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A Doll??s House And Goblin Market And A Doll's House

Decent Essays

Henrik Ibsen’s play ‘A Doll’s House’, written in 1879, and Christina Rossetti’s poem ‘Goblin Market’, written in 1862, both demonstrate that an appetite for power, knowledge, sex, and money have an ultimately destructive affect upon their characters.
An appetite for power, and therefore control, is quintessential to the plot of Henrik Ibsen’s play: ‘A Doll’s House’ and Christina Rossetti’s poem: ‘Goblin Market’. The importance of power is first evident in the martial relationship between Nora and Torvald Helmer. Nora presents herself as an idealistic Victorian Woman reliant on her husband: “Aha! So little Miss Independent’s in trouble and needs a man to rescue her, does she?”. The use of a ‘damsel-in-distress’ complex is critical to the …show more content…

Within ‘A Doll’s House’ Nora Helmer has a strong appetite for knowledge. This is particularly evident in her voracious longing for independence: “But it was great fun, though, sitting there working and earning money. It was almost like being a man”. This knowledge of “being a man”, and what that entails, would be unknown to many women during the Victorian era due to the fiercely patriarchal society that was perpetuated. The desire for knowledge and its inaccessible nature is particularly evident in the lack of further education for women. In fact, in the United Kingdom the first widespread report of female further education was the Edinburgh Seven in 1869. Whilst that instance of knowledge was not destructive, in the case of Nora and ‘A Doll’s House’ her appetite for knowledge is ultimately catastrophic for the Victorian female ideal due to the secrecy she creates around it: “My husband must never know of this”. As a result of this concealment and Nora’s appetite for knowledge, the Victorian ideal unravels and ultimately becomes destructive. Likewise, in Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’ an appetite for knowledge is ultimately destructive for the characters within the poem. After tasting the “fruit” of the “Goblin Men” and becoming knowledgeable of the taste and effects of it Laura “knew not was it night or day”. This confusion of time and geographical

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