Nora’s Sentimentality in A Doll’s House
In the play “A Doll’s House”, after eight years of marriage to Torvald, Nora realizes that she hasn’t properly known her husband. She realizes after a certain episode in their life that her husband has turned into a complete stranger to her. In this essay, I will explain why and how Nora’s failure can be explained by sentimentality in Jefferson’s sense.
According to Jefferson, sentimentality is the problem of pleasurable or false beliefs. He explains it further saying that it is a kind of misrepresenting the world in order to indulge our feelings. In other words, sentimentality is when someone is describing the world differently than what it actually is because it’s emotionally satisfying to that person, such as wanting to believe something for reasons other than truth.
Sentimentality is what enabled Nora to see some ways in which she can be wrong about Torvald, the person who she thought she loved. It interfered with her knowing the world around her and the people. …show more content…
As Jefferson notes, it wasn’t always that way. Jefferson explains that “the qualities that sentimentality imposes on its objects are the qualities of innocence, such as the one we hear in Nora’s simply innocent explanation about her life.” He goes on explaining further that “The simplistic appraisal necessary to sentimentality is also a direct impairment to the moral vision taken of its objects. This may in itself be harmless. Often enough it is. Though the sentimentalists in the poodle parlours may have a morally warped view of their little darlings no-one need be too alarmed by it. But sentimentality does have its moral dangers and these are rather more apparent when its objects are people or countries. For the moral distortions of sentimentality are very difficult to contain just to its objects” (Jefferson,
In the play “A Doll’s House”, after eight years of marriage to Torvald, Nora realizes that she hasn’t properly known her husband. She realizes after a certain episode in their life that her husband has turned into a complete stranger to her. In this essay, I will explain why and how Nora’s failure can be explained by sentimentality in Jefferson’s sense.
According to Jefferson, sentimentality is the problem of pleasurable or false beliefs. He explains it further saying that it is a kind of misrepresenting the world in order to indulge our feelings. In other words, sentimentality is when someone is describing the world differently than what it actually is because it’s emotionally satisfying to that person, such as wanting to believe something for reasons other than truth.
Sentimentality is what enabled Nora to see some ways in which she can be wrong about Torvald, the person who she thought she loved. It interfered with her knowing the world around her and the people. …show more content…
As Jefferson notes, it wasn’t always that way. Jefferson explains that “the qualities that sentimentality imposes on its objects are the qualities of innocence, such as the one we hear in Nora’s simply innocent explanation about her life.” He goes on explaining further that “The simplistic appraisal necessary to sentimentality is also a direct impairment to the moral vision taken of its objects. This may in itself be harmless. Often enough it is. Though the sentimentalists in the poodle parlours may have a morally warped view of their little darlings no-one need be too alarmed by it. But sentimentality does have its moral dangers and these are rather more apparent when its objects are people or countries. For the moral distortions of sentimentality are very difficult to contain just to its objects” (Jefferson,