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أكـاديـمـي
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رد: l|][Ξ¯▪ Last Year 1st Semester ▪¯Ξ][|
The End of A Doll’s House
A Doll’s House traces the awakening of Nora Helmer from her previously unexamined life of domestic, wifely comfort. Having been ruled her whole life by either her father or her husband Torvald , Nora finally comes to question the foundation of everything she has believed in once her marriage is put to the test. Having borrowed money from a man of ill-repute named Krogstad by forging her father’s signature, she was able to pay for a trip to Italy to save her sick husband’s life (he was unaware of the loan, believing that the money came from Nora’s father). Since then, she has had to contrive ways to pay back her loan, growing particularly concerned with money and the ways of a complex world.
Torvald has just been promoted to manager of the bank, where he will receive a huge wage and be extremely powerful. Krogstand tells Nora that he will reveal her secret if she does not persuade her husband to let him keep his position. Nora tries to convince Torvald to preserve Krogstad’s job, using all of her feminine tricks (which he encourages), but she is unsuccessful.One night Krogstad sends a letter to Torvald telling him about the loan story .The husband has just read Krogstad’s letter and is enraged by its contents. He accuses Nora of ruining his life. He essentially tells her that he plans on forsaking her, contrary to his earlier claim that he would take on everything himself. During his tirade, he is interrupted by the maid bearing another note from Krogstad and addressed to Nora. Torvald reads it and becomes overjoyed. Krogstad has had a change of heart and has sent back the bond. Torvald quickly tells Nora that it is all over after all: he hasnforgiven her, and her pathetic attempt to help him has only made her more endearing than ever.
Nora, seeing Torvald’s true character for the first time, sits her husband down to tell him that she is leaving him. After he protests, she explains that he does not love her—and, after tonight, she does not love him. She tells him that, given the suffocating life she has led until now, she owes it to herself to become fully independent and to explore her own character and the world for herself. As she leaves, she reveals to Torvald that she hopes that a “miracle” might occur: that one day, they might be able to unite in real wedlock. The play ends with the door slamming on her way out.
A Doll's House ends with the slamming of a door. Nora turns her back on her husband and kids, and takes off into the snow to make her own way in the world. It's a pretty bold decision, to say the least. Some might even call it foolish. She doesn't have a job. Not a whole lot of marketable skills. No home. No prospects of any kind. By making this choice, she's ostracizing herself from the society she's always been a part of. Most "respectable" people just aren't going to hang out with her. The comfortable life she's leading will be totally destroyed.
Nora makes her reason for her decision pretty clear in her last argument with Torvald. Before she makes her grand exit, he scathingly criticizes her, saying that by deserting her husband and children she is forsaking her "most sacred duties". Nora doesn't see it this way. She tells him that the duties that are most sacred to her now are the "duties to [herself] .
It seems like Nora has gone through a kind of personal awakening. She's come to the conclusion that she's not a fully realized person. She has to spend some time figuring out who she is as an individual or she'll never be anything more than someone's doll. This would be impossible under the smothering presence of Torvald. She must force herself to face the world alone. Nora knows that she is about to suffer. It seems that some part of her may even welcome it. In a way Nora is like the Biblical Eve after she ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. All of a sudden, she is enlightened, but that enlightenment comes with a heavy cost.
But is there any hope for Torvald and Nora getting back together? The last line of the play seems to suggest that maybe there is. Torvald is alone in the living room. Stage directions tell us that, "A hope flashes across his mind" and then Torvald says, "The most wonderful thing of all?" He's referring to the conversation he and Nora had right before she walked out of the room. Nora says that if they're ever to be more than strangers "the most wonderful thing of all would have to happen," that their "life together would be a real wedlock" .So, has Torvald realized what this means? Has he figured out that they both have to respect each other as individuals in order to have a real marriage? Has he taken a bite of the forbidden fruit as well? Ibsen doesn't tell us for sure. Maybe Torvald runs out into the snow and makes it all better. Maybe his pride keeps him in the apartment and maybe there are other final actions .
Though Nora is economically advantaged in comparison to the play’s other female characters, she nevertheless leads a difficult life because society dictates that Torvald be the marriage’s dominant partner. Torvald issues decrees and condescends to Nora, and Nora must hide her loan from him because she knows Torvald could never accept the idea that his wife (or any other woman) had helped save his life. Furthermore, she must work in secret to pay off her loan because it is illegal for a woman to obtain a loan without her husband’s permission.
