More on A Doll's House

THEME




The theme is the central idea or insight into life that a writer hopes to convey in a work of literature. In some literary works, the theme is directly stated. More often, however, the theme is implied, or revealed indirectly, through the portrayal of characters and events or through the use of literary devices such as irony, symbols, or allusions.

Longer literary works, such as plays and novels, are likely to have many possible themes ; and disagreements frequently arise among readers and critics as to the theme or themes of a particular work. These disagreements result because writers often deliberately make their works ambiguous, or indefinite or uncertain, and because every reader’s interpretation of a work is colored by his or her viewpoint or perspective. For example, someone who is especially concerned with women’s rights might interpret A Doll’s House as an expression of the need for women to escape from the confinement and restriction they faced in nineteenth-century European society.

This is only one of many possible themes of A Doll’s House. Another theme is that in order for a marriage to be successful, the people involved should know and trust each other, should view each other as equals, and should have separate identities. Related to this idea is the theme that true love has little to do with such superficial qualities as physical beauty and financial and social status. Still another theme is that people are often faced with, as Ibsen put it, an internal conflict between « natural feeling on the one hand and belief in authority on the other. » A related theme is the notion that society and authority place restrictions on people that inhibit the development of individuality. This idea is connected to another possible theme that Ibsen himself suggested when he described his plays as the depiction of « the struggle which all serious-minded human beings have to wage with themselves to bring their lives into harmony with their convictions. » Finally, the play also suggests that it is wrong to try to apply a rigid moral code to all situations and that people who claim to adhere to such a moral code sometimes expose themselves as hypocrites.