A Dolls House by Henrik Ibsen - Research Paper Example

The play was introduced in 1879, women seeking freedom and looking beyond the confines of their homes and homely duties were not appreciated. This explains why the captivating character of Nora who plays a distraught ordinary homemaker is particularly credited for making this play tense and emotionally charged. Her despair and resulting helplessness almost paralyze her at times and these emotional themes are quite ingeniously handled by Ibsen. The raw and explicit way in which Nora as an entrapped woman in a patriarchal network contemplates her disturbed emotions leaves no choice for the readers to remain oblivious to the emotional complexity of the character. Rather this makes the readers keenly imbibe her turbulence ever so intensely. This research paper aims at scrutinizing how Ibsen details Nora’s search for freedom, personal recognition, and happiness in his play and tackles the touchy issues of despair, helplessness, and societal obligations.

As one goes through this remarkable play, it becomes apparent that Ibsen deliberately keeps Nora in every scene of the play until the last act to present a very intimate and accurate portrayal of all women going through similar hardships in those times when women were expected by the patriarchal society to remain restricted to their homes and pamper their husbands. Her dialogues are laden with the misery which haunts her at all times. She is emotionally distressed by the fact that she was first treated merely like a mute doll by her father and then later by her husband Torvald which makes her seek freedom and realize that she is living a lie (Gardner). She does not feel that the life she is living accurately defines who she is and longs to discover her real potential day and night. The mundane tasks she performs every day as a dutiful wife to satisfy her husband and the society she lives in actually work to suffocate her and injure her soul. This quest for lasting happiness takes Nora on a long journey of turbulent incidents. It is possible to emotionally relate to Ibsen’s play with the help of Nora’s character because it is also found fraught with myriad emotional themes other than despair, marriage norms, and women’s rights. This is evident from how Nora gradually grows from a naïve and society’s approval-seeking girl into a mature and bold woman made tough and resilient by hard times who finally musters up enough courage near the end of Act III to ask her husband to sit down and discuss several important things which they have never discussed before. When she tells Torvald, “You and Papa have done me a great wrong. It’s because of you I’ve made nothing of my life” (Nora cited in Chastain 218), it becomes evident that she loathes the identity ascribed to her by her husband and the chauvinistic society in which she lives.

The play deftly criticizes 19th-century marriage norms and ideas. The marriage of Nora and Torvald seems to be working fine from the surface but if one tries to delve into their relationship’s depths, many doubts and agonies encountered by Nora are brought to the surface instead. That is why Nora’s quest for personal growth, independence, and content in The Doll’s House attempts to highlight the issue of how many people around us who do not get to live the life they once dreamed of is left haunted by the terrible game of what if. Shedding their dreams of independence and personal recognition, they are often destined forever to make others happy and live themselves unhappily. Many women like Nora even in present times are expected by others to depend on their husbands and be someone else. So it is understandably easy for all such people to emotionally connect with the play in one way or another by evaluating Nora’s character. Initially lost in the domestic comfort which encapsulates her, she soon grows out of her comfort zone and is finally forced by the twisted circumstances of her life to visualize it as a giant net entrapping her. Read More