Ibsen's "A Doll's House"

In A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen, the play's protagonist Nora Helmer has her character defined, in part, by the use of a dramatic foil for her -- her former schoolmate Christina, always addressed as "Mrs. Linde" because she is a widow. Ibsen uses Mrs. Linde's secondary subplot as a way of commenting or drawing attention to the primary storyline about Nora and her husband Torvald. But in each of the three acts of Ibsen's drama, the dramatist uses Mrs. Linde effectively as a foil, by advancing each element in her lesser storyline as a means of providing a constrast to (or perhaps at times a reflection of) Nora, the protagonist and the "little doll" of the play's title (Ibsen 84). I hope to demonstrate this by showing how Mrs. Linde is used as a foil in each of the three acts, and concluding by noting...
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