In one letter, the author claimed that I had not understood that Mrs. Alving, in taking the blame for her husband's dereliction, gains "heroic moral and intellectual stature"; Ibsen's point, she wrote, was that Mrs. Alving now sees how "society" victimized her husband "through her as a duty-ridden, joyless, bought wife." The purpose both of the de-gendering of A Doll House and attacking Nora on personal grounds was to remove Ibsen from the taint of feminism. The logic of the first argument, while never laid out, was that women's status is insufficiently universal to be a subject of art; A Doll House is art; ergo, A Doll House is not about women's status. ...if one removes the "woman question" from A Doll House and gives Nora the same rights and status as her husband, there is no play; or rather, there is, precisely, the crisis of the play, the confrontation between husband and wife.