A Doll's House
Glossary
A
- Anne, the Nurse
- The Helmer children's nurse, who was Nora's own nurse in childhood and gave up her own child to raise Nora after being left an unmarried mother. Nora's brief conversation with Anne, in which she reflects on leaving her own children to someone else's care, quietly foreshadows the choice Nora herself makes by the play's end.
- Related: Nora Helmer
C
- Christine Linde
- An old friend of Nora's, recently widowed and in need of work, who arrives at the Helmers' seeking Torvald's help finding a position. Her practical, hard-won independence contrasts with Nora's sheltered situation, and her earlier history with Krogstad becomes central to the play's resolution.
- Related: Nils Krogstad, Nora Helmer
D
- Dr. Rank
- A close family friend and physician who visits the Helmers almost daily and privately confesses his love for Nora. In this act he reveals he is dying of an inherited illness, using coded language about ordering visiting cards to signal to Nora and later Torvald that his death is imminent.
- Related: Dr. Rank's Illness
- Dr. Rank's Illness
- Consumption of the spine, a hereditary disease Dr. Rank inherited from his father's dissolute life, which he reveals is now entering its final stage. His frank, almost darkly humorous acceptance of his own death contrasts with the other characters' inability to speak plainly about their own crises.
- Related: Dr. Rank
F
- Forgery
- The crime Nora committed by signing her dying father's name on Krogstad's bond after the date he had actually died, since she could not borrow the money in her own name in time to save Torvald's life. Krogstad, who committed a similar forgery himself years before, recognizes and exploits the same crime in Nora, and Torvald condemns it in the abstract before learning it was Nora who committed it.
- Related: Krogstad's Bond, Nils Krogstad
H
- Helmer's Bank Promotion
- Torvald's new position as manager of the bank, effective the following New Year, which is the source of the family's improved finances and also the reason Krogstad's job — and therefore his leverage over Nora — becomes newly precarious. The promotion sets the plot's pressures in motion by giving Torvald the power to fire Krogstad and giving Krogstad reason to fight back.
- Related: Nils Krogstad, Krogstad's Bond
K
- Krogstad's Bond
- The promissory note Nora secretly signed years earlier to borrow money for a trip that saved Torvald's life, without his knowledge — a transaction women of the time typically needed a male co-signer to make legally. The bond, and Nora's forged signature on it, is the hidden debt around which the entire plot turns.
- Related: Forgery, Nils Krogstad, The Letter Box
M
- Macaroons
- The sweets Nora sneaks and hides from Torvald, who has forbidden them, making them a small running symbol of her habit of concealment even in trivial matters. The detail introduces, in miniature, the larger pattern of secrecy that drives the play's central plot.
- Related: Nora Helmer
N
- Nils Krogstad
- A lower clerk at Torvald's bank with a damaged reputation from a past forgery, who holds a secret financial claim over Nora and threatens to expose her unless she helps him keep his job. He functions as the play's outside threat, though the play complicates him considerably as his backstory with Mrs. Linde emerges.
- Related: Krogstad's Bond, Forgery, Christine Linde
- Nora Helmer
- The play's protagonist, introduced as Torvald's seemingly frivolous, treat-loving wife who hides macaroons from him and calls herself content with her pampered domestic life. As the play unfolds she reveals a hidden history of resourcefulness and secret debt, setting up the transformation the rest of the play tracks.
- Related: Torvald Helmer, Macaroons, The Doll's House Metaphor
S
- Sacred Duties
- The phrase Torvald uses for a wife's obligations to husband and children when Nora first raises the possibility that a person might have duties to herself as well. The exchange crystallizes the play's central conflict between Nora's inherited sense of obligation and her emerging need for independent selfhood.
- Related: Torvald Helmer, The Doll's House Metaphor
- Squirrel and Skylark
- Torvald's habitual pet names for Nora, used affectionately throughout the play to describe her as a small, decorative, slightly featherheaded creature rather than an adult partner. The diminishing nicknames, charming at first, come to read as evidence of exactly the treatment Nora names explicitly in her final confrontation with him.
- Related: Torvald Helmer, The Doll's House Metaphor
T
- The Doll's House Metaphor
- Nora's own description of her marriage in the play's final confrontation: 'our home has been nothing but a playroom... I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I was papa's doll-child.' The image gives the play its title and names directly what the entire plot has been building toward — Nora recognizing herself as an ornament handled and played with rather than a person treated as an equal.
- Related: Sacred Duties, Nora Helmer, Torvald Helmer
- The Letter Box
- The locked mailbox where Krogstad's letter revealing Nora's forgery sits for an agonizing stretch of the play, visible to the audience as a ticking clock while Nora tries to delay Torvald from opening it. It becomes a literal object of dread on stage, and Nora's attempts to keep Torvald away from it drive much of the play's tension.
- Related: Krogstad's Bond, Forgery, The Tarantella
- The Tarantella
- The vigorous Italian folk dance Nora rehearses frantically for the Helmers' costume party, ostensibly to please Torvald but really as a desperate distraction to keep him from checking the letter-box before she can resolve the crisis with Krogstad. Her increasingly wild, almost frenzied dancing during rehearsal visibly signals the desperation she cannot otherwise express.
- Related: The Letter Box, Nora Helmer
- The Wonderful Thing
- Nora's private phrase for the miracle she expects once Torvald learns what she did for him — that he will step forward to take the blame and shield her, proving his love is as absolute as hers. The gap between this fantasy and Torvald's actual, self-interested reaction when the truth comes out becomes the turning point that changes how Nora sees her marriage.
- Related: The Doll's House Metaphor, Torvald Helmer
- Torvald Helmer
- Nora's husband, newly promoted to bank manager, who calls her pet names like 'squirrel' and 'skylark' and keeps tight control over household spending. His affectionate but condescending treatment of Nora as a plaything rather than an equal partner is established from the play's opening scene.
- Related: Nora Helmer, Sacred Duties