A Doll's House

Audiences are made to engage and connect with characters on stage so that the playwright can project social issues and personal concerns. Realism was a movement that came about in the late 19th-century drama that aimed to replace the artificial romantic style with accurate depictions or ordinary people in plausible situations. In attempting to create a perfect illusion of reality, playwrights and directors rejected dramatic conventions that have existed since the beginnings of drama. Some techniques used in realism are making the characters believable, everyday types, authentic costumes, stage settings are often set indoors and look realistic, usually a “box set” is used with three walls and an invisible “fourth wall” facing the audience, realistic plays often see the protagonist rise up against the odds to assert themselves against an injustice of some kind, such as Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll House. Ibsen uses techniques such as misogyny, bestial imagery and irony to engage the audience and to make them understand the social and personal concerns issued within the play. The audience is made to engage through the use of symbolism, and the fact that it Ibsen uses realism which is different to the traditional melodrama.

Early on, Jones identified what a stage setting is: “A stage setting is not a background; it is an environment” (Jones 20) and that it is there to “remind the audience of where the actors are supposed to be” (Jones 138). In fact, this reminder for the audience was called an “allusion” (Jones 138), which is even more helpful when attempting to define what the role of scenic design should be. An allusion can then be a reference point for time, place, socioeconomic status, etc. to grab a hold of and suspend the audience’s disbelief. Like the author discussed, a setting also doesn’t have to be realistic, especially as that is not

The first chapter, “The Art of Staging” claims “Staging in fiction involves putting characters in specific strategic positions in the scene so that some unvoiced nuance is revealed.” (Baxter 13) This includes the character’s standing positions, their proximity to each other, specific gestures and facial expressions, which give the reader more insight to the scene and the characters without explicitly saying so. This goes hand in hand with the setting of the atmosphere where atmosphere sets the dominant tone or the mood of a story. The atmosphere can be in reference to the setting or the characters themselves. Here, the reader is to read between the lines. The key to this is using a lot of detail which is crucial to providing the information.

Setting is an important aspect that affects the tone, characters, and symbols in a story. It allows the audience to know where the story is taking place and the time frame it is in. Without the setting, a story is incomplete and the audience would not get the full experience of vivid imagery that audience should have. In the play, Trifles, by Susan Glaspell, the setting has an influence on many of the aspects of the play. Two other works that setting has an impact on the audience’s view of the work is, “Hills Like White Elephants,” by Ernest Hemmingway, and the short story “A & P,” by John Updike. Overall, setting serves a major purpose in all of these works and modifies the tone, characters, and the symbols of each individual work.

The scene involving the actress and the poet, they were in a country inn, by her request, while the count stopped by to her home in the next scene. The actors and actresses in the play help you imagine certain aspects of the set that could not be seen. For example, the window and paintings in the scene involving the actress and the poet. If the performers had not indulged that information in the dialogue and blocking and helped you imagine that the things were there, the audience would have lost some key information about the scene and would have been confused. Even though both scenes only really involved a bed and table for props and set design, you could tell the difference between the two sets from the placement of the props, the sound, and most importantly the

Commonly, we see female characters in literature completely at the discipline of their male counterparts. However, some females challenge the notion that subservience to the patriarchy is absolutely ‘necessary’. A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen and Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd both create interesting female characters in Nora Helmer and Bathsheba Everdene respectively. Whether these women are truly either independent or dependent, is ambiguous in their pieces of literature.

What is important of this play is how time goes by, and how it is manipulated. The stage manager, which is possibly the main character of the play, as the power to stop the time in the play, cutting scenes as he wishes, or recreating scenes from the past as flashbacks. This creates a sense of non-chronological time, which the Stage Manager can control. This sense is a motif, or a recurring structure or contrast, that can help to develop and inform the major themes. By showing this manipulation of time, Wilder engages his audience by overturning their expectations of the theater as one that goes in a linear time. For instance, in Act one, the Stage Manager begins with a rough introduction to the play, mentioning “This is the back door. There's some scenery for those who think they have to have scenery. This is Mrs. Gibbs' garden. Corn... peas… beans... hollyhocks... heliotrope... and a lot of burdock. In those days, our newspaper come out twice a week” (Wilder 5). In this scene, the Stage Manager insults the audience by telling them that people are more important than objects, in this case the scenery, and they should focus more on the characters and the plot, rather than just the view of the play. By using the motif, Wilder gives a certain control over the play’s

For a start, the setting is different in the story than in the play. In the story they developed the scenery with imagery and set the scene for us beforehand. However, in the play they went straight to the house and we didn’t even get to see the town, or the mood of where they lived. In the play it was more about the story and not setting us up for it, not letting us get the background of the story.

