After reading “A Doll’s House” by Henrik Ibsen, made me doubt about, what is “love” in this play? We can see different relationships between characters that we can call the feeling that they are conveying “love”, like the love that Dr. Rank felt for Nora, the love between Krogstad and Kristine, the relationship between Anne-Marie and Nora and the love between Torvald and Nora. Love is a very complicated feeling that everyone can interpret different.
First of all, how do we know that the characters are conveying love? I notice that the diction and the context that the author is giving to each character are the elements that are giving us an answer. Like Dr. Rank with Nora, before Dr. Rank confessing his love to Nora, we can see that the author is giving us an image of Dr. Rank as not only an old friend of Torvald but also a person that really pays attention to Nora. The way that he refers to Nora we can see that he is someone that truly listens to her, enjoys her presence, wants to know what she really thinks and he appreciates her. In comparison to the relationship of Nora with Krogstad, Krogstad only sees Nora as a housewife and the way he refers to her, we can see that he just sees Nora as an opportunity for him to get his job back. In the other hand, we can see that Krogstad and Kristine have an honest relationship that no matter that they haven’t seen each other for a long time, they both share their feelings and care about each other. With Anne-Marie and Nora is more about how Anne-Marie talks to Nora and their relationship more like a mother daughter relationship, “Little Nora, poor thing, didn’t have any other mother but me”- Anne-Marie. We can see that Anne-Marie really cares about Nora as if she was her daughter.
We can say that “love” is a feeling of appreciation, interest and caring for someone no matter their differences bringing an honest relationship. In the case of the “love” between Torvald and Nora, at the beginning of the play, the author presents their relationship as a happy couple that has everything and nothing to worry about. However, we start to see details of how they interact with each other, how Torvald refers to Nora, “my little squirrel”, “my skylark”, in a way that the author is giving a context as if he owns her. And Nora trying to do everything for Torvald so that he is happy without Torvald caring about her. Then we can see that Nora is scared to share thoughts with Torvald. Before Nora confessing that she doesn’t love Torvald anymore, we can compare the other relationships with Nora and Torvald and identify that what they have is not love, they don’t share a connection. Nora grew up with the idea of loving but she never felt love. So she thought that what she felt with Torvald was the same feeling of “love” as her relationship with her dad and then realizing it is not love. And Torvald was in love of the idea that she did what he said, to control her and he was being selfish. We can now see that since the beginning, their relationship doesn’t define how the author represents love.