Analysis of A Doll's House

            I do not regard, "A Doll's House," as a well made play. Typically, the formula for a play under this genre calls for a happy ending. The ending to Ibsen's play, is pretty far from happy. This play does not so much build up to a climax and then resolve itself in conclusion, it eventually implodes. However, I do not think this play can be labelled so simply as a tragedy. Henrik Ibsen was one of the first realist writers of the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century was a century influenced by change. In this period, what we call modern society, developed. .
             In the modern society, the individual and common sense were in focus. The emergence of thinkers such as Darwin, Voltaire and Kant, had a huge impact on the era to come. Ibsen addresses matters that Kant is famous for arguing; those of human morality, cause and effect. Kant stated, "It always remains a scandal of philosophy and universal human reason that the existence of things outside us, should have to be assumed merely on faith, and that if it occurs to anyone to doubt it, we should be unable to answer him with a satisfactory proof". He also proposed that, "up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition." These two statements, from one of the most influential philosophers, can be simply interpreted as Kant arguing that our experiences are structured by necessary features of our minds. The mind shapes and structures experience so that, on an abstract level, all human experience shares certain essential structural features. It is these, "essential structural features," that not only reflect human morality, presented by Ibsen, but reflect Ibsen's realist style of writing. .
             Ibsen subverts the previous, and typical technique of writers and playwrights, of this period.