Previously on AP Lit, the class was watching A Doll's House, repulsed by the old and not at all fitting actress that plays Nora in the film.
"There can be no freedom or beauty about a home life that depends on borrowing and debt." -Act I
"Because an atmosphere of lies like that infects and poisons the whole life of a home. In a house like that, every breath that the children take is filled with the germs of evil." -Act 1
"Nora, darling, you're dancing as if your life depended on it!" -Act 2
(I'm in a t.v soap opear mood today :P)
As we have been discussing this play I am repeatedly reminded of The Glass Menagerie, written by Tennessee Williams. It is Nora's character that makes the connection to both Amanda the mother, and Laura the daughter. The costume that Nora wears to the party is not only symbollic because it shows her metamorphasis but also because it symbollically represents her life which as she feels is hanging by the thread that the letter sent by Krogstad is threatening to cut. In Amanda's case in The Glass Menagerie, that beautiful yellow dress she always talks about just shows how she is so attached to the past and is unwilling to let it go. The play certainly depicts her as a character who completely lives in the past and is unable to take a firm grasp of reality. So the dresses or the costumes in both plays are a symbolic representation of each of the women's lives respectively. Also they both live their lives in some facade.
I feel Nora relates to Laura because they are both described as children in one way or another. Nora is a child in Torvald's eyes, and as for Laura, I can't quiet recall but Amanda always thought of her as a small child who was unable to be independant.
It's interesting the way those two plays relate.
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Im not completely sure if this was the author's intended purpose, but Nora's character is perhaps one of the most multidimensional, precise, and "perfect" in the play. In many eerie ways, her nonchalance reminds me of Pangloss's unrealistic optimism, yet the reality of her situation is one of a crumbling "doll house" Today, Ms. Clinch covered something that I had never thought of before; Nora was simply an object of admiration for Torvald, an object which exists solely for his pleasure. Of course, her ideological "virginity" gave the impression that she was simply taking advantage of a flat character for his money in the beginning of the play, but later as the crucial events unfold, Torvald appears to be desperate.
ReplyDeleteSpecifically, take a look at Act III, page 1218 where Torvald greedily says, “Am I not to look at my most precious possession?” clearly indicating his motives for marrying Nora and withstanding her excessively immature actions and behavior. This is only emphasized by, again, Torvald’s own words when he says, “So I take my lovely little Capri girl—I might say, my capricious little Capri girl—under my arm—a quick turn around the room—a graceful bow in all directions…” (P.1216. Of course, Torvald is drunk, but this is the defining moment where the “dollhouse” is shattered; it isn’t a place of blissful happiness or a place of true love and success, it’s a place exploding with superficiality and entrapment. Maybe Torvald really doesn’t love Nora as she thinks?
With this in mind, and the enormity of the issues that Nora faces, is it reasonable to think that her efforts to please Torvald were simply for the wrong motive, maybe even in vain? From the beginning, this couple didn’t appear to be happy, and the pervading materialism basically clouded any attempts by the reader to decipher the characters. Within this mess, I see one perfect character, and that is Nora. Not Miss. Linde, but Nora. I might be crazy, but I also think this play’s a tragedy, reason being that Nora was too ignorant to comprehend the reality that was slowly destroying her life. Torvald’s true feelings for her only came out when he was drunk, as if exactly as Miss Linde explained. The reason I say Nora is a “perfect” character is not because of what she has over others, but because of how effectively she fulfills her purpose in the play. She is the “Antigone” character in the play, ultimately suffering the “loss” of realization and having the utter truth be revealed to her husband. Every character serves the secondary purpose of simply aiding Nora in fulfilling the central theme, which is to live reality and shed the coat of superficiality.
Of course, the central theme isn’t clear either, so the reader is left to uncover scraps of wisdom from these characters with a “secondary purpose” to form a cohesive idea of what’s really going on. Im reading the play for the second time right now, and im finding new meaning each time :/