1960, ?She is childish [Nora] - she still loves macaroons - she is not above concealing the fact from her husband:? (249). David Thomas further backs my idea in his 1983 essay by saying, ?She [Nora] counteracts her husband?s pompousness with kittenish flirtation and child-like acts of disobedience,? (259). According to Brian W. Downs in his 1950 essay, Torvald does not really help Nora?s childishness. In the first act Torvald is talking to Nora about her ?spend thriftness? and he says she is just like her father. Downs says, ?Her [Nora] father, it transpires, an irresponsible spendthrift, brought her up with no sense of social obligation or serious thought for the morrow, while her husband, finding her a delightful companion like this, did nothing to repair the omission and, indeed, continued to treat her with the condescending playfulness less appropriate to a mother of three children than to a girl in her teens,? (239).Nora finds ways to stall for time to keep the truth from coming out. One way we see her doing this is by appearing to be needy and unable to carry on normal acts of living without her husband?s approval or opinions. This is displayed when she interrupts him on the way to the mailbox to get the mail for the day. She knows that the letter from Krogstad is in the box explaining the whole ?secret? to Torvald. Nora does not want him to read the letter so she is trying to stall for time to retrieve the letter herself. She stalls by telling him that she can?t possibly dance the Tarantella dance at the party tomorrow until she practices with him. She leads him to believe that she has forgotten the dance. His verbal instructions were unsuccessful, so he asks Dr. Rank, a close friend, to play the piano so he can illustrate the dance to the forgetful Nora (1232-1233). Despite all of her efforts we find out later in the story that her attempts to retrieve the letter before her husband read it were futile. Of course there ...
