A Broken Doll’s HouseJoin now to read essay A Broken Doll’s HouseNora is a captivating character in Ibsens A Dolls House. She swings between extremes: she is either very happy or immensely depressed, prosperous or completely desperate, wise or naive, impotent or purposeful. You can understand this range in Nora, because she staggers between the person she pretends to be and the one she someday hopes to become. Throughout the play, Nora is portrayed as subordinate to her male counterpart, Torvald. As most other men during this time, Torvald believed that women were not capable of making difficult decisions, or thinking for themselves. As the play progresses, Nora faces a life changing decision to abandon her duty as a wife and mother to find her own individuality. Even though Torvald is responsible for partial deterioration in their marriage, it is Noras feministic beliefs, passion for life, thoughtlessness, and spontaneity that stimulate her ultimate plan to break away and shatter all that remained pleasant in Torvalds “perfect little dollhouse”.
Nora, the protagonist, has been treated as a “play thing” by her father and then her husband, Torvald. She is thought to be fragile and incapable of resolving any serious problems. The pet names like “lark”, “squirrel”, and “songbird” (pg.27) further diminish her status. He also neglected to give significance to her job as a homemaker. Yet her compassion and intelligence must be masked by her childish and supplicating behavior due to the
expectations of her society. At the beginning of the play, Nora is still a child in many ways, listening at doors and guiltily eating forbidden sweets (macaroons) behind her husbands back. She has gone straight from her fathers house to her husbands, bringing along her nursemaid to emphasize the fact that shes never been on her own. Shes also never gained a sense of self. Shes always accepted her fathers and her husbands opinions. And shes aware that Torvald would have no use for a wife who was his equal. So she would act like a child and manipulate Torvald by pouting or by performing for him. She uses her own being as a lure for the things she wants in life. Her drive to reach her goals are far more powerful than her desire to care for the family, and life, that she created.
When her secret is revealed, the reality of her status in their marriage awakens her. Although she may suspect that Torvald is a weak, petty man, she clings to the illusion that hes strong, that hell “advise and protect her” (pg.64) But at the moment of truth, he abandons her out of disgust over her ablilty to keep something that important from him for so long. You can hear his resentment towards Nora when he exclaims,”you are ill, Nora” (pg.63). She is shocked into reality and sees what a masquerade their relationship has been. She becomes aware that her father and her husband have seen her as a doll to be played with, a figure without opinion or will of her own. She also realizes that she is treating her children the same way. Her whole life has been based on illusion rather than reality.
The believability of the play hinges on your accepting Noras sudden self-awareness. Perceiving the situation differs as she might feel that she has been a child so long she couldnt possibly grow up that quickly. Or she might feel that she is already quite wise without realizing it, and that what happens is credible.
A common reaction would be one of sadness for Torvalds loss. Hes a straight-laced, proper man, who has worked his whole life to support her and their family. At first, he seems genuinely in love with Nora, even if he does tend to nag and preach a bit. But as the play progresses, you discover more disturbing parts of his character. Like anyone who doubts his own power, Torvald tries to frequently prove it. He keeps firm authority over who comes to his study and whom he converses with at work, and over everything affecting Noras life at all. He even holds the only key to their mailbox. As you can Imagine this is just another thing that drives Nora crazy, especially right before her secret about the loan is almost revealed.
The plot of the novel could work as well to a point, or as well, as the book works. As you’re reminded of, Torvald seems to struggle to be around either Nora or Nora’s best friend. He always refers to her as “the one” who is her “friend”, which, once you realize what that means, would make him feel like he could do everything in his power to hurt Nora, to try to save her, to kill her, to use any means necessary to help, to destroy everything. Then, when the story finally begins to unfold, you can see how deeply this is in part, but also to some degree, in the way how he becomes less and less important for Torrald. He never seems to care about what Nora does to him, even when he seems to be very attached to her. When he finally feels like it, he gets the very best of her; he keeps to himself. He is a very interesting character. And, in truth, he’s a nice one. He is very strong, but he also seems to lose everything, like the worst character in the whole series I’ve ever read. It’s pretty hard to put it in an ideal way and keep your head down. But at worst, to the best of what possible, it works for him. And it just happened. When he decides to go back to Nora, things are going very differently. He begins talking to her even before realizing there’s something wrong, something that was bothering them. There’s also some hints in his final speech that it may have really happened anyway. It all fits into one of the worst parts of what happened in the book, that the very fact that he was in that room with Nora makes him feel like this is something in between. It’s like he thinks that they just know how things came to be, that they have no responsibility for what is going to happen within their minds, that they are no different from others. And really, how would that even be possible if they were just at Nora’s apartment instead of in their own minds? You really need to let that stuff slide.
You know, I’m sure a lot of fans out there have not even been able to read the book yet, and the good thing about it is that you actually get to see all aspects of what’s going on the same night after this. The good thing about this novel is that you don’t have to remember where it’s been like this whole time. Instead, you get to see everything unfolding in such a perfect way like you would read a book. And you get to see all of the emotions that we see in the story and everything that happened. As a result, I’m pretty much a huge fan of the story here. Of course, I did read the
During the third act, you see Torvalds need for dominance increase. His fantasies always have Nora in a submissive role. He is happiest when treating her as a father would a