Very cheerful, the pretty and girlish Nora Helmer enters from the outdoors, humming a tune while she deposits her parcels on the hall table. “Is that my little lark twittering out there?” calls her husband, Torvald, from the study, and he emerges to greet her. They talk about their improved income because Torvald has just been appointed as bank manager, and Nora chatters about Christmas presents she has just purchased for the children. Torvald suspects that his “Miss Sweet Tooth” has been “breaking rules” by indulging herself in prohibited confection. Nora denies the accusation, but the audience has seen her pop macaroons in her mouth as she came in. Deftly, Nora changes the subject and talks about decorating the tree.
The maid tells Torvald that their family friend, Dr. Rank, awaits him in his room. When Torvald has gone, another visitor arrives to see Nora, and the two women, who have not seen each other for the past ten years, are alone onstage. Christine Linde, having just returned to her hometown, tells Nora all about her unfortunate life. Married unlovingly, widowed for the past three years, Christine experienced the hardships of a woman who was forced to make her own way. She points out that her toilsome life has aged her, while Nora is as innocent and childlike as ever. Nora declares that she too has worked and sacrificed all these years. Her toil has saved someone she loves, she boasts, and she tells Christine how she borrowed 250 pounds when Torvald’s health was in such danger that he needed to go to a southern climate to improve his condition. She describes how she secretly repaid installments of the debt by stinting on her personal expenses and taking in copying work to do at night. Christine is amazed that Nora has not mentioned the matter to her husband in all these years. He would never consent to borrowing money, Nora explains, and involuntarily she exposes the real reason for the deception—to save face for Torvald:
How painful and humiliating it would be for Torvald, with his manly independence, to know that he owed me anything [says Nora]. It would upset our mutual relations altogether; our beautiful happy home would no longer be what it is now.
Christine, still amazed, asks if Nora will ever reveal her secret to Torvald. Some day she shall, answers the girl with a half-smile. It may be good to “have something in reserve” in future years when she is no longer as attractive as now, “when my dancing and dressing-up and reciting have palled on him,” Nora says.
The maid announces another visitor for Torvald. The newcomer, Nils Krogstad, is a lawyer and moneylender who now works at the bank. Nora seems relieved when he says he has come merely to talk with Torvald about “dry business matters.” Leaving the study to allow Krogstad a private talk with his chief, Dr. Rank emerges to greet the ladies. Obsessed with thoughts of illness, the physician characterizes Krogstad as “morally diseased.” Like many of his physically diseased patients, he continues, the lawyer refuses to submit to his fate, despite great agony, in the hopes of a change in his position.
This idea draws a parallel between Krogstad’s situation and that of Dr. Rank. The lawyer feels his job is threatened now that Torvald is his chief, while Rank, ill with a congenital disease, is close to losing his life. With this in mind, Ibsen indicates that Krogstad clings to his respectability, or moral health, just as Dr. Rank clings to whatever physical life he has left.
