The Cherry Orchard and A Doll’s House.

Henrik Ibsen’s play ‘A Doll’s House’, written in 1879, and Christina Rossetti’s poem ‘Goblin Market’, written in 1862, both demonstrate that an appetite for power, knowledge, sex, and money have an ultimately destructive affect upon their characters.

The effects of our own personal desires on ourselves and others. In the play A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen the protagonist Nora Helmer is faced with an ordeal from her husband Torvald co-worker Krogstad.Nora, she knew her family income wasn’t doing well and wanted to be independent of Torvald. This lead to Nora’s own criminal offenses of forging Torvalds signature to borrow money. When Krogstad became aware of the situation he’d used the information to blackmail Nora into ensuring him a job with Torvald. Upon further analysis, one can state that Krogstad desires to take Torvalds job caused him to manipulated Nora into getting what he wanted, and ended up with committing a crime and betraying a friend. An individual's selfish ambition can negatively impact one’s self and others in destructive ways.

A Doll House, by Henrik Ibsen, and A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry, both have central themes of search of self-identity within a social system. This is demonstrated by women characters from both plays breaking away from the social standards of their times and acting on their own terms. In most situations women are to be less dominant than men in society. These two plays are surprisingly different from the views of women in society and of the times and settings that they take place in.     

There is a common struggle between the call of duty and the desire to live one’s life in the two plays “A Doll’s House” by Henrik Ibsen and “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams. Nora, from “A Doll’s House” didn’t realize her desire to live her own life until the end of the play and she dealt with the struggle by convincing herself that she was unfit to be a mother and a wife. Tom, from “The Glass Menagerie” always struggled between his responsibility to his family and his desire to be a merchant marine. Both Nora and Tom were trapped by the circumstances of life and needed to get out. Other characters struggled as well, and we can see this through character traits and flaws, abandonment, and character transformations.

A Doll’s House, by Henrik Ibsen, portrays a young married woman, Nora, who plays a dramatic role of deception and self-indulgence. The author creates a good understanding of a woman’s role by assuming Nora is an average housewife who does not work; her only job is to maintain the house and raise the children like a stereotypical woman that cannot work or help society. In reality, she is not an average housewife in that she has a hired maid who deals with the house and children. Although Ibsen focuses on these “housewife” attributes, Nora’s character is ambitious, naive, and somewhat cunning. She hides a dark secret from her husband that not only includes borrowing money, but also forgery. Nora’s choices were irrational; she handled the

In Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House”, the Christmas tree is a centrally important stage property used to symbolize Nora’s duplicity, reflect the disintegration of the facade of the perfect marriage as well as the fate of the Helmer family, and mirror Nora’s self-image. The state of the Christmas tree transitions from a plain fir tree at the beginning of Act I, to a decorated Christmas tree towards the end of Act I, then finally to a dishevelled tree at the beginning of Act II. Such transition in its appearance on-stage symbolises significant changes that happens in the Helmer household over the Christmas season. The decoration of the Christmas tree symbolizes Nora’s duplicity as being both a seemingly compliant housewife, and a tactfully manipulative

“Your squirrel would run about and do all her tricks if you would be nice, and do what she wants.” (Act II, p.38)

Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House is a play written in 1879 and is still talked about and performed today. While it was written as an intellectual reflection on how women deserve all the same rights as men, it’s also a good metaphor for how women should be independent today. In fact, that’s the theme in the play, independence. The play follows the main character Nora, she is treated like a child by her husband, Torvald. Nora went out of her way to get a loan from Krogstad, as well as her father, and she is still treated like an uneducated child. She is also being blackmailed by Krogstad if she doesn’t convince her husband to give him a promotion at the bank. Because she is a woman, and the politics of

The background characters in A Doll’s House play a very important role in the play. They add more depth and help to get more information out of the main characters. If they were not around then the play would be a lot more dull. Especially in a play like A Doll’s House where the two main characters are a boring husband and wife.

In the play A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen uses costume props and stage direction to aid in making Nora’s inner character apparent. Nora’s character acts very submissive in the first act of the play, particularly when in the company of her husband, as seen when Torvald scolds Nora for wasting money and Nora responds by immediately giving in to her husaband’s authority by saying “...Let us do as you suggest, Torvald...that is a very sensible plan” (A1P5L10-11). Nora’s again presents herself as obedience to her husband when he accuses her of eating macaroons and she responds by saying “I should not think of going against your wishes” (A1P6L14). Yet this submissive behaviour is just an act for her husband, the audience on the other hand is shown

Macaroons: nora ! Nora! Please don’t leave me and go… why did she leave me half eaten? what is going to happen of me now!! Torvald detests me, he was always against Nora eating me………why did it have to be me?

Though unknown to the outside world, many seemingly perfect relationships are dark moral places to investigate. We constantly see idealistic relationships that appear flawless at first glance; however, we are too taken aback when we discover such relationships are based on deception. In A Doll House, Henrik Ibsen contends through Nora that truth plays a crucial role in idealistic living; and when idealistic lifestyles are built on deceit an individual will eventually undergo an epiphany resulting in a radical understanding of reality, potentially leading to the destruction of relationships. This idea is exercised in the play when Ibsen immerses us directly in the center of a romantic and idealized relationship between an older man, Torvald

Ranevsky and her brother, Leonid Gaev, represent the blindness and backwardness of the aristocracy. They see the cherry orchard from a nostalgic, romanticized perspective and remain stuck in their old, superficial habits. The cherry orchard represents the old Russia where class was tied to land ownership and ruling over serfs. Ranevsky and Gaev stubbornly cling to the past. They are unable to look towards the future and face the fact that the cherry orchard must be chopped down. When she sees the orchard, Ranevsky exclaims, “Oh, my childhood, days of my innocence!… nothing has changed” (149). She is wrong; Russia is

In Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, the plot follows the Ranyevskaya family trying to cope with the inevitable auction of their beloved orchard and home. Throughout the play, it is evident that the Ranyevskaya’s mourn, not only the loss of their orchard, but also the loss of a part of themselves. The cherry orchard in Chekhov’s work is really a symbol of the Ranyevskaya’s past, and each time they refuse to accept that the orchard will be cut down is another moment they spend living in the past.

accept what Nora had done, and wouldn't have been able to deal with the extreme