'How does Ibsen portray women in the opening of 'A Doll's House'? essay
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Course
Drama and poetry pre-1900 (H472)
Institution
OCR
Exemplar essay on Henrik Ibsen's 'A Doll's House' - essay question 'How does Ibsen portray women in the opening of 'A Doll's House''? - deals with important theme of gender roles in the play - includes valuable context and quotes - grade A
'How does Ibsen portray women in the opening of 'A Doll's House?'
Ibsen, living and writing in the midst of the 19th Century patriarchal society of Norway,
portrays females as they were stereotypically viewed in his play ‘A Doll House’, but also
defies these roles with his fully formed female characters, revealing the struggle and
complexities of life as a woman in this period that were widely stigmatised by those around
him, earning him the title “the father of modern drama”.
Ibsen initially exposes Nora as a naïve and materialistic wife, who relishes her husband’s
patronising treatment. As she enters the scene, she welcomes the childish nicknames,
‘skylark’, ‘squirrel’, thrust at her by her husband and lives up to them by talking solely of her
purchases and the ‘lots and lots of money’ Torvald is soon to earn. The playwright also
manifests the stereotypical fragility of women through the stage direction ‘puts her hand
over his mouth’, followed by the line ‘Oh, Torvald! Don’t say such dreadful things!’, as he
mentions his hypothetical death. Her equally weak reply to how she would repay a debt:
‘Who cares about them? They’re strangers’ causes her husband to condescendingly exclaim
‘how like a woman!’. Here, Ibsen introduces his female protagonist as incapable, delicate
and immature, a character which would have been unsurprising, if lightly amusing, to the
19th century audience, who followed patriarchal laws based on the assumption that women
could not control their own property nor had the intelligence to carry out meaningful work
or exercise the vote.
However, the playwright begins to play with the audience’s ideas of perception, as Nora’s
character begins to deepen and another, quite unconventional, female is introduced on
stage. Though remaining fairly unlikeable, as Nora unthoughtfully boasts to Mrs Linde of the
‘heaps of money’ her husband is soon to gain, as she reveals her ‘secret’ to her friend, the
audience begins to realise the protagonist is not as submissive as she presents herself. She
overcomes the challenge of women not being able to ‘borrow money without her husband’s
consent’ with ‘business sense’, in order to ‘save’ his ‘life’, and resourcefully found money to
pay back the instalments, all without Torvald’s knowledge. Ibsen evolves Nora into a crafty
and ‘clever’ woman, rather than an ignorant ‘spendthrift’ as originally perceived. As well as
this, Mrs Linde, who honourably took care of her sick mother and little brothers even after
her husband’s death, by ‘start[ing] a little shop, and a little school and anything else’ she
could ‘turn’ her ‘hand to’, becomes a strong and resolute character. So, the conventional
presentation of women as inferior quickly deteriorates, as the two female characters are
seen to defy their societal roles
With this revelation, Ibsen creates another, rather manipulative dimension to his female
characters. Firstly, Mrs Linde’s admission that she ‘didn’t love’ her husband, but married
him only for economic incentive, may seem marginally wicked, especially to a modern
audience and the common negative connotations surrounding “gold-diggers”. In fact, the
playwright spotlights here the few options women had and corruption that plagued the
marriage market as a result, which he was known to condemn, for example in his 1862 play
‘A Love’s Comedy’, which became a source of outrage as it suggested love and marriage
aren't always synonymous. More predominantly though, Nora clearly manipulates her
husband with her femininity in order to successfully repay her debt, as she seemed to create
a façade of innocence and idiocy in front of Torvald in the previous scene, then saying she
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