Characters and themes in A Dolls House Flashcards
Nora
Her girlish extravagance is established in her desire to spend Helmer’s salary straight away.
Their relationship rests upon his paternalism and childlike qualities and is very much that of parent and child.
She delights in the power her attractiveness and sexuality gives her.
She is pleased to be protected and pampered- delighting in her ability to manipulate.
Torvald
Torvald sees himself as the epitome of the respectable nineteenth century husband. He treats his wife as a winsome little creature, dependent on his knowledge of the outside world.
His dominance over Nora lies in his financial control of the household.
When the IOU is sent back, if Nora would have accepted, Helmer would have been happy since his social standing and respectability was not affected.
He holds rigid views, obsessed with the need to abide by social, moral and religious code of the time.
Where Helmer is shown to be weak and in need of support, Nora’s strong will and vitality allow her to cancel the marriage contract.
His subservience to petty social values are more important then his feelings towards his wife.
Helmer is trapped in his social role, afraid of social humiliation.
His blunt air of authority is so compelling that when it finally shatters the effect is devastating.
Mrs Linde
Widowed and released from the burden of an ailing mother and two younger brothers Mrs Linde finds herself free at last.
Her sense of duty determined that she should break with Krogstad, whom she loved, because he had no money to maintain her family.
She perceives her freedom to be loneliness. She feels ‘so dreadfully lost and empty’
Anne- Marie: the nurse
Having brought up Nora, Anne-Marie is now nanny to Nora’s children.
She gave up her illegitimate child to strangers in order to take up the offer of a job.
She is critical of the father of her child ‘That good for nothing didn’t lift a finger’
i.e. women’s status is affected- gain permanent social disapproval. But father wasn’t affected. Ibsen as feminist.
Feminism
An alternative ending is crafted in which Nora melodramatically revokes her decision to leave. Nora ‘Motherless! Ah, though it is a sin against myself, I cannot leave them’ Ibsen called this a ‘barbaric outrage’
The play has been vilified for advocating women’s liberation.
Ibsen made his own personal notes: ‘A woman can not be herself in modern society’.
Love and duty: self liberation
Mrs Linde presents the results of marriage embarked purely out of duty to member of one’s family.
Nora flies out to the outside world but Mrs Linde ‘couldn’t bear to stay out there any longer’ and chooses the safety of domesticity.
Ibsen shows true love to be a delusion, inhibiting the free development of the individual.
In striving to maintain a romantic view of marriage, Helmer and Nora, have assumed roles in which they have become trapped.
When Nora slams the door, she shatters the romantic masquerade that has been their life.
Heredity and the environment: heredity and free will
The origin of species would suggest that our lives are controlled by heredity and the environment.
Dr Rank is suffering from a disease inherited because of his father’s overly indulgent life.
Helmer alludes to Nora having inherited her father’s spendthrift ways: ‘all your father’s recklessness and instability he has handed on to you’
Man vs Woman
When Nora’s domestic role, coupled with her natural vivacity and intelligence, enable her to reject the controlling influence of society, Helmer remains cowed by a social code he can neither live up to or ignore.
A Doll’s House
A doll’s house provides a make-believe world where children make their dolls perform social roles.
Ibsen draws a parallel to the life represented on stage and the make-believe world of a dolls house.
When Nora slams the door, she is rejecting her role as a doll.
Nature
Inside the house- The cosy drawing room, warmed by a large stove is a refuge from the weather outside.
Helmer knows just how fragile their protected environment is.
The ‘Lark’ and ‘Squirrel’ would have difficulty surviving in a world were nature seems, in Tennyson’s words ‘red in tooth and claw’
The miracle
Her husband has embodied her religion
Helmer has been the God-like provider upon which she has totally depended on. Once her belief in him has broken, and he has not performed the miracle, she has not concept of religious duty left.
The Christmas tree
Trees state as Nora’s disintegrating web of lies. The pretty decorations that Nora used to cover up her deceit are falling away. Soon the bare, ugly truth will emerge.
