A Doll’s House Essays

College

A Doll's House

Loureen, the protagonist of Lynn Nottage’s play, “POOF!”, and Nora, the main character of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll House”, are both abused by their husbands. While Nora’s abuse is primarily emotional and Loureen’s is physical, their abuse led them...

A Doll's House

It is very difficult to label something as a first in literature. Much the way inventions are often adaptations of previously patented objects, most authors borrow ideas and techniques form pre-existing media. In order to truly classify something...

A Doll's House

'Until death do us part.' Well, not always. Everywhere one looks, divorce is plaguing society, and it has become widely accepted throughout the world. Now the violent shredding of a family is shrugged off like the daily weather, and the treasured...

A Doll's House

'Ibsen's knowledge of humanity is nowhere more obvious than in his portrayal of women' (Joyce). Discuss and illustrate:

In his often quoted 'Notes for a Modern Society' Ibsen stated that, 'in practical life, woman is judged by masculine law, as...

A Doll's House

When Nora Helmer slammed the door shut on her doll's house in 1879, her message sent shockwaves around the world that persist to this day. "I must stand quite alone," Nora declares, "if I am to understand myself and everything about me" (Ibsen...

A Doll's House

In A Doll's House by Ibsen, the author takes the preconditions and viewer expectations of the play format established by earlier writers and uses them to shock his audience rather than lull them into oblivion with simple entertainment. Ibsen...

A Doll's House

In Ibsen's A Doll's House, the path to self-realization and transformation is depicted by the main character, Nora Helmer. She is a woman constrained by both her husband's domineering ways as well as her own. From a Jungian perspective, Nora's...

A Doll's House

Truth or illusion? When the fantasy world people create in order to cope with the absurdity of life is brought too far into reality, it becomes hard to distinguish between authenticity and fiction. This ambiguity is apparent in both Edward Albee's...

A Doll's House

Though written almost fifty years apart, and by two authors from completely different backgrounds, Nella Larsen's novel Quicksand and Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House (also known by the title A Doll House) address similar issues concerning the...

A Doll's House

The Role of Women in "A Doll's House" and "Ghosts"

The role of women has changed significantly throughout history, driven in part by women who took risks in setting examples for others to follow. During the Victorian era, women were beginning to...

A Doll's House

A predicatable response to reading Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House might be a distaste for Nora's feeble-minded obsession with money, possessions, and culture through the first two acts that is then, suddenly and unexpectedly, reversed as those...

A Doll's House

The play A Doll’s House, by Henrik Ibsen, offers a critique of the superficial marriage between Nora and Torvald Helmer. Written in 1879, the play describes the problems which ensue after Nora secretly and illegally takes out a loan from a local...

A Doll's House

Considered the precursor of Western dramatic criticism, Aristotle’s notes on The Poetics arms modern readers with the language by which tragedy is evaluated and judged. In this essay I will examine how Aristotle’s classical vision of tragedy...

College

A Doll's House

Henrik Ibsen was born in 1828 to a merchant family in the small Norwegian town of Skien. After his family fell into poverty, he was forced out of his education and, at 15, worked as an apprentice in a pharmacy. It was here that he began writing...