Historical Context

A Doll's House was published in Norway in 1879.

The play caused an immediate sensation and sparked debate and
controversy.
It was highly provoking: People tended to respond strongly to it,
whether in praise or censure.
The play has less shock-value today, but in the late-nineteenth
century, performing it was often, as one critic puts it, "a
revolutionary action, a daring defiance of the cultural norms of
the time."

What were these cultural norms?-

There are the ideals and values represented by Torvald Helmer
and his doll-wife Nora, before her great change.
These were the ideals that defined what is commonly termed
"bourgeois respectability": financial success, upward social
mobility, freedom from financial debt and moral guilt (or at least
the appearance thereof), and a stable, secure family organized
along traditional patriarchal lines.

The patriarchal ideal was supported and reinforced by a social

structure wherein women had little overt political or economic
power, wherein they were economically, socially, and
psychologically dependent on men and especially on the
institutions of marriage and motherhood.

The ideal of bourgeois respectability prevailed in the nineteenth

century, but it never went unchallenged, and by the time Ibsen
wrote his own challenge to it, at the end of the century, a new era
of crisis and uncertainty regarding all things conventional had
already begun.

The position of women was an especially volatile issue because

the patriarchal ideology underlay the entire social, political, and
economic structure. If women were to have autonomy, then the
whole structure of society would have to be re-imagined and
three quarters of the world would have to be remade.

It was an apocalyptic idea that thrilled many intellectuals but

terrified the ruling and middle classes, so that each move in the
direction of autonomy, women's suffrage, revised marriage laws
and advances in women's education, felt like the end of the world.
The last decades of the nineteenth century had already begun to
feel like the end of the world, anyway. The Western world was
about to enter a period of unprecedented change-revolutions
social, political, economic, cultural, and scientific. No one knew
exactly what was coming, but a great many looked toward it with
a mixture of hope and dread.

When Nora slams the door of her doll's-house, shutting herself out
of the only world she has known she is stepping into a future that
is unknown and therefore both promising and threatening.

Cultural Context

The background of this play is urban middle class society in the

nineteenth century. In the figure of Helmer we see the
embodiment of patriarchy who manages to dominate his wife and
assert his authority consistently. Money plays an important part in
this social world and it is a means through which Helmer manages
to sustain his power over his wife and keep her subservient to
him.
Genre

This play is a drama of social realism in three acts