Seduction and Betrayal by Elizabeth Hardwick

complete blank — and no pension at the end of it. She survived. Mrs. Linde is steadfast if somewhat depressed. She has always worked.
    At this point Nora starts to reveal the real plot of the play. Hearing of Mrs. Linde’s troubles, of her lifelong sacrifices, Nora cannot resist admitting the troubles she, the happy, lucky young wife, has known. She has got herself into a mess on behalf of those she loves and she is proud of her steady, if unconventional, efforts to extricate herself. Nora too has made decisions, borne burdensome consequences. Yes, she has a husband and “three of the loveliest children,” but she has had to find ways, she has had to work — “light fancy work ...crochet and embroidery and things of that sort” — and copying late at night. Her secret is that she took on nothing less than the responsibility of saving her husband’s life.
    Helmer, when they were first married, had lost his health in the struggle to survive in the harsh commercial climate of Norway. We have no reason to doubt that he might have died without a trip south, to the sun. The bitter Norwegian winters, the coughs, the lung disease, the bronchial threats are perfectly convincing. “How lucky you had the money to spend,” the penny-worn Mrs. Linde says about their year in Italy.
    Of course they hadn’t the money to spend. Nora, without telling her husband, who would have certainly refused or vetoed the idea, had borrowed the money from the disgraced moneylender, Krogstad. This man had been a schoolmate of Helmer’s, an admirer of Mrs. Linde’s, a small-town embarrassment to himself and his family because he had at some time been guilty of forgery, had not actually been sentenced, but had lived on — forced into usury — with a small post in Helmer’s bank and no position in society. Nora turned to Krogstad for her secret negotiations on the money for the year in Italy; she also forged her dying father’s name to the note because she didn’t know what else to do. But they had their year in the sun, her husband is well, and she has been scrupulously paying back the loan with interest all these years, doing “fancy work,” and saving pennies from her household money.
    Lies had to be told, but Nora never doubted that she had done something both necessary and honorable. Also, the trip to Italy was one of those necessities that happily coincided with the heart’s desire. When she gets out her pretty costume and dances the tarantella in a Mediterranean celebration of joy, we see that in saving her husband’s life she has had the best year of her own. “I seem the fool I am not,” said Cleopatra.
    Mrs. Linde speaks of being alone and childless and Nora cries out, “So utterly alone. How dreadful that must be!” And yet when Mrs. Linde faces her present situation, her mother dead, the boys raised and on their own, Nora suddenly says, “How free you must feel!” Mrs. Linde finds only “an inexpressable emptiness.” She has no one to live for and yet “you have to be always on the strain.” This woman has had a hard life of lonely work. She is thoroughly capable, even shows a talent for business, and Helmer is easily able to offer her a job in his bank.
    Still, Mrs. Linde is a paradox, the sort of puzzle at the very heart of this play. She is capable and hard-working, but she is not independent . Nora is impractical and inexperienced, loves “beautiful gloves,” and wants the house to be nice — she is also intrinsically independent and free-spirited. In the end she leaves her husband and her children in order to find herself, but it is not the final gesture that makes her free. Anna Karenina left her husband and her son, but she was tragically dependent, driven finally by the torments of love to a devastating jealousy and to suicide.
    Mrs. Linde, with her business experience, is prudent and conventional