Jake Rich
English 112
Gregory
March 29, 2013
“Isn’t a wife allowed to save her husband’s life?” Obviously if you love your sick husband you should be able to save his life at any cost with no questions asked right? Well that isn’t in fact the case in “A Doll’s House” written by Henrik Ibsen, in Denmark, in the late 1800’s. Nora saved her husband’s life by taking a loan out and taking her husband Torvald to a better environment so he could recover. To do this though she had to forge her dying father’s signature in order to take out the loan. Krogstad a banker finds this out and starts to blackmail her in order to keep his job that he knows he will lose very shortly. He tells Nora that she must convince Torvald to let him keep his job or else he will tell Torvald what she did, and how she broke the law because he is a very clean cut guy and will be devistated by this news, even though it saved his life. This is when Nora says “Isn’t a wife allowed to save her husband’s life? I don’t know much about the law, but I’m sure there must be provisions for things like that.” (Ibsen 1616). Throughout the play you can see that Ibsen wants the audience to sympathize with Nora and he believes and Nora believes that since she did the right ethical thing by saving her husband’s life, she should be forgiving and pardoned from the crime that she committed. Nora throughout the whole play is basically trying to stall Torvald from opening his mailbox because he will read the letter Krogstad wrote explaining what Nora did. When Torvald finally opens the letter he is very mad with Nora and disappointed. You would think that he would be maybe upset that she didn’t ask him for the signature to take out the loan that would ultimately save his life, but no he is angry. This is the point where Ibsen really gets the audience to sympathize with Nora and the predicament that she is in. Nora knows that what she did was breaking the law but she did it anyway because she loves her husband. How could u punish and send someone off to jail for saving a man’s life? She did the ethical thing by saving his life but she knew the consequences and knew she couldn’t out run what she did for very long. Nora though, never missed a payment on her loan. Ibsen at first makes her out to be this crazy spender and spoiled woman when infect she spends only half of what Torvald gives her and puts the rest in what she owes from the loan she took out. The fact that she could go to jail is plain