What the exam asks
In Paper 2, you write a closed-book comparative essay answering one of four general questions across two literary works. You do not need to memorize long speeches, but Criterion A (Knowledge, understanding and interpretation) and Criterion B1 (Analysis and evaluation of textual features and/or authorial choices) reward precise references to both small-scale language choices and broader dramatic choices.
The second half of Act 1 is particularly rich for Paper 2 questions that ask how two works:
- Present power: how it is held and how it is resisted.
- Present a character who conceals the truth, from others or from themselves.
- Present the relationship between a parent and a child.
- Set one character against another (Krogstad and Nora as mirror figures).
- Use what is left unsaid, or a turning point, to shift the reader’s or audience’s understanding.
Core ideas
Structural pacing: from domestic joy to dread
Ibsen builds the second half of Act 1 as a four-step descent: playful domestic joy (Nora with her children), external threat (Krogstad’s interrogation), moral lecture (Helmer’s condemnation of forgery), and isolated dread (Nora alone). By placing Nora’s romping hide-and-seek game immediately before Krogstad’s unannounced intrusion, Ibsen uses juxtaposition (setting two contrasting scenes side by side) to maximize the shock of the legal threat. The living room, which initially looked like a warm sanctuary, is progressively transformed into a trap.
The motif of moral disease and inheritance
Before Krogstad even confronts Nora, Dr Rank introduces a recurring motif: the metaphor of moral contagion. Speaking of Krogstad, Rank claims that society is full of people who are “morally diseased.” Later in the act, Torvald Helmer expands this into a theory of maternal corruption, claiming that a deceitful parent infects the home with “germs of evil.”
Ibsen links three characters through this medical vocabulary across the play:
| Character | Connection to the disease motif | Dramatic function |
|---|---|---|
| Dr Rank | Suffers from what Nora, in Act 2, calls “consumption of the spine” (a wasting disease), which he blames on his father’s “youthful amusements”; diagnoses Krogstad as “morally diseased.” | Establishes the idea of children paying for their parents’ past actions; gives the idea a doctor’s authority, which Act 3 will turn on Nora. |
| Nils Krogstad | Condemned by Rank and Helmer as a moral contagion because of his past forgery. | Acts as a mirror to Nora rather than a melodrama villain; his offence, he tells her, was “nothing more or nothing worse” than hers. |
| Nora Helmer | Takes to heart Helmer’s claim that a deceitful mother “poisons” her children’s home; her own terrified echo (“Deprave my little children? Poison my home?”) turns his general theory on herself. | Drives the plot of Act 2; her terror of infecting her children makes her keep them away and contemplate suicide. |