Playwright Henrik Ibsen sympathized with the individual's struggle against predominant social values and mores. Although he was never a feminist, his portrayal of Nora in A Doll's House was received with praise by feminists and with disdain by traditionalists. Set in the middle of a nineteenth-century Norwegian winter, the play shows the limitations married women faced with regard to control over property, children, and even their individualism. The following excerpt is from the last scene, where Nora decides to let her husband, Torvald Helmer, know what she has felt about the eight years of their marriage.

Nora. In all these eight years—longer than that—from the very beginning of our acquaintance, we have "never exchanged a word on any serious subject.

Helmer. Was it likely that I would be continually and for ever telling...