A Doll’s House: 林怡平 Joy LIN

 A Doll’s House questions the social doctrine of being men and women:  Ibsen’s contemporaries:

 The seemingly fragile doll-wife 1. Secretly saves her husband’s life 2. Pays the debt by years of work  A submissive creature, but someone other than men’s little women.  The “masculine” provider and protector: “It was almost like being a man.”

 A dominator with “all his masculine pride” 1. Pushes Nora away 2. Defines himself as a victim  Failing to be the shelter, Trovald violates the notion of chivalry.  A frail-minded “feminine” receiver

1. Fantasy of his chivalry falls apart 2. Delusion of their mutual love 3. Trovald’s true character: Selfishness—Women to live/sacrifice for love.  Painful self-consciousness  Overthrows patriarchy’s socialization of females as serving items:  No longer an object, but a subject. No longer a doll in the house.

 A Doll’s House is not merely play of feminism.  Ibsen states on the Norwegian Women’s Rights League: “[T]rue enough, it is desirable to solve the woman problem, along with all the others; but that has not been the whole purpose. My task has been the description of humanity.”

 The protagonist’s identity broadens: Nora is a woman and “first and foremost a human being.”  Emphasis on individuality:  A universal subject: Voice for the repressed, the unheard and the marginalized. the fixed roles— the function as a daughter, a wife, a mother, a doll An individual with independent mind— Nora

 Finney Gail. “Ibsen and Feminism.” The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen. Ed, James McFarlane. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  Gray, Ronald. “A Doll’s House.” Ibsen—A Dissenting View. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

 Moi, Toril. “First and Froemost a Human Being.” Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press,  Saari, Sandra. “Female Become Human: Nora Transformed.” Contemporary Approaches to Ibsen Vol. VI. Eds. Bjorn Hemmer and Vigdis Ystad. Oslo: Norwegian University Press,

 Templeton, Joan. “The poetry of feminism” Ibsen’s Women. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,