Name Tags
This is the A Doll’s House characters guide, for Henrik Ibsen’s play, in R. Farquharson Sharp’s English translation from Project Gutenberg. It has spoilers, including how it ends, so come back after you have read it if you want to stay clean. There are only five main speaking parts, plus a nurse, a maid, a porter and three children, so it will not take long.
Let’s start with the name that matters most.
Five Names for One Woman
Nora Helmer is called a different thing by almost everyone she meets. Her husband Torvald calls her his lark, his squirrel, his songbird. By my search of the text, he says skylark six times, squirrel three times, and songbird or singing-bird five times. Her friend Christine tells her, twice, that she is a child. Krogstad calls her a fine, spoilt lady. Her old nurse calls her little Nora. And Doctor Rank calls her a riddle.
Her father had a name for her too, but we only hear it from Nora. In the last act she says he called her his doll-child. Keep that name in mind, because it matters.
Nora Helmer
Nora is the center of the play. By my count of the spoken words, she says about forty-five percent of all of them, nearly ten thousand words out of a little over twenty-two thousand, and she gets five hundred and sixty-six speeches. Nobody else comes close.
When we meet her, she is humming, bringing home Christmas presents, and sneaking macaroons that her husband has forbidden. She plays the happy spendthrift he expects. But she is also the one who saved his life. Some years earlier, when Torvald fell ill, she secretly borrowed two hundred and fifty pounds for a year in Italy, and signed her dying father’s name to get it. She works at copying at night and pinches her own dress money to pay it off, and she is proud of it. Christine tells her she knows little of life’s burdens, and Nora answers that she has something to be proud of. That is her secret, and it is the first thing in the play that belongs only to her.
Torvald Helmer
Torvald is a lawyer who is about to become the manager of a bank. He is not a monster, and the play works because he is not. He is warm, playful, quick to hand her a few coins, and sure that he is the best thing in her life. He also rules the house with small bans. No debt, no borrowing, no macaroons, because they might spoil her teeth. He chooses her costume for the ball, a Neapolitan fisher-girl, and he coaches her dance.
He is also a man who cares what people will say. He keeps Krogstad out of the bank partly because Krogstad is too familiar with him in public. When the first letter arrives, he calls his wife a hypocrite, a liar, a criminal. When the second letter arrives, he calls it all a bad dream, and he forgives her. In his own view, that is love. In hers, it is the moment she sees she has been living with a stranger.
Christine Linde
Christine is Nora’s school friend, a widow of three years, who arrives broke and looking for work. Where Nora has been protected, Christine has been working since she was young, for a bedridden mother and two younger brothers.
Years ago she broke with Krogstad to marry a man who looked richer. She says she had no choice, and the play lets her explain. In Act Three she offers Krogstad a partnership, two people on one piece of wreckage, and she is the one who insists that Torvald must learn the truth. When he suspects she only wants to save her friend, she says that a woman who has sold herself once for another’s sake does not do it twice. She is the sensible one. In my reading, and this is an opinion, she is the play’s other answer to what a woman can do: she picks a household to work for.
Nils Krogstad
Krogstad is a lawyer with a small post at the bank, a widower with sons, and the man who lent Nora the money. Years ago he did something, which Torvald says was forging a name, and it ruined his standing in town. He tells Nora he wants to win back respect for his sons. He begs her to save his job, and when she cannot, he turns the bond into a weapon, and says that within a year he will be the manager’s right hand.
But the play does not leave him there. Once Christine holds out her hand, he is ready to ask for his letter back, though she tells him to leave it. Later he sends the bond back to Nora, with a note about a happy change in his life. In my reading, he is the villain who gets a second chance.
Doctor Rank
Rank is the family’s dearest friend, in the house every day. He has a spinal disease that, he says, comes from his father’s excesses, and he tells Nora he has probably a month. He refuses to let Torvald into his sickroom, because Torvald has a refined disgust for anything ugly. In Act Two he tells Nora he loves her, and she responds by calling for the lamp.
He promises to send a visiting card with a black cross when the end begins. In Act Three he stops by after the ball, jokes that he will go to the next one invisible, and takes a cigar. Then the cards arrive, and he is gone from the play. In my reading, Rank is the one person who might have helped Nora, and she realizes she cannot ask him.
The Rest of the House
Nora has three children, Ivar, Bob and Emmy. They are mostly heard from the next room, and they are the stakes of every decision she makes. Anne, the nurse, raised Nora herself, and gave up her own child to do it. Helen is the maid, and the porter appears once, with the tree.
Before Krogstad’s second visit in Act One, Nora is under a table playing hide and seek with them. Within minutes she sends them away. By the end, she tells Torvald she will not even see them before she goes.
The Counts
Back to the counts. Torvald has two hundred and seventy-one speeches. Christine has one hundred and ninety-three, Krogstad one hundred and twenty-seven, and Rank about a hundred.
The surprise is Act Three. Until Nora tells Torvald to sit down, he outtalks her by about twenty-five hundred words to five hundred. After that, it flips, and she speaks about seventeen hundred to his six hundred and fifty. The doll finally speaks.
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