Word: nora
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...movie retells the story of one of the theatre's (Ibsen's) first angry women. Or at least the first to slam the door on her husband and children and on the Victorian respectability that buttressed a lifetime of security. Having been educated to believe that men were better, Nora is unconscious of her oppression. It is so built into her head that it takes her the whole movie to see it, much less to summon the guts to rebel against...
...surface Nora is happy with her life. You see her first as the doting wife and ravishing matron of a quite proper bourgeois household. She flutters about as if domesticity were giving her a giddy high. She coos over her babies, she makes a delighted to-do about dressing the Christmas tree and saving pennies when she shops. Set up by her husband, Torvald, as queen of his private life, she manages his home with charm of a born peacemaker. She doesn't question the rightness of the fact that she has to steal sweets behind her husband's back...
...Nora continues to chirrup about like a gay lark, you feel anxiety whooshing through her chatter. The smile on her china doll face is somehow out of joint. You begin to see that she is clinging desperately to her innocence, (like an invalid making the best of a sorry confinement...
...takes catastrophe to shake her out of it. In ignorance of the law Nora had committed forgery when she faked her dying father's signature (to save him pain) on a sum of money she borrowed to pay her husband's rest cure bills. It had never occurred to her that the action might be illegal--to her it was a human duty as daughter and wife. But when Torvald discovers her crime, he is blind to its noble aspects. To him, the damage done his honor counts for more than the love that prompted it. Only when he works...
When Torvald tells her that he could not, as man, sacrifice his honor for love, there is a silence as if the shot fired at Sarajevo had just been heard the world round. Then Nora turns to the camera with a real smash below the belt, "Millions of women have." She looks like a continental Uncle Sam jabbing his recruiting "We Want You" finger straight into your stomach. Imagine how this fired the moral fervor of the ladies in the suburbs of Detroit...