"How far Nora is a tragic heroine in Henrik Ibsen's "A Doll's House"

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IB Oral

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Presentation Date: March 3rd-7th 2003

“How far Nora is a tragic heroine in Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House”

On a frigid April day in 1864, Henrik Ibsen arrived at the docks in the Norwegian capital of Oslo (then called Christiania). The young man was a failure. The theater he’d run had closed, and none of his own plays were successful. Disillusioned by his country and society, Ibsen, together with his wife and son, boarded a ship and left Norway, figuratively slamming the door behind him.

Fifteen years later a similarly disillusioned Nora Helmer would slam the door on stage at the end of A Doll’s House, helping to change the course of modern drama.

Good Afternoon Ladies & Gentleman, today I will be doing an oral exposé on How far Nora Helmer is a tragic heroine in Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House”. 

The tragic events in a play enable critics to consider it a “tragedy”, one which to some extent follows and diverges from the Aristotelian definition. Aristotle believed that tragedy must revolve around a central character known as “the tragic hero, on whom the plot focuses and who exhibits certain characteristics, which leads to his, though in this particular case, her downfall. A tragic heroine is the female version of a tragic hero and is defined as one who tries to remain true to oneself and will do anything to preserve herself. The use of the word tragic describes the always destructive cause of the character involved. In “A Doll’s House”, by Henrik Ibsen, Nora Helmer is a tragic heroine from the beginning of the play to when the final door slams shut. Ibsen is able to depict her as such through the themes, motifs, and overall plot of the play.

“We are no longer living in the age of Shakespeare…what I desired to depict were HUMAN BEINGS, and therefore I would not let them talk the language of the gods.”

-Ibsen

Through the play, Ibsen is seen to comment on faith and the human condition. Up until Ibsen’s time, serious drama had been almost exclusively concerned with members of the aristocracy or military heroes. Comedy had served to depict the lives of the farmers, workers, and lower class. “A Doll’s House” is a serious drama about the middle class. It can be seen as a tragedy of everyday life. The main character and protagonist of the play, Nora, is not the subservient female of the Victorian society that she appears to be. It is important to remember that The theme of the place of women in society was prevalent in late nineteenth-century literature and appeared in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Ubervilles, to name only a few. ..

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In examining Nora more closely, the reader comes to realize that she is a fascinating and multifaceted character who swings between extremes; she is either very happy or suicidally depressed, comfortable or desperate, wise or naïve, helpless or purposeful. One can understand this range in Nora because she wavers between the person she pretends to be and the one she may someday become. Ibsen felt strongly that society should reflect people’s needs and not work against them. In “A Dolls House”, society’s rules prevent the characters from seeing and expressing their true nature, which is prevalent in Nora, and ...

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