How Does Henrik Ibsen Use Tarantella Dance

Theatre is accessible to all audience members. Even though everyone has different life experiences, an image is something they can grasp onto, but interact with in different ways. This gives each audience member a personal experience with the piece. In A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen uses the image of the Tarantella dance to emphasize the poison of deception and hypocrisy that characterizes Nora and Torvald’s marriage.
The Tarantella was a wild Southern Italian dance, generally danced by a couple or line of couples. The dance was named after the tarantula spider, whose poisonous bite was mistakenly believed to cause tarantism, an uncontrollable urge for wild dancing. The cure prescribed by doctors was for the sufferer to dance to exhaustion. It involves a lot of very fast spinning and jumping and is so exhausted they usually fall to the ground. It is constant uncertainty, like Nora's character. Just as the dancer is trying to get rid of the venom, Nora was trying to rid herself of Torvald. The Tarantella …show more content…
The start of her marriage with him was when she became infected by his venom. Ball expounds The idea of Torvald injecting Nora isn’t solidified until her Tarantella dance, but looking backwards it is easy to see she had been infected the entirety of their toxic relationship. Ibsen wants the reader to see the dependence and control that exists between the couple. He calls her by belittling pet names like in order to degrade her and requires her to be dependent on him for money. Nora also feels she has to hide macaroons from Torvald so he wouldn’t know she’d been eating them. Torvald wants Nora to have proper behavior and appearance as she is like his trophy that serves to beautify his home and reputation, showing the amount of control he has on her. Nora has been unconsciously suffering through this their entire