The Bondage of Marriage in Ibsens A Doll's House - Essay Example

November 21, The Bondage of Marriage in Ibsen’s A Dolls House Womanhood destroys personhood in patriarchal societies. During the late nineteenth century, women’s lives were limited to their preparation for marriage and their roles as wives and mothers. For some women, these roles were perceived as gifts from God, an essential element of their natural destiny. For other women, they have become exhausted of the system that threatens their own personhood. Ibsen relates the reality of gender issues in A Dolls House. This play underscores the gender gap that renders women powerless and hopeless in their constricted roles and responsibilities. The major conflict that Nora faces is finding her personhood that clash with male-defined womanhood ideals, but she resolves this, when she realizes that the only way to become a person is to leave the entire marriage and family institution that prevented her from doing so. The title of the play can be connected to the argument that marriage is one of men’s many doll houses, especially the most important one. Marriage legalizes the authority of husbands over their wives. As wives, women are bent to follow their husband’s needs and desires, during these times when patriarchal structures were strong, although increasingly challenged because of the suffragist movement. The title of the play argues that the true owner and player of the doll house is Torvald. His wife and children are mere toys to his power play. In the last act of the play, Torvald reminds Nora of her duties to him as his wife, and her related duties as a mother: “Before all else, you are a wife and a mother” (Ibsen Act 3). Nora is about to leave him, which pushes him to remind her that they are, in fact, in a contract. Marriage is a social contract that, more than ever, binds women to men. Langås underscores that through these pleas, Torvald accentuates his rights as a husband, in a marriage where equal rights for spouses do not exist. Marriage becomes a legal imprisonment for women that they cannot and should not easily break out from. Furthermore, marriage subordinates women to their responsibilities as mothers. Nora is constantly worried of her children, not only because she is their mother, but increasingly so because society expects her to look after them. In Act 1, Nora narrates to Mrs. Linde her financial predicament. She emphasizes how she must continue the charade that includes maintaining her children’s physical appearance: “I couldnt let my children be shabbily dressed” (Ibsen Act 1). This statement reveals that she is taking care of her children’s physical conditions for the sake of Torvald and society. They are the ones judging her because they put her in a position where her personhood is secondary to her motherhood. Marriage conditions women to be mothers, not as human beings. Another role of marriage is to ensure the conditioning of children, particularly women, as future dolls. The nurse of the children depicts the formation of the characters of children: “Oh well, young children easily get accustomed to anything” (Ibsen Act 2). She reveals the insight that if Nora has been molded to act and think like a doll, children are raised the same way. Marriage represents the training ground in establishing gender norms and expectations. It seals womanhood’s lid on personhood’s existence. Marriage ensures the economic and political subordination of women. Kashdan notes that Ibsen is not a suffragist, but he wrote about issues as he saw them. Clearly, women in his time already exhibited dissatisfaction with their married lives. Kashdan remarks that to depict his times, Ibsen created Torvald: “Torvald is, in effect, a symbol for male-dominated and authoritarian society” (3). Torvald dominates Nora’s life by controlling every aspect of her living. Men as the sole sources of money become the sole source of political power inside and outside marriage. Indeed, Torvald uses his money to control his wife. He calls Nora a “little featherhead!” before emphasizing his economic role in the family: “Suppose, now, that I borrowed fifty pounds today, and you spent it all in the Christmas week, and then on New Years Eve a slate fell on my head and killed me…” (Ibsen Act 1). By painting this surrounding scenario, Torvald underscores his significant function in Nora’s life. He is saying that without him, Nora and his children will die from hunger. Due to these conditioning of the helplessness of his wife, Nora has to wheedle and to flirt to get money. She tells her husband what she wants for Christmas: “You might give me money, Torvald. Only just as much as you can afford; and then one of these days I will buy something with it” (Ibsen Act 1). On the one hand, wives unsurprisingly depend on their husbands, when they have no livelihoods of their own. On the other hand, this scene sets the inferior position of a wife under her husband. Nora cannot do anything she wants because she lacks the money to be able to do so. Since the times called for women’s subordination, Nora has to hide her economic independence because it undercuts Torvald’s. She explains to Mrs. Linde why she has to hide the truth from him: “A man who has such strong opinions about these things! And besides, how painful and humiliating it would be for Torvald, with his manly independence, to know that he owed me anything” (Ibsen Act 2). For her, male ego is prized enough, which when destroyed, can also devastate their marriage. Hence, marriage is