At this point in the play, what possible outcomes can you predict? What questions has the playwright left you with at the end of Act I?

It is a happy first act for the family, but Krogstad’s presence launches the crisis that will consume Nora’s attention. The family seems functional, the room is comfortable, and Nora seems to have the Christmas spirit (for instance, she generously tips the porter who brings in the Christmas tree). The family seems to be, as Aristotle might have had it, at the height of happiness—from which they will tumble downhill. Nora’s secret, which might come out before its time, puts an ominous cloud over the doll’s house. The outside world now invades the home in the form of Mrs. Linde and then Krogstad. These machinations about who should get the banking jobs, complicated by Krogstad’s threat to reveal the secret and by Torvald’s denunciation of Krogstad, are just too much for Nora to manage.