The purpose of this text is to inform about the controversial play by Norwegian playwright Henrik

Ibsen entitled "A Doll's House". In order to carry this out in a clear way to understand, we relate the
thematic elements of the play corresponding to the role of women at the time, with facts that
surrounded the author during the elaboration of the play.

When we analyze the historical context of Ibsen, we can determine that during his period as a writer
he went through a stage where his writing was close to romanticism, where he dealt with folkloric
themes and others, however, later we can clearly observe that Ibsen's works acquire the characteristics
of the current of literary realism, giving in his works an accurate representation of the reality of his
environment in order to express a criticism of it. At that time he was submerged in great censorship
due to the fact that his artistic expressions, from the society's perspective, offended the morals of the
period. Some of the criticisms that Ibsen expressed through the aforementioned literary current
become clear before the interpretation of works such as "An Enemy of the People" and "A Doll's
House", which is the one that summons us to expose this text.

In order to give an account of Ibsen's realism stage, we can go into the play A Doll's House,
specifically to the theme that was raised at the beginning, that is, the social role of women in his time.
How do these elements relate to each other? Well, this is made possible by taking into account the
elements that the author himself leaves in the plot to get us into their historical social environment,
such as the image that women had in the eyes of the time being managed and subjected to the
decisions of men and for the benefit of the image of men, how women could not attack their honor,
and how the reputation and appearances were more important than being loved, the dependence of
women on their husbands in terms of economic issues, among others. However, we are going to focus
on the first one. As we can notice during the reading of this play, the woman is nothing more than a
kind of ornament for the man's reputation and responsible for the maternal and household chores,
while her husband keeps her in a big and beautiful place where there is the idea at a social level that
he dominates his home and the more luxuries there are, the more proportional should be the
happiness; and together they make up what would be a conventional bourgeois family of the time.

This scheme created by the society of the time is seen in the protagonist Nora throughout most of the
play, showing a woman who lives by and for her husband, obeying all orders so as not to fail his
reputation, which even in her eyes was more important than anything else, and is deluded into
thinking that as she for him, Torvald would do anything to protect her no matter what happens to his
integrity.
This is seen when Nora, in order to save her husband's life, decides to make a loan illegally without
caring what might happen to her for taking care of her husband, which makes her fall into a lot of
stress in trying to hide and pay this loan without anyone finding out, going to the point of wanting to
commit suicide so as not to ruin the man's reputation, this is a clear proof of how this woman was
domesticated and deceived by the social perspective of that historical moment, coming to correct the
idea that even an act of good faith like saving her husband's life if it meant that it was "foolish for a
woman", because as far as her belief went her husband would have done the same for her, due to the
luxuries he gave to her.

However, at the end of the play, Nora turns the whole plot upside down and breaks with the scheme of
the obedient and compliant woman, when Torvald discovers what she did and mistreats and scorns
her as a "fool who knows nothing" telling her that she knows nothing about the world, referring to that
scenario where the man's reputation was something untouchable. At that moment the protagonist
realizes the true person that her husband was, a total stranger who lived with her and that although
because of the luxuries he gave her, she thought he would do anything, even put aside his reputation
to protect her, she was wrong and reaches a point where she decides to leave her home with her
children and her husband because she falls into the conclusion that she was never happy, because she
was in a confusion and could never mature as she always lived like a doll, being handled to the liking
first of her father and then of her husband, a fact that in her opinion takes away even the ability to
raise her children, so she runs away, leaves her marriage with the conventional idea of the time and
instead of fulfilling the "sacred duty" that was right for society, she wants to fulfill the duty she has
with herself to be able to think and determine the good or evil from her own freedom and not from
submission to a social perspective of "what will they say".

This last fact of the play is one of those that detonate the censorship of Ibsen because at the moment
in which this play generates its aesthetic effect in the society of that historical period in Europe, it is
qualified as immoral; fact that reflects that the representation that Ibsen makes of his reality or
environment fulfills his criticism of how the decisions and the role of the woman were dismissed
before the decision of the man being practically a social law of marriage that the woman does things
at home and obeys her husband.