The word "money" alone appears ten times in the first three pages of one translation. If you count "buy," "spend," "pay," "spendthrift," "economize," "debt" "gilt," "salary," "shilling," "afford," "pound," "expenses," and "save," you have at least twenty-eight references to money in the first three pages. It feels like a bell clanging over the rest of the dialogue, a cymbal that you hear ringing above all other instruments. And most of these references concern money itself—not what it can buy. Indeed, on the occassion of Christmas, it is the only thing the wife will ask of her husband:

Twelve years after the publication of Capital, what we see in this exposition is commodity fetishism of the first order: a delight in commodities for their own sake, or the mere idea of commodity, and its stand-ins: currency, and the promise of currency. To say the least, Nora and Torvald are not anarchists. They are quite unquestioning of their bourgeois appointment, and even blithely ignorant of the delicate platform that they stand on, even as they revel in their new-found fortune and security. That delicate platform is cleverly and elegantly manifested on stage in the current Intiman adaption in Seattle.

But Nora has the anarchist seed in her, a radical independence that sprouts when she leaves the "warm and cosy" home ("Here is shelter for you," Torvald had said, "here I will protect you like a hunted dove that I have saved from a hawk's claws."):

What an incredible thing for a woman—for anyone—to say in 1879: that she would leave her children with a man she doesn't trust—to educate herself. Almost as if self-knowledge is the highest value.