The Door
At the end of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Nora leaves her husband and, she says, her children, and the last sound in the play is a door shutting. So why does she go? This is the full ending explained, so it spoils everything. I used the Project Gutenberg text, ebook number twenty-five forty-two, in R. Farquharson Sharp’s translation, and everything here comes from Nora’s own words in the last scene.
I count three reasons. Let’s go through them, and then I will tell you what the play does not say.
Before She Goes
First, where we are. It is the night of the ball. Torvald has read Krogstad’s letter, which tells him that Nora forged her dead father’s name to borrow money. He has called her a hypocrite, a liar and a criminal, and said she cannot be trusted with the children.
Then a second letter arrives, and Krogstad has sent back the bond. Torvald cries that he is saved, burns the paper in the stove, and forgives her, over and over. He tells her she is his scared little singing-bird, that he has broad wings to shelter her, and that he will be both will and conscience to her.
Nora thanks him for his forgiveness and goes into the next room. When she returns, she has taken off her fancy dress and is in everyday clothes. She says she will not sleep tonight. Then she tells him to sit down, because this is, in her words, a settling of accounts.
What Christine Did
One person made this scene possible, and it was not Nora. Christine Linde could have let Krogstad take his letter back. In Act Three he is ready to, and she tells him to leave it. She says there are things in this house that she has seen in twenty-four hours, and that Torvald must know the whole truth, so that the two of them can have a complete understanding. Without that, there would be no settling of accounts. Her choice is what forces the conversation.
Reason One: He Did Not Take the Blame
Her first reason is the one the whole play has been building. For three days, Nora has been waiting for a wonderful thing. The phrase wonderful thing appears twelve times in the play, once in Act One, four times in Act Two and seven times in Act Three.
Here is what she hoped. When Krogstad’s letter was in the box, she was sure that Torvald would not give in to him. She was sure he would tell Krogstad to publish it to the world, and then come forward himself and say he was the guilty one. She says she would never have accepted such a sacrifice. What mattered was that he would offer it.
He did not. Torvald’s first thoughts were about himself: his happiness, his future, and the power Krogstad now had over him. And when the danger passed, as far as he was concerned it was as if nothing had happened. Nora puts it exactly: his fear was not for what threatened her, but for what might happen to him.
That is when she says it dawned on her that for eight years she had lived with a stranger.
Reason Two: The Doll
Her second reason is the one that gives the play its title.
Nora says that when she lived at home, her father told her his opinions, and she took them for her own. He called her his doll-child, and played with her as she played with her dolls. Then she was handed from her father’s hands into Torvald’s. He arranged things to his taste, and she took on his taste, or pretended, she says she is not sure which. She has existed to perform tricks for him. Their home has been a playroom, she has been his doll-wife, and the children have been her dolls.
Here is a count. The word doll, with its forms, appears eleven times in the play, and all eleven are Nora’s. In Act One there are four, all about toys and the little ones, a doll for Emmy, a baby doll. In Act Three there are seven, and they are about Nora and her marriage: doll-child, doll-wife, your doll.
Torvald’s answer is that there is some truth in this. He promises that playtime will be over and lesson time will begin. She says he is not the man to educate her.
Reason Three: Duties to Herself
Her third reason is the one Torvald finds shocking. He tells her that before all else she is a wife and a mother. Nora replies that she does not believe that anymore. She believes that before all else she is a reasonable human being, just as he is, or at least that she must try to become one.
She has other duties just as sacred, she says, duties to herself. She cannot stay and be a good mother when she has never learned to think for herself, and she cannot learn that from him.
She also makes two tests she plans to run. The first is religion. She admits she knows only what the clergyman said when she was confirmed, and she means to find out whether it is true for her. The second is the law. She has learned that the law is not what she thought, and she cannot believe a law is right if it says a woman cannot spare her dying father or save her husband’s life. She wants to see who is right, the world or she.
Torvald’s final argument is that she is ill, or out of her mind. She says she has never felt so clear.
How Torvald Sees It
It helps to hear how Torvald thinks he is behaving. When he forgives her, he says there is something sweet and satisfying to a man in knowing he has forgiven his wife freely and with all his heart. He says it makes her doubly his own, and that she has in a way become both wife and child to him. To him, that is a gift. To Nora, it is the same trade as before: her father’s hands, then his.
He is not shown as a cruel man. He is shown as a man who has never been asked to see her as anyone but his little lark. That is why, in my reading, the play hurts.
What She Gives Back
Watch what she hands over. She gives back the ring, and asks for hers. She leaves the keys. She says the maids know the house better than she does, and that Christine will come tomorrow to pack the things she brought from her old home.
She will take nothing from him, now or later. He offers to send help, and she says she cannot accept anything from a stranger. He asks if they might live as brother and sister, and she says that would not last long. He asks to write, and she says no.
The hardest part is the children. She says she will not see them, because she knows they are in better hands than hers, and as she is now she would be of no use to them. In my reading, and this is an opinion, that is the hardest line in the play to hear, and the play never tells you whether she is right.
The Last Wonderful Thing
Torvald asks, as she is about to go, whether he can ever be more than a stranger to her. She tells him the most wonderful thing of all would have to happen: both of them would have to change so much that their life together would be a real wedlock. She says she no longer believes in wonderful things.
He answers that he will believe in it. She goes out through the hall. He sinks onto a chair, buries his face in his hands, and says her name. Then he asks himself what the most wonderful thing of all could be, and a stage direction notes that a hope flashes across his mind. A door shuts below.
That is the end. The play does not say where she goes, beyond that she thinks of her old home and of Christine. She says herself that she has no idea what will become of her. It does not tell you whether he changes, or whether she ever comes back.
The Other Ending
There is one more thing, and I want to label it clearly. As of November twenty twenty-six, it is reported that for a German production, Ibsen wrote a different ending in which Nora stays, and that he disliked it. Sources I found differ on the details, so treat it as reported, not confirmed. It is not in the Gutenberg text, where the ending is the door.
The Counts
Two counts to finish. First, from the moment Nora tells Torvald to sit down, she speaks about sixteen hundred and seventy words and he speaks about six hundred and fifty. Before that, in the same act, he speaks about twenty-four hundred and fifty to her five hundred and thirty. In Act One and Act Two she already does most of the talking, but this is the first time Torvald has to listen.
Second, Torvald’s pet names, skylark, squirrel and songbird, come out of his mouth fourteen times over the three acts. After Nora tells him to sit down, he does not use one of them.
Here is my reading, and it is an opinion. Nora does not leave because she stopped loving her children, or even because she was wronged by a forged bond. She leaves because for the first time, a conversation was possible, and what it showed her was that nobody in the house had ever asked her what she thought.
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