A Journey to Self – Realization in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House

Abstract

In this play A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen portrays how a woman manages to take a stand for her rights in the nineteenth century highly patriarchal society. His view on marriage and on the status of women is reflected in his work a dolls house. He believed that husbands and wives should live as equals and find out the kind of people they really want to become. Feminism is a dominant theme of his play and he has re-examined the roles of women in the society by exposing the masculine stereotype in the Victorian Norway. The play, turned out to be one of his masterpieces as it developed a new dynamic style which portrayed life very accurately and tried to break the false notions of idealized self. The women themselves felt they did not have any identity of themselves and they live on the entity of their father or husbands as being the “other”. This refers to the people who are marginalized and are different from the superior self. In the play, the protagonist Nora is found marginalized in the society and how she comes to know her real identity and leaves the house to live an independent life.