Ibsen's "A Doll's House" in a Doll's Essay

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Ibsen's "A Doll's House"

In A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen, the play's protagonist Nora Helmer has her character defined, in part, by the use of a dramatic foil for her -- her former schoolmate Christina, always addressed as "Mrs. Linde" because she is a widow. Ibsen uses Mrs. Linde's secondary subplot as a way of commenting or drawing attention to the primary storyline about Nora and her husband Torvald. But in each of the three acts of Ibsen's drama, the dramatist uses Mrs. Linde effectively as a foil, by advancing each element in her lesser storyline as a means of providing a constrast to (or perhaps at times a reflection of) Nora, the protagonist and the "little doll" of the play's title (Ibsen 84). I hope to demonstrate this by showing how Mrs. Linde is used as a foil in each of the three acts, and concluding by noting how the changing arc of her character over the course of the play is meant to serve the greater (and more shocking) changing arc of Nora's character.

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The first act of A Doll's House introduces us to Mrs. Linde immediately after the introduction of the protagonists: she makes a social call upon Nora, although Nora does not recognize her. It is clear that the two women have not seen each other for some time, although they have remained apprised of each other's existence: Nora confesses a short way into their dialogue that she knew from a newspaper obituary that Mrs. Linde had been widowed three years ago, and had contemplated writing to her but ultimately did not. The reason Mrs. Linde provides such a stark foil upon her immediate entrance in Act One, though, is because she enters hard on….....

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