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Nora 's Escape From Henrik Ibsen 's A Doll 's House Essay

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Sarah Tomlinson
Ms Davis
Honors Modern Literature
7 October 2016
Nora’s Escape Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House follows Nora’s struggles to escape the firm grasp of her domineering husband. Throughout the novel, Nora is depicted as obedient to her husband, Torvald, and never dares to stand up to him. Torvald’s condescension and thinly veiled misogyny continuously confines Nora to her strict 19th century gender role. The title of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House mirrors Nora’s sense of oppression and lack of agency as she struggles to free herself from the strict gender roles of her time period. In Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Ibsen uses his own experiences, a strong main female character, a sense of confinement, a conservative and dominant leading male character, and an overbearingly misogynistic society to prove that women do not have to adhere to, and can overcome, a strict set of gender roles. Though Henrik Ibsen was born and raised into a strictly conservative society, he befriended feminist activists who shaped his own beliefs, which is evident in the plot of A Doll’s House. The Norwegian culture in which Ibsen was raised in teaches that women should always be submissive to the dominant male. Kristen Ørjasæter, a Norwegian writer, gives insight as to why Henrik Ibsen created his title for the play when she states, “The American way of calling a woman a doll is not translatable into Norwegian, where a doll is just a toy” (Ørjasæter). The use of ‘doll’ is

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