I am writing my Mid-Term Essay over the theme truth/honesty. I think “A Doll’s House” has quite a bit to do with the topic truth/honesty. In the story the characters are hiding from each other in a sense and seeking the truth about everyone else. Nora plays a game with her husband and her kids and is hiding her true personality from him. But he is also doing the same exact same thing as his wife Nora is.
The reason for this is because he doesn’t think she could understand the secrets of their relationship and Nora is just trying to figure out what her life means or finding the “truth” of her life. This game Nora is playing is kind of like hide and seek when I think about it. She is hiding from all of the adults in her life. She is trying to keep everyone from knowing something about her, especially her husband. She hides what she did from Torvald when she borrowed money for his poor health because he says it would be “painful and humiliating” for him. Torvald is always shown to be in control of everything and so she didn’t want to make him mad so she didn’t tell him about her actions. Everything she does goes against truth/honesty in this play.
An old saying “the truth shall set you free” really relates to this play towards the end particularly. Nora becomes so confused because she is lying so much and not being honest about anything. From the smallest deception to forgery she gets tangled in a web of lies she created for herself. Christine showed up to help Nora solve all of her lying problems to Torvald and the deeper lies of Nora’s self-deception.
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I think another one of our short stories that relates with “A Doll’s House” is “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I think YGB relates in the honesty category because all of Young Goodman Brown’s town friends and wife even lied to him about being his friend and wife if you look at it like they were hiding being part of a cult from him. But if you think of the story as being just a vision that YBG had then it wouldn’t really show for that point of view. The power of honesty can either hurt or enhance peoples lives.
The truth in “A Doll’s House” breaks Nora and Torvald’s marriage. “Miserable woman…who was my pride and joy… a hypocrite, a liar, worse than that, a criminal! …they might even think I was the one behind it all, I who pushed you…I’ve taken such good care of you…done to me?…you’ll go on living here…you will not be allowed to bring up the children, I can’t trust you with them.” The tricks Nora is willing to perform in order to satisfy her husband provide the foundation for the idea that the two are really living an idealistic lifestyle at all, and are really caught up in a web of lies and deception. She says things like “I’ll do anything to please you Torvald, I’ll sing for you, dance for you.” When Mrs. Linde finds out about what Nora had been hiding from Torvald she insisted to Nora that she needed to inform him what she did because a healthy, successful marriage can’t run on lies.
