Paraphrase In Henrik Ibsen's The Doll House, the main character's husband, Torvald Helmer has a very strict

and traditional view of moral corruption. His view is that whenever a past generation makes a bad decision or faulty action, then it comes into effect in the next generation negatively. Although Torvald believes that the offspring will genetically acquire the erroneous ways of the parents and their actions will be similar, he also has a psychodynamic approach to the erroneous actions, blaming the conduct of the offspring on the ambience of the household of a defective parent. He sees a relationship between the environment in which the child is born into and the future behavior of the child. Some examples of his hereditary and psychodynamic views are when he tells Nora she doesn't know how to manage her finances, just like her father (pg. 46) or when later on he accuses Krogstad of infecting his children with lies (pg.70). Although he does believe in redemption (pg. 70), when he states that many, just like Krogstad, have come back and cleaned up their name with the appropriate punishment, it seems as if the influence of a sin is uncleanable because of the amount of times a character's sin is punished with a defect. Torvald is not the only one though. On page 81, Dr. Rank, the most neutral of characters to the audience, but morally corrupt from the inside, lusting for Nora as his life comes to an end, accuses his father's "wild army days" for his "poor, innocent spine". I assert that from all of these examples, which are spread throughout the play's script, that it was an accepted belief in that era among all social classes (the men in this play are all higher bourgeoisie) that the moral corruption will become a "stain" through every generation in the family tree. The fact is that in the time this play was written, the late 1800's, even in the 19th and 20th century. people needed an explanation for the causes of negative attributes and physical imperfections and they could not explain them scientifically, hence relying on religion and hereditary facts as the common measurement for these flaws.