A woman cannot be herself in the society of the present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and with a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view.
George Bernard Shaw opined on "A Doll's House" that "When he(Torvald) goes on to tell her (Nora) that commercial dishonesty is generally to be traced to the influence of bad mothers. All her illusions about herself are now shattered. She sees herself as an ignorant and silly woman, a dangerous mother, and a wife kept for her husband's pleasure merely; but she clings all the harder to her illusion about him: He is still the ideal husband who would make any sacrifice to rescue her from ruin.
The final disillusion comes when he , instead of at once proposing to pursue this ideal line of conduct when he hears of the forgery, naturally enough flies into a vulgar rage and heaps invective on her for disgracing him. Then she sees that their whole family life has been a fiction: their home a mere doll's house in which they have been playing at ideal husband and father, wife and mother.
So she leaves him then and there and goes out into the real world to find out its reality for herself, and to gain some position not fundamentally false, refusing to see her children again until she is fit to be in charge of them, or to live with him until she and he become capable of a mere honorable relation to one another.
Muriel C. Bradbrook (1909-1993) in her analysis in "A Doll's House: Ibsen the Moralist" suggests that Nora slowly discovers the fundamental bankruptcy of her marriage. Bradbrook calls it "eight years' prostitution".
She also shows the true extent of Torvald's possessiveness and immaturity. As Bradbrook says, the true moment of recognition in the Greek tragic scene occurs when Nora sees both herself and Torvald in their true nature. She does understand that she has lived by what Virginia Woolf called "the slow waterlogged sinking of her will into his."
In act-1, no less than six different episodes bring out the war that is secretly waged between his masculine dictatorship and her feminine wiles:
So when the crush comes, she cries, " I have been living with a strange man."
The climax of the play comes when Nora sees Torvald and sees herself; it is an anagnorisis, a recognition. Nora says, "I have made nothing of my life... I must stand quite alone...it is necessary to me..."
Whilst the Ibsenites might have conceded that Torvald is 'Art', they would probably have contended that Nora is 'Truth'. Nora, however, is much more that revolting wife. She is not a misantropist or a fighting suffragette, but a lovely young woman who knows that she still holds her husband firmly infatuated after eight years of marriage..
Leaving of Nora: In leaving her husband Nora is seeking a fuller life as a human being. She is emancipating herself. Yet the seeking itself is also a renunciation, a kind of death-" I must stand alone".
She is as broken as Torvald in the end. But she is a strong character and he is a weak one. She was putting herself outside society, inviting insult, destitution, and loneliness. She went out into a very dark night.
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