No Longer a Doll

Minnie Foster and Nora Helmer are two females living in a male controlled world. They must play mindless girls, who voluntarily obey with male expectations and requests. Women's emotions in both stories are rather trifling. Nora and Minnie spend their lives in seclusion and religious neglect, which they repeatedly take for granted. Nora's husband does not seem to take Nora sincerely.

Nora starts off as a passive and typical housewife of her time, but as the play advances, her conflict with Krogstad shows how she is slowly straying away from what would be her place in society. By the end of the play when Torvald find out about the blackmail and refuses to defend her, her perceived reality is completely shattered. She then realizes the sham she's been living and take the bold step of breaking away from Torvald and her traditional role in society as a wife and mother.

The main characters Nora and Torvald pretend to be someone who there are not to please others around them. In the early 19th century society rules where a woman was suppose to be a trophy wife and please a man in any way he asked and the man works and provides for his family and if you disobeyed the society rules you were inhuman like since society was created by humans. Sick and tired of living by society rules Nora decides to make her own rules and leave her husband despite how society would view her. While reading A Doll House, I realized that Nora was treated as a child/doll mostly by her husband Torvald. Throughout the play he would treat her as he was her father rather than her husband.

Women were to be a representation of love, purity and family; abandoning this stereotype would be seen as churlish living and a depredation of family status. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Henry Isben’s play A Doll's House depict women in the Victorian Era who were very much menial to their husbands. Nora Helmer, the protagonist in A Doll’s House and the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” both prove that living in complete inferiority to others is unhealthy as one must live for them self. However, attempts to obtain such desired freedom during the Victorian Era only end in complications. The central characters in both “The Yellow Wallpaper” and A Doll’s House are fully aware of their niche in society.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, women weren’t given any voice. Their lives began with fathers making them feel powerless, and lead to their husbands treating them with the same principles. Gender roles were an important aspect and major issue of this time, women wanted a different life. “A Doll’s House” By Henrik Ibsen and “Trifles” By Susan Glaspell show great detail of how the female characters were treated powerless by the men in their life. Women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were powerless.

This gender division meritoriously kept women in a childlike state of obliviousness and prevented them from reaching any scholastic or professional goals. John, the narrator’s husband, establishes a treatment for his wife through the assumption of his own superior wisdom and maturity. This narrow minded thinking leads him to patronize and control his wife, all in the name of “helping her”. The narrator soon begins to feel suffocated as she is “physically and emotionally trapped by her husband” (Korb). The narrator has zero control in the smallest details of her life and is consequently forced to retreat into her fantasies... ... middle of paper ... ...at the narrator will possibly be physically restrained or imprisoned at some point when her husband regains consciousness.

An examination of the ways that Nora, the protagonist of A Doll’s House, and Laura, the protagonist of The Father, struggle for personal liberty show the progressive viewpoints of each author on gender roles in a marriage. The protagonists of both plays are oppressed by their husband and stripped of personal liberties in their oppressive, male dominated society. Nora, in A Doll’s House, is often referred possessively, like an object, by Torvald her husband, with names like “my little lark”, and “my squirrel” (145). The use of names for Nora emphasizes that he does not see her as an equal. Furthermore, the costume and dance for the New Year’s party further objectivizes Nora, emphasizing the delusion in Torvald that Nora’s identity is for him to mold for his fantasies.

Without the illusion and without the aid of alcohol, the Actor is brutally forced into seeing the truth, and it is beastly. The Actor's realization arrives in Act IV when he quotes, " `this hole here... it shall be my gave... I die, faded and powerless.' " Hedda is forced into a dull marriage in which she is expected to be obedient, and her pregnancy shoves her into the role of motherhood. At the end of the play, she is unable to fight against the blackmailing judge since he is a powerful figure in the community, and she is just a married bourgeois woman.

Nora is a woman pressured by 19th century societal standards and their oppressive nature result in the gradual degradation of her character that destroys all semblances of family and identity.Nora’s role in her family is initially portrayed as being background, often “laughing quietly and happily to herself” (Ibsen 148) because of her isolation in not only space, but also person. Ibsen’s character rarely ventures from the main set of the drawi... ... middle of paper ... ...ild-wife devolves into that of a desperate woman to preserve the illusion of the perfect home. In order for Nora to preserve her sanity she was essentially forced to break free of the stereotypical 19th century familial constraints. Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House, depicts the entrapment of an average housewife and the societal pressures placed upon her. The play displays her gradual descent into what would be deemed “madness” in that specific time period.

In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, women were often portrayed as submissive to men. Women were seen as oppressed by society as well as by the males in their lives. Both of Gilman’s bodies of works, “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “Turned”, illustrate the fight for selfhood by women in a demoralized and oppressive environment. The narrator’s escape from her unbalanced marriage and captivity is her complete loss of sanity. Mrs. Marroner overcomes her husband’s infidelity and emotional control by taking in the vulnerable Gerta and leaving her husband.