A Doll's House vs. The Visit

Henrik Ibsen created a façade around two of his central characters that imposed ideas and emotions into the audience’s mind. These thoughts were the opposite of what they appeared to be in the conclusion of the play. The characters’ personalities were transformed in t

Dürrenmatt’s The Visit not only fashions a façade around the main characters, Ill and Claire, but around the entire population of the small town of Güllen as well. While the townspeople of Güllen appear to be decent people, they mask their genuine intent and, in some cases, their actual personalities. Take, for instance, the townspeople. Despite what the townspeople claim—that they would sooner endure poverty than shed the blood of a beloved town friend—they conceal their true intent: to take the life of Ill in order to rise out of their poverty. They are not actively verbal in this, of course. Instead, they express these motives through simple actions as opposed to words. The audience catches glimpses of this when the townspeople are shown to be charging more things “to account” and their sudden improvement in their manner of dress. Ill, though seemingly different, puts up the same type of façade. While he appears to be a good, wholesome citizen of the town, he is really covering up the sin that he had committed with Claire Zachanassian back in their teenage years. The turning point comes when Claire enters the play and reveals Ill for the philanderer he used to be. Even in the presence of the older Claire, he evades the consequences of fathering a bastard child by emphasizing, “It’s over and done with, dead and buried!” (pp 38). As for Claire, she puts up the false pretense of being a generous benefactor to Güllen, when her motives are quite evil: to kill the man who left her many years before. Even though her goal in the town is to kill a man, Dürrenmatt calls for the actor to play a humane and civil character toward the audience, creating a perverted sense of character depth where the audience views the murderer as the victim. The Visit takes advantage of the façade technique by not only creating false personalities for specific characters, but also generating a city in which people are not as they appear.

Motives also played a key part in the use of façades. In Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, he takes advantage of façades to cause turmoil amongst the characters in the play. Krogstad is given two façades: one that presents him as a powerless, unimportant man in society to Torvald, and another that presents him as a relentless, manipulative beast to Nora. Toward the end of the pla

Some topics in this essay:
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