individualism

• Nora, a dutiful mother and wife, spends most of the play putting others before herself. 
• Even when she plans to kill herself near the end of the play, it is not to hide her shame but rather because she thinks that if she is alive then Torvald will ruin himself in trying to protect her. 
•  Mrs. Linde admits that, without a husband or any family members to care for, she feels that her life is pointless
• both women find a sense of meaning in their lives through serving others and performing the caring, obedient role that society requires of them.
•  During the play, however, Nora learns that prioritizing her duty as a wife and mother cannot lead to real happiness. She realizes, when it becomes clear that Torvald would never have sacrificed his reputation to protect her, that while she thought she was sacrificing herself to protect her love, in fact no such love existed, and indeed the structure of society makes the love she had imagined to be real an impossibility
• She therefore decides to leave him in order to develop a sense of her own identity. The play ends with Nora choosing to put herself as an individual before society’s expectations of her.
• Throughout most of the play it seems that Krogstad cares more about his reputation than anything else.
• Punished by society for his act of forgery, he is desperate to reclaim respectability in the eyes of others
• However, his conversation with Mrs. Linde in the third act shows him that he will only achieve happiness through truly reforming himself and regaining the personal integrity that he lost rather than the outward respectability. In a similar way to Nora, Krogstad learns that society’s view of him is meaningless if he doesn’t respect himself as an individual.