Ibsens A Doll House and Allendes The House of the Spirits - Book Report/Review Example

not rounding off, but opening out: on "the house of the spirits" and "a doll house" For this assignment, the two works used are Henrik Ibsen's A Doll House and Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits. These two works were selected for the peculiar way their authors have chosen to give a close to these stories. A Doll House is a play written in 1879 as a commentary to the norms surrounding marriage during the Victorian era (Wikipedia, "Doll"). The play describes the marriage of Torvald and Nora Helmer, illustrating how this relationship between them is like a game for eight years of their lives. Nora had thought her husband to be a strong and principled man who likes indulging her, who likes calling her pet names like "skylark." Her devotion is such that she would sacrifice her own well-being and her own good name for her husband and her family. Nora borrows 250 pounds so that she and her husband can spend a year in Italy, a journey that would save her husband's life from the clutches of illness. In doing so, she forges the date appearing beside her father's signature on the legal tender of the loan, and to pay for it, she tucked away part of her household allowance and did odd jobs behind her husband's back. The relationship between the couple is put to test when Torvald threatens to dismiss Nils Krogstad, one of the clerks in the bank that he manages. Incidentally, Krogstad is also Nora's creditor. Krogstad attempts to blackmail Nora into convincing her husband to retain Krogstad in his position in the bank; in return, the secret of the loan will remain a secret. Nora fails to do so, and tries to scheme and plan to avert the impending disgrace. She even thought of going away so that her family would be spared the humiliation (Sparknotes, "Doll"). Among the means that came Nora's way to hide the secret is a promise of help from her girlhood friend Christine Linde. Nils Krogstad is Mrs. Linde's former sweetheart; she thought she could convince him to keep the secret. But when the time came, Mrs. Linde reneged on her promise. Because of this, Torvald learns of the loan Nora made, and Nora learns that for eight years of her life, she is merely a doll in Torvald's doll house. Published in 1982, more than a hundred years after A Doll's House, The House of the Spirits is the debut novel of Chilean author Isabel Allende and is the story of four generations of the Del Valle and Trueba families set in post-colonial Chile (Wikipedia, "House"). The main characters of the story are Clara Del Valle, called Clara the Clairvoyant for her psychic abilities and her incursions in the field of parapsychology; Clara's husband, Esteban Trueba, characterized by his monumental rages, his drive to better himself, and his obsession for his wife; and their granddaughter, Alba de Satigny, the person who reaped the evil mounting against the Trueba family because of the numerous abuses her grandfather inflicted on the tenants of his hacienda. The work is presented as a collection of Alba's annotations of Clara's journal, of Alba's own writings, as well as those of Esteban Trueba. The story begins and ends with the phrase "Barrabs came to us by sea." The endings of A Doll House and The House of the Spirits have two similarities. One is that they are both peculiar. The other is that instead of giving them a kind of closure akin to the "and they all lived happily ever after" type, the authors have chosen to make the ending in that at least one character is cast into the unknown, making the reader wonder what had become of them, thus not giving the stories a clean ending. The ending of A Doll's House is considered peculiar, especially at the time it was first performed in the late 1800s (Wikipedia, "Doll"). It is considered then that the home and the family should be the sole focus and purpose of a woman in Victorian society. Self-discovery is not seen as part of a woman's goals in life. Nora discovered the need to know herself when she realized that her eight-year marriage to Torvald is based not on love but on appearances. She is a doll in a doll's house, and as such, she ought to do what her husband tells her to do. However, pleasing Torvald is exactly what Nora has been doing for the duration of their marriage; she got into the trouble she is in precisely because of her devotion to her husband. But instead of giving value for the sacrifice his wife has rendered upon his person, Torvald goes into a rage upon finding out Nora's deed. She is suddenly deemed to be a woman without morals, undeserving of his love and unfit to raise their children, although for the sake of appearances, she is to remain in their household. However, upon learning that Krogstad has freed Nora of her bond, Torvald makes a quick reversal of his decision, demanding that Nora forget his earlier outburst and to go on as if nothing happened. This is where the turnaround happens: Nora, instead of complying with her husband's wishes, realizes that she has been nothing but a plaything all her life. She opts to leave the security of her husband's home and casts herself into the unknown but most likely difficult life of a woman who has left her husband and home in the Victorian era. The story closes there; it does not say what happened to Nora, or to Torvald, though it hints of Nora's wish that "[b]oth you and I would have to be so changed that. Our life together would be a real wedlock." But along with her realization that she is no more than a doll in a doll's house is that Nora no longer believes in wonderful things happening. In The House of the Spirits, the peculiarity comes with the phrase "Barrabs came to us by sea." First, it sets the work for what it is purported to be, a story told from three points of view, with Clara's journals as the main source. Clara's notebooks, the notebooks "that bear witness to life," help put together the histories of the families involved, with all the strange twists of fate and foreshadowing of destinies occurring repeatedly in the story (Sparknotes, "House"). Clara is the axis around which her entire family spins: the youngest and favorite daughter, the love of her husband's life, the thread that holds her family together. Upon her death, everything in her family falls apart. From the very beginning, the reader is made aware that what he is reading is a diary. The first two sentences of the book: Barrabs came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. She was already in the habit of writing down important matters, and afterward, when she was mute, she also recorded trivialities, never suspecting that fifty years later I would use her notebooks to reclaim the past and overcome terrors of my own (Allende, 1). already hints at what is to come. It is from these first two sentences that the entire strange chronicle of the family that lived in the house of the spirits started unfolding, almost all of which was told from Clara's point of view. Toward the end of the story, all the threads of the tales unraveled by the telling are woven neatly once more. In the epilogue, it is revealed that Alba, pregnant with a child whose father she does not know, who could be her lover or one of the men who raped her in prison, has taken upon herself to collect her grandmother's journals and to annotate them, as well as to begin writing her own experiences. It is not said what happens to Alba or to her child, although it is hinted that she will cope with the terrors of her life with Clara's help and inspiration. The last paragraph of the book reads: My grandmother wrote in her notebooks that bore witness to life for fifty years. Smuggled out by certain friendly spirits, they miraculously escaped the infamous pyre in which so many other family papers perished. I have them here at my feet, bound with colored ribbons, divided according to events and not in chronological order, just as she arranged them before she left. Clara wrote them so they would help me now to reclaim the past and overcome terrors of my own. The first is an ordinary school copybook with twenty pages, written in a child's delicate calligraphy. It begins like this: Barrabs came to us by sea (Allende, 432-433). The usage of the same phrase at both the beginning and the end is a sign that the story is a cycle and has no definite ending. A Doll's House and The House of the Spirits are unique and masterfully-written works of literature. They are not stories with rounded-off endings because in them there is no definite ending. That something can still be said of at least one major character in these two stories, beyond the events given in the stories themselves, shows that they are opening out to other possible stories in the future. works cited Allende, Isabel. The House of the Spirits. New York: Bantam House, 1985. Ibsen, Henrik. A Doll's House. 29 March 2005. Project Gutenberg. 20 April 2006. Sparknotes. A Doll's House. 22 April 2006. ---. The House of the Spirits. 22 April 2006. Wikipedia. A Doll's House. 8 Jan. 2002. 22 April 2006. ---. The House of the Spirits. 21 Nov. 2004. 22 April 2006. Read More