Nora’s decision to leave is the climax of the play, an unexpected turnout of events. Or was it? Was it her father’s ‘bad’ traits that made her leave? Or were they at all that bad? We can only speculate about Nora’s father’s habits, all we know from Helmer is that he was a “spendthrift”. But what about the other, so called, bad habits? The things we never found out about? Were they something like donating money to the poor? Helping the poor out in person? Things like that could have been considered by many as bad traits at the time, and certainly by such narrowed minded and hypocritical people as Helmer, who would have considered such things as bad ethics.
In the play, we can see many examples of how heredity is credited for passing on physical traits and problems from parent to child. Take for example Dr. Ranks illness, he takes it for granted that it was his fathers’ “amusements” which his “poor innocent spine must pay for” now.
This reinforces my point about Ibsen accrediting every bad trait in each character as inherited from their parents. Another example is when Ibsen uses Helmer to show that “nearly all young men that go bad have lying mothers” and that children are “infected with lies and deceit” in such a household.
Nowadays, to our modern society, this might seem as a very different, to say the least, way of looking at how a person’s character develops. It seems as though Ibsen is trying to imply that character something hereditary, something one inherits. In other words, you are what your parents are. And in a sense that is true, not only in a sense, but it is totally 100% correct. But there is one thing wrong with that; it only applies to children who grow up with their biological parents. What if a Swedish child was given away at birth and adopted by a Japanese family living in Japan? This child would certainly inherit some physical properties of his or her biological parents, for example blonde hair and would probably in a way resemble his or her biological parents. But this child was raised in Japan, went to a Japanese school, a Japanese university, had Japanese friends and lastly, never learned Swedish or even went to Sweden in his or her life! Does this child now think like a Swede? Probably not. This child is totally Japanese, regardless of what he or she looks like. It is the child’s environment that made him or her what he/she is!
As is the case with Nora, she has been brought up in a society where the boundaries are clearly stated, she has tried to comply with these rules and done so well, she has played her role as a ‘doll’ in two households, her fathers’ and her husbands’, only in the end to start questioning the rules that were set.
It is this transition of her character that is unclear to me. Why did she suddenly change? Throughout the play, she didn’t seem like an individual to whom thoughts like “I can't go on believing what the majority says” and “I have to think over these things myself and try to understand them”. But I have come to the conclusion that it was her environment that made her change. She finally realized the true environment that she lived in was ugly and brutal, in the face of Helmer. She saw that Helmer, who always said that he would “rescue” her if she ever was in need, only thought about rescuing himself. Thus she understood her environment and her character.
