from her doll's role to the realization of the injustice
done her by her father and her husband, Helmer Torvald.

"While I was at home with father, he used to tell me all his
opinions, and I held the same opinions. If I had others I concealed
them, because he would not have approved. He used to call me his
doll child, and play with me as I played with my dolls. Then I came
to live in your house. You settled everything according to your
taste, and I got the same taste as you, or I pretended to. When I
look back on it now, I seem to have been living like a beggar, from
hand to mouth. I lived by performing tricks for you, Torvald, but
you would have it so. You and father have done me a great wrong."

In vain Helmer uses the old philistine arguments of wifely duty and
social obligations. Nora has grown out of her doll's dress into full
stature of conscious womanhood. She is determined to think and judge
for herself. She has realized that, before all else, she is a human
being, owing the first duty to herself. She is undaunted even by the
possibility of social ostracism. She has become sceptical of the
justice of the law, the wisdom of the constituted. Her rebelling
soul rises in protest against the existing. In her own words: "I
must make up my mind which is right, society or I."

In her childlike faith in her husband she had hoped for the great
miracle. But it was not the disappointed hope that opened her vision
to the falsehoods of marriage. It was rather the smug contentment of
Helmer with a safe lie--one that would remain hidden and not endanger
his social standing.

When Nora closed behind her the door of her gilded cage and went out
into the world a new, regenerated personality, she opened the gate of
freedom and truth for her own sex and the race to come.

More than any other play, GHOSTS has acted like a bomb explosion,
shaking the social structure to its very foundations.

In DOLL'S HOUSE the justification of the union between Nora and
Helmer rested at least on the husband's conception of integrity and
rigid adherence to our social morality. Indeed, he was the
conventional ideal husband and devoted father. Not so in GHOSTS.
Mrs. Alving married Captain Alving only to find that he was a
physical and mental wreck, and that life with him would mean utter
degradation and be fatal to possible offspring. In her despair she
turned to her youth's companion, young Pastor Manders who, as the
true sa