Nora Helmer's decision to leave her family in Henrik Helmers's 1879 play A Doll House reflects the dilemma faced by many nineteenth-century women who were forced either to conform to highly restrictive gender roles or to abandon these roles in order to realize their value as individuals. Although Ibsen brings his audience to the moment that Nora chooses to disregard her social role and opt for her "freedom," his play does not clearly reveal the true fate of women who followed Nora's path in the nineteenth century. Historically, most women who chose not to acquiesce to the socially prescribed roles of marriage were treated as unnatural creatures and shunned by the respectable public. An actual letter written in 1844 by Marcus to his estranged wife, Ulrike, reveals the effects of this severe social condemnation ( His letter implies desperate fate that inevitably befalls women who reject their prescribed duties as wives and mothers. Through Marcus's latter to his wife, the painful ramifications of Nora's decision to accommodate her own personal desires instead of those of her family become even more poignant, courageous, and tragic.

Durbach, Errol. A Doll's House: Ibsen's Myth of Transformation. Boston: Twayne, 1991.

Like Ulrich, Nora decides to leave the security and comfort of her restrictive domestic life to try and become a human being. Ibsen, neglects, however, to show his audience the actual result of that decision. At the conclusion of A Doll House, Nora slams the door on her past life, hopping to begin a new life that will somehow be more satisfying. Yet the modern audience has no genuine sense of what she may have found beyond that door, and perhaps neither did Nora. Through Ulrike's story, however, the reader understands the historical truth that the world awaiting Nora was hostile and unsympathetic. Marcus warns his wife that "your husband, your children, and the entire city threatens indifference's or even contempt" (1628) if she refuses to return immediately to her socially acceptable domestic role. This pressure to conform, combined with the bleak prospects of a single women, results in Ulrike's ultimate choice to keep up the "appearance" rather that further subject herself to a contemptuous world that neither wants nor understands her. Although we cannot know Nora's fate after she leaves Torvald, we may assume that her future would be as bleak as Ulrike's and that the pressure to return to her domestic life would be equally strong.

nineteenth century, women had few alternatives to marriage, and the women who 'failed" at marriage were thought to have failed in their most important duty. In his letter, Marcus articulates society's deep disgust for women who reject what it believes is the sacred female role of homemaker. His letter, while on one level an angry condemnation of his wife's "stubbornness" and a cruelly condescending list of conditions to be met on her return, is on another level a plea for her to accept aga

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Approximate Word count = 1235
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)