggested by Nora’s initial meeting with Krogstad (p. 222)?
16. In what ways does Nora not face reality? Where does she rationalize? Where is her reasoning faulty?
17. How does Torvald feel about his children? When Nora talks with Anne-Marie, we see the class difference in how parents are able to relate to their children. Explain the difference(s).
18. Krogstad implies that Nora has acted as he did when he lost his reputation. Is this your perception also? Explain.
19. How is Nora’s sense of morality like that of Mrs. Hale?
20. Where does Nora begin to see herself as being like Krogstad? How does that affect her?

Consider the following large ideas as you read the play.

1. Nineteenth century social scientists see women as the earliest form of what Karl Marx called "exchange value"; that is, women were the earliest "objects" that men exchanged for barter purposes. According to feminist Gayle Rubin such a view of women deprives the woman of the opportunity to make exchanges in the market themselves, and it also implies that the inability to make money for the husband makes a woman useless. Nora Helmer makes exchanges in the market place that ultimately result in a crisis in her relationship to her husband and a move into society. Consider interior qualities of Nora and how they might allow her to succeed on her own in society.

2. Explore the implications of this interpretation: "A Doll House represents a woman imbued with the idea of becoming a person, but it proposes nothing categorical about women becoming people; in fact, its real theme has nothing to do with the sexes. It is the irrepressible conflict of two different personalities which have founded themselves on two radically different estimates of reality" (Robert M. Adams, Ibsen on the Contrary," in Modern Drama, ed. Anthony Caputi [New York: Norton, 1966], 345).

3. Consider the following: Nora is a hero. What do you consider the qualities of a hero and how does Nora fits the definition?