Penelope In A Doll's House

Throughout historical culture, the role of a wife has always been to be the obedient, loyal and passive woman which her husband has sworn to take care of. May it be in the Ancient Greece period or the 1960s; the view of a wife hasn’t changed much over the ages. However, some stories has showed the hidden side of wives in a multitude of tales, such as Penelope from The Odyssey and Nora from A Doll’s House. Through guile and cunning, they were able to keep their loyalty towards their husband. But how do they reason their motives to keep their devotion for their husbands?

To start off the subject, Penelope in The Odyssey, a heroic tale from Ancient Greece, has gained guile and cunning through her heroic and cunning husband Odysseus. Waiting for over 20 years for her husband’s …show more content…
Hiding things behind both her father and her husband since forever, Nora has learnt her own way of adaptation and loyalty towards them. Always hiding behind a ‘dominant’ male figure, she would do her own selfish things behind them, such as going in the maid’s area in the middle of the night or eating a forbidden snack (macaroons) behind her husband’s back. Compared to Penelope, Nora would seem to me a more selfish character due to these same reasons. Although, even with her selfishness, she would still do her best in order to acquire her husband’s fidelity. Saving her husband’s potential life by committing fraud against a loan shark, or even leaving her dear husband due to him not meeting her prerequisites of him; during that time period, a woman doing all of this seemed unimaginable. But for that woman, if her reasoning was to save her husband or because that same husband wasn’t what she expected to be (brave, responsible, head of the family), she would deem it reasonable. Thus is how Nora processed her ways in Ibsen’s