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I saw Nora as lacking any belief in herself and her abilities, and trapped in that situation all her life. Trapped also of course by the situation of most women of her generation - not educated, not given equal pay for equal work, not expected to be able to achieve anything.
Tell people how stupid and hopeless they are and you can crush their self-confidence very quickly. It needs a very strong and confident character to overcome those odds.
Hamlet, I think she married her husband because he asked her and she saw it as a way of escaping what she saw as her dead-end life. But of course she took the prison with her, and it was her bad luck that she got such a poisonous man. Mind you, she wouldn't have thought she deserved anyone decent. And perhaps that explains why the men she knew were indeed not available: gay, not interested or married, as you point out.
I like your comparison of Nora and Dorothy, caleb72. Perhaps showing that all sorts of things can lurk beneath the surface, even when things appear to be happy, and that this was a road down which Nora might have gone, but did not.
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