A Dolls House: A Push To Freedom Essay examples

It can seen how Nora starts taking control of her own acting disregarding her husbands

Nora’s need to please her father and later her husband made her lose her true self and it is through the flow of events that she realizes that she needs to go and find her true self

While Mrs. Wright lashes out against her perceived cage, her gender role, by killing Mr. Wright, Nora’s character ultimately decides to trip the latch, to fly free from the bars. Nora’s complex personality proves to be difficult to predict to the very end, when she decides to shirk her duties to her husband and children to focus on herself, to serve her own needs for individuality, a decision that was not entirely popular with readers and audiences alike. Indeed, Nora quite easily refuses to be the “doll” in Torvald’s house, and abandons her loving, though misguided husband, and her children. She feels driven to do this once she realizes that she and Torvald had never exchanged a serious word in

Each time Nora finds herself unable to help herself the problem is easily directly traced back to her husband, her father, and to the overbearing dominance of the male society. She tries to save the life of the man she thinks she loves and in doing so sees how she has become a victim of her own ignorance which has been brought upon her by the men in her life.

On the other hand, readers love Nora because she goes against societal norms to recreate

need for future respect as well. The author states “Nora is happy because she sees the

1357). Nora had no second thoughts on saving her husband, since why not “hundreds and of thousands of women have done” it in the name of love (p. 1401). Eventually, Nora finds out her love was not mutual as he claims that “But no man would sacrifice his own honor for the one he loves

In Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Nora Helmer is a traditional “angel in the house” she is a human being, but first and foremost a wife and a mother who is devoted to the care of her children, and the happiness of her husband. The play is influenced by the Victorian time period when the division of men and women was evident, and each gender had their own role to conform to. Ibsen’s views on these entrenched values is what lead to the A Doll’s House becoming so controversial as the main overarching theme of A Doll’s House is the fight for independence in an otherwise patriarchal society. This theme draws attention to how women are capable in their own rights, yet do not govern their own lives due to the lack of legal entitlement and

Here, Nora pulls together the tragic circumstances. She sees that she was never truly happy in the house, just content. Her father kept her as a child would a doll, and Torvald continued this when they were married. They formed her opinions for her, set expectations to which she was supposed to adhere, and wrote a vague script of how she was supposed to act. She was like a puppet, with no thoughts or actions of her own. When she finally realizes the injustice being done to her, she decides to free herself.

Nora starts off the play essentially as Torvalds toy. She is obedient, she is cute, she rarely goes against his wishes, and she is nothing without her “owner”, Torvald. The reader, however, discovers early on that all is not what it seems to be. Nora is actually a very rebellious woman who enjoys going against Torvald’s wishes. There are scenarios where she does this out of the sheer enjoyment she gets. Nora loves macaroons.

Ibsen also uses a symbol to develop Torvald Helmer as a character. The locked mailbox represents Torvald as a superior and controlling husband. The mailbox is for Torvald alone to access, as he only holds the key. Similarly, Torvald’s study is a private room that Nora is never allowed to enter. The fact that Torvald will not even allow Nora to read the mail shows how far he has kept her apart from the outside world and kept her under his total control. Torvald does not recognize Nora as an intellectual person to be involved with any business or important matters in life. The mailbox also represents Nora’s submissiveness, which signifies the oppression of all women during the time period.

The character of Nora goes through the dramatic transformation of a kind and loving housewife, to a desperate and bewildered woman, whom will ultimately leave her husband and everything she has known. Ibsen uses both the characters of Torvald and Nora to represent the tones and beliefs of 19th century society. By doing this, Ibsen effectively creates a dramatic argument that continues to this day; that of feminism.

Nora, the innocent little housewife, starts off as a harmless little doll but soon changes. She is Torvald’s perfect wife in the beginning of the play, but little does he know that she has a mind of her own and isn’t really his little doll. The opening of Nora’s ulterior personality starts when she opens up to Mrs. Linde (Act 1). Nora bleeds to Mrs. Linde her financial problems with the trip that she spent two hundred and fifty pounds on, on her husband. Being the reader, I was shocked to hear so knowing how harmless and perfect Nora appeared to be. Then later on, the plot unfolds and reveals the incriminating fact that Nora had been owing Krogstad this money the whole time and had been paying him back in increments with the allowance given to her by Torvald. It is crazy that Nora had been so sneaky all along and had been keeping it away from Torvald all along. Nora is then stuck in a dilemma when Krogstad blackmailed her by telling her that she has to get his job back or he’ll reveal the whole thing to

restricted to playing with the children, doing little housework, and working on her needlepoint. A problem with her responsibilities is that her most important obligation is to please Torvald, making her role similar to that of a slave. Torvald easily talks down to Nora saying things like: “…worries that you couldn’t possible help me with”, “Nora, Nora, just like a woman”, and “Mayn’t I look at my dearest treasure? At all the beauty that belongs to no one but me—that’s my very own?” as if she is considered his property.

Nora gets blackmailed for forging a signature, and for this she gets disowned by her husband. But, when her husband finds that the blackmail will be dropped, and will no longer affect their lives, he tells Nora that everything is okay and they both can presume living like normal. This opens Nora’s eyes fully for the first time, before she had only glimpses of the wrongness in her identity, but now she knew. Nora had been living a false identity, she had been a ‘toy doll’, and at the end of the play she decides to want so much more than to be what others thought she should be. In the end of Act three, Nora states ”I must think things out for myself and try to get clear about them” (Ibsen 199). Nora is now going to decided who she is and what she really believes, she is going to discover her own identity. In an article on women working in World War II, it states, “While patriotism did influence women, ultimately it was the economic incentives that convinced them to work. Once at work, they discovered the nonmaterial benefits of working like... contributing to the public good, and proving themselves in jobs once thought of as only men’s work” (“Rosie Riveter: Women”). Women before World War II were thought of as simply housewifes for the most part, similar to Nora. The circumstances of World War II brought about need for women in the workplace, this started a domino effect of women taking up an identity similar to males the sense that they could now