After Torvald answers why he doesn’t like Krogstad, Nora begins to panic. She begins to panic because she learns that she committed the same crime as Krogstad. Torvald says that Krogstad never admitted his guilt, has a life full of lives, and even lies around his family. Torvald then goes on to say how living in this type of atmosphere can corrupt the whole family. Then, Torvald tells Nora that there’s no way he could work with a person like Torvald. Nora realizes that she might be corrupting her children and that she should leave them to prevent her from corrupting the children. After Torvald tells her all of this, she says that she has to get back to work on the tree so she can think.

When Krogstad threatens to expose the truth, Nora must use her craftiness to distract Torvald and sway him into letting Krogstad keep his job. Unfortunately, she is not able to change his mind, but she does succeed in diverting his suspicions of her motives. She praises him and lulls him into a false sense of security by telling him that "[n]o one has such good taste as [he has]" and then goes on to ask him if he could "take [her] in hand and decide what [she is] to go as" for the dance. She confesses to him that she "can't do anything without [him] to help [her]". These statements lead him to believe that he is the one to "rescue" her, when it is in fact Nora who is trying to rescue him from dishonour. Later on, when Krogstad puts a letter in Torvald's mail, explaining everything that Nora has done, Nora uses her charms once more. She pretends that she has forgotten the tarantella so that Torvald will spend all his time with her and think nothing of the mail that awaits him. Nora truly believes that by deceiving her husband, she is protecting him from worry. Because of Nora's deception, the person that Torvald believes her to be is quite different from the person she actually is. He believes that she is a "spendthrift," infatuated by expensive things when in reality, she saves her money to pay back Krogstad and buys cheap clothing and gifts. Torvald

The enforcement of specific gender roles by societal standards in 19th century married life proved to be suffocating. Women were objects to perform those duties for which their gender was thought to have been created: to remain complacent, readily accept any chore and complete it “gracefully” (Ibsen 213). Contrarily, men were the absolute monarchs over their respective homes and all that dwelled within. In Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House, Nora is subjected to moral degradation through her familial role, the consistent patronization of her husband and her own assumed subordinance. Ibsen belittles the role of the housewife through means of stage direction, diminutive pet names and through Nora’s interaction with her morally ultimate

Symbolism is frequently used in dramatic works to represent abstract ideas and qualities, potentially in the form of people, objects, places, or actions. Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie each include various symbols to represent the social messages that the authors are trying to convey to the audience. In A Doll’s House, the central character, Nora Helmer, can be seen as a symbol herself. Her family and her husband treat her like a doll, and this oppression and condescension is the reason for her inner unhappiness and longing for independence. As well, Ibsen also focuses on the solo dance that Nora performs – the Tarantella. This dance emphasizes Nora’s feelings of separation and isolation from her

The setting of the play helped to develop the mood. First of all, the abundance of props brought the story to live successfully. For example, the bed and door created the forgotten, quiet feeling in the old man's room. Next, the floorboards were lifted up so it actually looked like the

Later in the play things start getting complicated for Nora. Her husband Torvald had become Mr. Krogstad boss at work, and Torvald wanted to fire Mr. Krogstad. This is when Mr. Krogstad starts to blackmail Nora. He wants Nora to stop Torvald from firing him. If she does not, Mr. Krogstad was going to tell Torvald her secret. This should have been the perfect time for Nora to tell the truth to her husband, but she believed that telling Torvald the truth will ruin their relationship. Nora says to her friend Mrs. Linde “Torvald, with all his masculine pride – how painfully humiliating for him if he ever found out he was in debt to me. That would ruin our relationship. Our beautiful, happy home would never be the same” (Iben 802)

Mrs. Linde assumes that Dr. Rank is the person that Nora borrowed money from, but Nora denies it and doesn’t tell her who the real person is. Torvald shows up. Nora begs him to not fire Krogstad. Her begging only angers off Torvald, and he tells the maid to send Krogstad his notice. Torvald goes to his office. Nora then had a plan to ask Dr. Rank for the remainder of the money that she owes, but her plan fails when he tells her that he will be dying soon and that he is in love with her. She feels guilty and doesn’t ask. As Dr. Rank goes in to see Torvald, Krogstad comes storming in, upset that he was fired. He yelled at Nora and then put blackmail in Torvald’s mailbox on the way out. In a fret, Nora tells Mrs. Linde everything. Mrs. Linde explains that she used to have a relationship with Krogstad that maybe she could change his mind. Mrs. Linde leaves to give a note to Krogstad, while Nora has to keep Torvald from reading the letter. The next night, while the costume party was taking place, Krogstad met up with Mrs. Linde to talk. The conversation revealed that they were once both deeply in love with one another, but Mrs. Linde left him for another wealthier man. She then confesses that she wants to get back with him. He accepts. They agree that they would leave Krogstad’s letter for Torvald to read because it would be better if Krogstad knew what his wife did for him. They ran