It all had to with power, with status and with the gender roles. The repressive attitude of the bourgeois society towards everything that threatened its own position of power demonstrated only too clearly how far it had moved from the standpoint of the revolutionary citizens of the French Revolution in 1789. Economic freedom has been a constant motivating force in the life of the individual. Capital gave a position of power in society; and once those positions had been won, the bourgeois individual had acquired something which had to be defended. In this way, the bourgeois individual became a defender of the status quo and a traitor to his own officially expressed values.
This is what forms the background to Ibsen's criticism of contemporary society. He found that in his age a clear dichotomy between ideology and practice, a contradiction between the public and the private life of the bourgeois individual. It was precisely these contradictions in the bourgeois world that Ibsen made his special field as a realistic commentator on contemporary life. Ibsen wanted to make the individual the sustaining element in society and thereby dethrone the bourgeois family as the central institution of society. .
Ibsen allows the individual's status in the family stand as an illustration of their position in the wider society. The power structure within the walls of the domestic home reflects the hierarchical power structures which prevail in the wider world. He uses an individual's destiny to embody contemporary social problems, and therefore, creating a sense of realism in the individual characterisation. .
A Doll's House may be said to be a story of a quite immature woman who suddenly wakes up and sees her marital situation, sees the "life-lie" on which she has based her life. She is married to and has had children by "a stranger", somebody who has always treater her like a child and a possession.