The Importance of Trust in A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House is an exploration of gender relations in a contemporary,
respectable marriage. A devoted mother of three, Nora Helmer is ecstatic about her husband’s
new role as a bank manager because it means they will be financially stable after a long
struggle with tough .financial circumstances. This scene showcasing a happy marriage and
home is, however, founded on a potentially destructive secret. Torvald had been critically ill
seven years back, and Nora saved his life by secretly forging her father’s signature to secure
the loan she needed for the treatment from Krogstad. Torvald had been too proud to borrow
the money, and now works with Krogstad at the bank. However, Krogstad’s position at the
bank is threatened when Torvald is willing to dismiss him and offer the position to Nora’s old
friend. As Krogstad is aware that Torvald does not know about her forgery, he threatens to
expose her unless she can convince Torvald to keep his position at the bank. However, Nora
fails to convince her husband, and Krogstad retaliates by sending her husband an
incriminating letter about her deeds. Torvald thinks Nora’s actions are full of betrayal and
engages in high moral rectitude that portrays his hypocritical and self-serving nature: “Now
you’ve wrecked all my happiness–ruined my whole future.”
Nora is extremely disillusioned by Torvald’s response because she loses trust in the
meaning of their marriage. It is evident that he cares more about his reputation and “honor”
and in certainly incapable of similar self-sacrifice. After the outrage and disrespectful
remarks about his wife’s incapacity to be a dutiful wife and fit mother, Torvald hopes to
restore his prior “beautiful” relation with his wife when Krogstad confirms that he would not

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be taking any action. His response letter to Krogstad, devoid of heroic self-sacrifice and pride
in his wife’s call to save his life, becomes the epiphany to Nora’s reality as a daughter, wife,
and mother: “I’ve been your doll-wife here, just as at home I was Papa’s doll-child” (Ibsen,
Act III). These words reflect the expectations of a submissive, dutiful and unthinking wife
meant to serve the egotistic nature of machoistic, self-entitled men.
From Torvald’s actions and way of thinking, it is clear that the choice to trust Nora is
based on the perception of her guilt averse nature, which serves a belief-dependent model of
trust. In this model, not only choices play a role in defining gains, but also an individual’s
view of the choices. Torvald is invested in the belief that Nora would not likely betray his
trust since he had agreed to marry her despite her father’s moral unfitness and his seemingly
‘”heroic” action of preventing his dismissal. As such, when Nora decides to leave, Torvald is
shocked as he did not think his wife was capable of forgoing her role as wife and mother. He
even refers to her as a “blind, foolish woman” and worries what people will think: “To desert
your home, your husband and your children! And you don’t consider what people will say!”
(Act II). Evidently, Torvald does not acknowledge Nora’s duty to herself.
One of the realizations from Henrik Ibsen’s play is that trust is useless when it is only
one-sided. Nora had been living in an illusion of trust to authority that she does not question,
but she is jolted into reality when she discovers that her heroic self-sacrifice did not mean
anything when challenges by her husband’s honor and reputation. It becomes clear that she
has been living in a doll-house all her life, trusting and following blindly what her father and
husband expected of her. However, Torvald is the typical selfish and machoistic man of the
19 th century who believes that women are “flowers” and are mothers and wives before
anything else. Nora’s trust in her husband is broken as his is broken when he discovers that
she betrayed him to save his life. For Torvald, trust is a belief-dependent game that serves the
ideology that his authority in the home should be unchallenged.

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Work Cited

Ibsen, Henrik. “A Doll’s House.” (1879).