an economic and political system for men to strengthen their doll houses. The patriarchal system is missing or corrupted, which suggests its ability to delimit married men and women. Rosefeldt argues that A Dolls House associates fatherhood with physical and moral corruption (84). He notes the irony that the patriarchal system that aims to provide social norms is corrupted too. Mrs. Linde serves as an important minor character because her plight represents women who cannot stand on their own when the men in their lives are missing. Because her father leaves them, she is forced to provide for her own mother and siblings. Later on, she marries for convenience, but this marriage fails to provide her economic security too. Her life is filled with uncertainty because of her economic situation as a woman. Nevertheless, Mrs. Linde has performed her roles well as a mother. She stands for Nora’s foil, a woman who wants to make it work inside a corrupt system. Aside from physical absence, men are corrupted individuals because of their desire for power and wealth, Krogstad is corrupted because he breaks laws to protect his economic authority in his family. Rosefeldt notes that he was “desperately trying to raise his children to redeem himself” (84). Again, like Nora, one of the pressures in providing for the family comes from society. Men expect other men to become stalwart breadwinners and to fall short of that is an attack on their personhood. Moral pollution inflicts the male characters of the play too. Dr. Rank suffers from the moral pollution of his father. His father has kept so many mistresses that he contracted syphilis, which he passed on to his son. Rank tells Nora that he has to “pay this penalty for another mans sin” (Ibsen Act 2). His father’s immorality gives him an illness that curtails his ability to enjoy his life to the fulles. Torvald is a failed father because he does not get involved in raising his children and does not support the sacrifices of his wife. His lack of parenthood does not make him fulfilled as a father, and it burdens Nora too much as the parent. Marriage cannot be a reliable institution if the system that made it is corrupt and weak. By leaving her family, Nora is judged as fighting her natural womanhood. Marriage instills the idea of what is natural to women. Langås asserts that: “…Ibsen and his play are marked by notions of woman as pure, nature-bound and authentic and thus uniquely gifted for those critical tasks which were the author’s lifelong intention with his dramas…” (151). Women’s purity is embedded in their ability to perform their gender roles flawlessly. Nature is connected to Godliness, where the church promotes gender norms regarding social institutions like marriage. Torvald insists that Nora respects what the church says about motherhood and being a proper wife: “Can you not understand your place in your own home? Have you not a reliable guide in such matters as that?--have you no religion?” (Ibsen Act 3). Torvald reminds Nora that the Church is another authority that she cannot violate. The Church treats marriage as an enduring institution and Nora cannot flout it anyway she wants. In addition, Torvald questions Nora’s morality: “But if religion cannot lead you aright, let me try and awaken your conscience. I suppose you have some moral sense? Or--answer me--am I to think you have none?” (Ibsen Act 3). He insists that Nora respect tradition and religion, as if they are inherent to women’s nature. To go against morality is to go against God, argues Torvald. Despite the moral and religious arguments, Nora leaves her family, and most of all, her marriage, because they cannot help her find her identity. She informs Torvald of her desire to find her identity: “I believe that before all else I am a reasonable human being, just as you are--or, at all events, that I must try and become one” (Ibsen Act 3). Her marriage has taught her to be irrational, and so she has to escape its delimiting grasp on her rational route to finding her personhood. Men cannot be seen as pure villains in marriage, nevertheless, because they are nurtured in the same marriage models too. Kashdan does not want to perceive “Torvald as a thoroughgoing villain” (3). For her, Nora must have seen something in Torvald enough to risk her marriage and stature by working without her husband’s knowledge. Torvald is as lost as Nora. This paper believes that his marriage is important to him, not only because he values his integrity to other people, but because he is trained to think this way. When he mentions the social and religious institutions to ask Nora to stay, it shows that he is a man of another man’s world. Who he is reflects what society has made men to be. Definitely, some men could have or have done better. They could have treated their wives as equals, but Ibsen’s settings define strict patriarchal norms. These are rules that are embedded in critical social institutions, including marriage, families, schools, governments, and churches, and Torvald will have a hard time questioning them. As a result of these social conditionings, he becomes a man with a manhood that he has not set for himself. He only knows what society has prepared him for: “But to part!