Critics

• The need for every individual to find out what sort of person he or she is and to strive to become that person

  Meyer
• Everywoman's struggle with Everyman

  Templeton (struggle)
• Bourgeois antigone


  Templeton (Borg)
• A poet of the human soul

  Templeton (poet)
• Nora is much more than just a woman arguing for female liberation, she embodies the comedy as well as the tragedy of modern life

  Haugen
• The play exploded like a bomb onto contemporary life


  Koht (bomb)
• Little by little the topical controversy died away; what remained was the work of art and its demand for truth in every human relation

  Koht (truth)
• Like angels, Nora has no sex, Ibsen meant her to be everyman

  RM Adams
• In closing the door on her husband and children, Nora opened the way to the turn-of-the-century women's movement

  Finney
• The watchword of a revolution

  Young
• The new woman sprang fully formed from Ibsen's brain

  Beerbohm
• N&T's relationship is an unresolved battle for power

  Garland (battle)
• Conversations are the battlefields where characters fight for authority and strive for understanding

  Garland (conversations)
• Though syphillis is depicted as a terrible malady, restrictive social norms are for Ibsen the worse disease


  Soloski
• The tarantella ironically underscores an independent woman's voluntary return to a patriarchal institution

  Dean
• Shook the foundations of fin-de-siècle domesticity

  Westgate
• For a woman to extricate herself from this chaos is a heroic feat


  Herzen
• Nora realises she has always been controlled by other people's desires not her own

  Lee (desires)
• The only way she was able to borrow money was by taking on someone else's role- not in her own right

  Lee (role)
• Nobody in the play produces anything of value

  F Gray (value)
• Nora and Mrs Linde have been reified by society and are beginning to articulate the fact

  F Gray (reified)
• Shock effects of capitalism produced experiences of belief and disbelief which mirrored the theatrical border between reality and illusion

  J Moody (shock)
• Victorian drama plays on the fears of a society newly alert to the anxieties and embarrassments of a capitalist system

  J Moody (capitalist)
• Neither the Norwegian law nor the law of any civilised country would afford any ground for a suit against Nora, either in civil or criminal court


  Willey
• Invisible puppet like strings / addressing audience

  Hans Neuenfels
• Doorless and windowless prison-like set

  Ingmar Bergman
• Nora emerged from large white dolls house, unhooked wall of set as if it was a dolls house

  Polly Teale
• Nurse says 'duty' haunting Nora

  Hans Neuenfels (nurse)
• Restless, illogical, fractious and babyish little wife

  Clement Scott
• We are 'guilty creatures sitting at a play'


  Shaw
• An invitation to reflect on the nature of theatre

  Toril Moi
• Indifferent to the woman question except as a metaphor for individual freedom

  Brustein
• Unstagey, like a personal meeting

  Elizabeth Robins
• All the men in the play have a strong association with death


  Polly Teale (death)
• Beneath the male facade of power lives a fragility, a sense of chaos or collapse


  Polly Teale (facade)
• Home as both a sanctuary and a prison

  Polly Teale (prison)
• His men are often weak minded as well as emotionally, sexually and professionally unsuccessful

  Richard Eyre
• Nora is a sexual creature who radiates and uses sexual power over Torvald and Dr Rank


  Johnston (sexual)
• Torvald is a man relatively easy to manipulate, so long as his sense of society's rules are not violated


  Johnstone (manipulate)
• Torvald's moral code is entirely derived from society's expectation


  Johnstone (moral code)