A Doll's House's female characters' need for security

Through Nora in A Doll’s House, Ibsen shows how women at the time had to appear economically dependent, in order to appease the fragile male ego, though many secretly harboured a desire for financial independence. Although she spends much of the earlier portion of the play acting as a petulant, ‘charming’ child, pretending to be a dependent ‘featherbrain’ in order to please Torvald, the reality is quite different. She yearns to earn her own keep, to ‘work like a man’, taking up copying work that she hides from her husband, deriving a guilty pleasure from defying some of the social expectations of females, which dictate that the husband is the master of the househo

However, these writers clearly have sympathy for women who married for reasons other than love, portraying them as being victims of circumstance, and of the materialistic society in which they lived. Tatiana gains the reader’s sympathy through her ‘sad station [which] made all fates look the same’ and Mrs. Linde by way of her ‘helpless’ mother and ‘two small brothers’. The outcomes for these two women, however, are contrasting. Tatiana chooses security, knowing full well the fleetingness of romantic love, and the ‘quickness’ with which it can dissipate. Pushkin is demonstrating here the effect of living in such a wealth-dominated society, breeding cynicism and destroying innocence.

Female characters in 19th Century texts also need sexual independence. That is, for their sexual freedoms to be equal to those of men. In stark contrast to men of the time, such as Onegin from Eugene Onegin, who were permitted to be discreetly promiscuous, even to the extent that they could brag about their various ‘conquests’, and be lauded for being a ‘professional flirt’. Women, however, were expected to remain chaste before marriage, and faithful to their husband after, further perpetrating the conception of women as innocent ‘maidens’, pure and untainted. To flout this unwritten expectation with a display of female sexuality, as Nora does in flirting with Dr. Rank, is dangerous. Women who do so run the risk of unwittingly giving out a sexual invitation, as well as risking the ire of their husband.

Women also covet independence in a physical sense. Torvald’s pet names for Nora, such as ‘little songbird’, show the generally accepted notion of women as being caged creatures. Through the setting of A Doll’s House, a single room in which all events take place, Ibsen may be showing the reader here that, as society expected women to remain in the house, as ‘dolls’ to be played with by men, they are often kept in a ‘locked box’, this suffocating atmosphere causing women to feel isolated from outside society, and become desirous of freedom. The final stage direction in A Doll’s House is that of a ‘door…slamming’, symbolic of Nora’s newfound independence and her simultaneous exit from her sheltered existence and entrance into the outside world as an individual. <

Some topics in this essay:
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