Impact of Reading of Dolls House on my thinking - Essay Example

My reading of Ibsen’s play (A Doll’s House) has influenced my ideas and has helped me understand how an individual should define his/her role in a society which has already set certain pre-defined roles for him/her. It also has given me new insights into shaping my own existence.Nora actually decided to be understood according to her own point of view. The narrow masculine thought of her father and husband visualized her as a‘doll’ only to be used as a decoration piece.

Both her father and husband could not delve deep into her inner self. She complains, “He called me his little doll, and he played with me just the way I played with my dolls”. She blames them for misunderstanding her. She says, “A great wrong has been done to me, Torvald. First by papa, and then by you. It’s the truth, Torvald.” (p 70).Her own home became a prison for her where she was engaged as a ‘skylark’. It was a doll’s house where she had only to act as an object that beautified the surroundings.

She mournfully expresses,” Our home has never been anything but a playroom. I’ve been your doll-wife, just as I used to be papa’s doll-child” (p 71). She seems to suggest that both the men in play did not allow her to live her true self. Rather they expected her to behave according to their wishes.Sturman (2004 ) finds that the issue dealt in the play is about an individual’s struggle to maintain his personality in a society which has assigned for him/her certain ‘stereotyped social role[s].

’ ‘The problem is personified as Nora, the doll, [who] strives to become a self-motivated human being in a woman-denying man’s world’ ( p 31).Nora is not just a house-wife faced with a domestic crisis. Rather she has been symbolized as an individual who in the end refuses to come to terms with the expectations of others in order to assert the choice of her own fate.