Nora As A Doll's Eating Sweets Analysis

Women’s role throughout history roots itself in what she can do for others. She is the gatherer, the wife, and the mother, all these roles share is a single commonality . The fact that, until recent, she was never the provider. Social standards and conditioning forced women into subservient positions. Women were not allowed to provide for themselves, their place was to be the pretty object. They were to be watched and taken care of. A woman could not define herself as an individual, but rather as an object contingent on her husband, children, and household. In the 19th century Europe, while the industrial revolution was beginning the push for a woman to leave the home, the bourgeoisie clung to the old role of the woman, further encapsulating …show more content…
From early on she is shown as childlike in her inability to stop eating macaroons. Her husband’s ban on Nora’s eating sweets demonstrates how “Nora is expected to practice cookie-jar trickeries in the game between the strong, wise, put-upon husband and the weak, childlike wife.” When we are first introduced to Nora it is simple to see how she appears childish, and inept. This expectation of Nora to conform to an attitude and lifestyle approved by her husband is further demonstrated as he calls her his ‘lark’ referring to her as a bird. This reference to Nora as a lark is reminiscent to the idea of her being a caged bird. She is confined to the world of the domicile. The bird also reflects a passage by Mary Wollstonecraft in which she criticized male expectations that women “have nothing to do but to plume themselves, and stalk with mock majesty from perch to perch” . This idea that Nora is a pretty thing to look at directly correlates with the title of the play, A Doll’s House. In both scenarios, it represents the expectations of women by the bourgeois class. They expected women to be idle and not to care for themselves. To always be there as something for their husband or children. Having an identity outside of others, outside of the ideas of being wife and mother, was not …show more content…
These reactions to Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, exemplify the expectations and roles of women in society during the 19th century. The severe backlash upon the work illuminated the way in which society trained people not only to see woman but society. Women were the second sex, not respected or even see as human but rather dealt with as a plaything. Ibsen through language, scenery, and characters’ actions demonstrates a woman’s place in the world. A world where a woman’s identity and validation can only be found by what she is to her husband and children and even that is highly insignificant, for like any other broken doll she could be just as easily replaced with a newer prettier version. Nora’s willingness to hold a mirror up to the broken system and say ‘replace me, I dare you’, despite the backlash, she, like the work, would receive, is the success of the work, giving her identity and allowing her to find success and a voice as her own rational being