Research Paper

It’s all around us, a highly structured system depicting our everyday life. It’s what we are all apart of and isn’t something one can simply escape. It is society. After reading A Doll’s House and The Giver, it was brought to my attention that society is often corrupt. I plan to discuss the characteristics of both Nora and Jonas, how they come to perceive the world differently and realize its destruction. As individuals come to better understand and learn about the corruption within society, their perspective on the world changes, leading them to challenge societal norms; this is evident in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and The Giver by Lois Lowry.

Nora, the main character, is a wife and mother who is seemingly dependent on her husband and acts in a childish manner. Throughout the play however, it because evident that Nora is very much so a round character. At the beginning Nora is a doll of society. She does everything that is expected of a woman during this time period. Her first instance realizing the corruption of society is when Krogstad, the man who gave her the loan, tells Nora how it is illegal for a woman to sign a loan. She foraged the loan because her husband, Torvald, was very sick. Nora expresses her frustration when she says “Do you mean to tell me that a wife has no right to save her husband’s life?” (Ibsen) Nora thinks that it is ridiculous that the law doesn’t take into account saving someone’s life and their love for another person. She believes that she was in the right to do such a thing as it was for the benefit of her husband and now perceives the laws of society differently. This instance in the play relates back to my thesis when Nora realizes the corruption of the laws of society, this is where Nora’s perception...

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...s/textbooks about transformative learning. This source fits well within my paper because it specifically talks about women stereotypes in one of the paragraphs. I could use this by relating how Nora realizes the stereotyped views on women in society and from there her whole perspective on the world changes. In A Doll’s House, Nora lives in the stereotypical world where women are looked at as inferior and this is looked at as normal. Even today people often think of women as having mainly household roles. Also, this source can connect with The Giver when it talks about cultural assimilation and how Jonah was taught the way of the world throughout his childhood and knew nothing else until he got his assignment. This source relates to my thesis in showing how stereotypical norms and cultural assimilation is often linked with corruption and the perception of the world.