Role of women in society

• Laura Kieler, whose actions inspired the debt story, took a loan and went to Italy to help her husband recover from tuberculosis, later forging a check to repay it.
• Laura Kieler's husband demanded divorce and barred her from their children, putting her in an asylum for a month, which is how Nora's story realistically would have ended
• The 1870s had strict Victorian social codes and laws that restricted the rights of all women.
• The Napoleonic code banned women from engaging in financial transactions.
• In 1870, the Married Women's Property Act allowed women to keep earnings or property acquired after marriage.
• If a woman wanted to divorce her husband, she had to prove adultery and desertion for two years.
• Muriel Bradbrook describes how "Nora's marriage becomes 8 years' prostitution"
• A Doll's House shows the idea of private and public spheres, showing how little men wanted women in work
• The comedic side of the poem, especially the sexual innuendos come from Roman de la Rose, one of the first texts that disclose the sexuality of women
• Proserpina is the roman version of persephone, abducted by Pluto and taken to the underworld against her will, although she was made most famous by Bernini's marble sculpture of the rape of Proserpina, featuring Pluto's rape of her and her subsequent descent into the underworld
• Following May's despcription is 'hir middle smal', Tolliver describes her as 'made of masculine fantasy'
• the Merchant's view on women is shown through 'she is a shrewe at al', a mysogynistic name for a woman, which a modern audience would see through the lens of Shakespeare's taming of the shrew
• MW Brun said in 1879 that "any real wife in Nora's situation would throw herself into her husband's arms" which shows how Ibsen's realistic take on marriage satirises the social cues of the time.
• She is charmingly lacking in sense of self and irresistibly bewitching piece of femineity – Hermann j weigand
• Joan Templeten says "Nora is not just a woman arguing for female liberation she is much more she embodies the comedy as well as the tragedy of modern life"
• The Merchant's Tale portrays women as treacherous or negative, saying 'the tresons whiche that wommen doon to man'
• Public and private spheres are shown through Torvald's word 'first and foremost you are a wife and a mother'. Wife comes before mother, implying her duty is to him
• Karen Dave draws the comparison with Adam and Eve, as Nora and May, just like Eve, is the one who gives into temptation.