--to part from you! No, no, Nora, I cant understand that idea” (Ibsen Act 3). He cannot understand the idea of women’s empowerment because he has not seen it for himself. Society has not taught him to think this way. Furthermore, the idea of happiness and success is hinged on a happy marriage and family. Torvald cannot accept that he has failed on this significant goal. More importantly, his cluelessness of why this happened is saddening. When Nora finally leaves, he says: “The most wonderful thing of all?” (Ibsen Act 3). The only wonderful thing he knows is being in power as a man. Power cannot be expressed without a subordinate. Without Nora, his power is diminished, and his identity is also reduced. All of a sudden, a vacancy exists in his life. The most wonderful thing for Nora is not wonderful for him at all because it does not affirm social norms. In effect, Torvald is a victim of his society, a victim of lost identity and the opportunity of sharing a better life with his spouse. Personhood is not the same as womanhood in A Dolls House. The process of degendering the self begins when Nora escapes from the society that gendered her. Langås dissects gender as an outcome and a process: Gender is a process where norms and regulations materialize, and this materialization takes place by means of frequent reiteration of these very norms. But the materialization never finishes, the bodies never unite completely with the norms, and in this space possibilities will open up for new materializations, different materializations which raise doubt about the hegemony of the same norms. (Langås 156). Marriage reiterates gender norms through the patriarchal system. Nora makes the critical choice of separating her body from the performed bodily actions of her gender when she leaves her husband and children. She does not only leave her husband because her children bind her to the same system that enslaved her. As shocking it might be, even to modern sensibilities, Nora makes a decision for her “self.” Nora’s performance of the tarantella dance represents her awakening to her identity. The dance “is supposed to incarnate youth, sensuality, eroticism, and chastity,” but it becomes more significant as a means of controlling events (Langås 163). To die in the dance is the symbolic aspiration of the death of womanhood. Through the death of the woman, the self can finally appear. Langås provides a fitting analogy: “Nora uses her body as a sign for a crisis that cannot be verbally represented. The body is her ultimate language” (163). The body that has been sexualized and commodified for the purposes of men has been transformed to a new body of the new person that Nora seeks to be. The play ends with the final message of personhood, where, to be a person, people must be free to pursue their goals and dreams without fear of prejudice or judgment, and Nora cannot do that as a mother and a wife. She is so empty inside that she wants to start anew, including leaving the world behind: “I am going to see if I can make out who is right, the world or I” (Ibsen Act 3). The world manufactures dolls like her, and she thinks that she can make her own world and discover who she is. In essence, being a person means being in touch with one’s strengths and limitations. Nora has understood her purpose in life is meaningless because she is a woman, specifically, a doll: “…-it was then it dawned upon me that for eight years I had been living here with a strange man, and had borne him three children--. Oh, I cant bear to think of it! I could tear myself into little bits!” She is so frustrated in being a personless being that she can die if she continues this way. Indeed, personhood is not aligned with the goals of marriage. As already discussed, marriage provides rules of attitudes and behaviors that prepare women to be slaves. She can only hope to be a person if she goes outside the system. The “real wedlock” she refers to is not possible in her lifetime (Ibsen Act 3). This wedlock requires gender equality, where men and women are equals in marriage and the rest of the aspects of their lives. When Nora says “the most wonderful thing of all,” she indicates the impossibility of this existence. The most wonderful thing is the removal of womanhood and the rise of the personhood of all. In her society, personhood is individualism and it is a sham for collectivist cultures with traditional structures and norms. The most wonderful thing is a dream, but it will not stop Nora from trying to reach that dream. With her womanhood removed, she can pursue her personhood. Marriage enshrines womanhood by undercutting the personhood of women. The irony of the story is that patriarchy is corrupted and weak, and so its marriage system is in danger of falling apart. Human society is poorly made because women are not allowed to become persons of their own. In A Dolls House, when women are dolls, the whole house can easily collapse. Women should be makers of their houses too. In other words, they should be equal builders of society, and they should be equal decision-makers and moneymakers in their families too. Nora knows that such notions are most wonderful, but unreal inside the system. Her only hope of being a person is leaving behind the system that enslaves her. Thus, the true process of claiming personhood can only be attained outside womanhood. Works Cited Ibsen, Henrik. A Dolls House. 1879. Project Gutenberg. Web. 21 Nov. 2012. . Kashdan, Joanne G. “A Doll’s House.” Masterplots (2010): 1-3. Web. 12 Nov. 2012. Literary Reference Center. Langås, Unni. “What Did Nora Do? Thinking Gender with A Dolls House.” Ibsen Studies 5.2 (2005): 148-171. Web. 12 Nov. 2012. Literary Reference Center. Rosefeldt, Paul. “Ibsens A Dolls House.” Explicator 61.2 (2003): 84-85. Web. 12 Nov. 2012. Literary Reference Center. Read More