Nora realizes that she is childlike and knows nothing about the world. She feels alienated from both religion and the law, and wishes to discover on her own, by going out into the world and learning how to live life for herself, whether or not her feelings of alienation are justified. Nora’s eating of macaroons against Torvald’s wishes foreshadows her later rebellion against Torvald.
Nora’s abandonment of her children can also be interpreted as an act of self- sacrifice. Despite Nora’s great love for her children—manifested by her interaction with them and her great fear of corrupting them—she chooses to leave them. Nora truly believes that the nanny will be a better mother and that leaving her children is in their best interest.
The action of the play is set at Christmastime, and Nora and Torvald both look forward to New Year’s as the start of a new, happier phase in their lives. They both must become new people and face radically changed ways of living. Hence, the new year comes to mark the beginning of a truly new and different period in both their lives and their personalities.learning how to live life for herself, whether or not her feelings of alienation are justified. Nora’s eating of macaroons against Torvald’s wishes foreshadows her later rebellion against Torvald.
For Nora's exit is a heroically brave manifestation of her uncompromising integrity, her passionate sense of herself, her absolute refusal to live a life where she is not in control of her actions. There is about her actions something grand, defiant, and totally free, values all the more precious given the infected society she is rejecting. The sight of such a person acting in such a way can scare us, for such action calls into question all the compromises we make in our lives to remain within our own doll houses. Such a vision of freedom challenges our sense of what we have done and are doing with our lives. Those contemporaries who were outraged at the ending of the play were being honest enough about their own feelings. If we are less upset, that may be because we have consoling ways to reassure ourselves, to neutralize the full effect of what she is doing.
This heroic quality in Nora's character indicates why the alternative "happy" ending Ibsen wrote for the play is so totally false. Technically it resolves the work into a comedy, by having Nora finally learn the importance of compromise for the sake of social bonds. But that shift violates everything that is most interesting and vital about her. There is nothing about this fascinating character which indicates that she would collapse so abjectly and unexpectedly. It's as if Sophocles provided an alternative ending in which Oedipus comes running back full of apologies, eager to make an appointment to see an eye doctor and a family counselor]
At the same time, however, her actions make no rational sense. They violate the strong bonds (and the social responsibilities those bonds bring with them) she has with Torvald and her children (whose major purpose in this play is to underscore this point about Nora). The frozen dark world she is going into is as unforgiving and brutal as the desert Oedipus wanders off into at the end of his tragedy. It is a world which has broken people like Krogstad and Kristine, who were better equipped in some respects than Nora is to cope with its demands. And she is carrying out into that world the most fragile of illusions: the demand for Romantic self-realization.
Hence, the question so many people want resolved ("Is Nora right or wrong to walk out the door at the end?") does not admit of a clear answer. The play insists that such a demand for simple moral clarity in the face of human actions is naive--rather like asking if Oedipus is right or wrong to destroy his own eyesight and become an exile. Nora is both triumphantly right and horribly wrong. She is free, brave, strong, and uncompromisingly herself and, at the same time, socially irresponsible, naive, self-destructive, and destructive of others. We may well want to sort out these contradictions into something more coherent and reassuring, something we can fit into our comfortable conventional moral frameworks (Nora the militant feminist, Nora the selfish home-wrecker), and there are productions which make that easy for us to do. My sense of the text, however, suggests that Ibsen is not going to sort out these contradictions for us, for they lie at the heart of the tragic experience he is inviting us to explore
When Nora walks out on Torvald and her family, she has asserted the final step on her first course to independence. This active step towards independence leads her into new and uncharted territory. However, it is a place that she knows that she must enter, scared and excited at the same time. She leaves her husband to find a new and independent life on her own.
At the end of the final scene, when Nora leaves the house assumedly for good, the screen directions help to provide closure for the play and for the audience. Although this is still a very open ended play, and many watchers would be left wondering how Nora survives and whether she manages to change her life for the better away from the controlling influence of Torvald. "From below the sound of a door slamming" shows that she has walked out of her past life for good.
Open Endings are a great way to infuriate an audience. But by leaving the major conflict initiated by The suspense plot unresolved, they can also force us to confront your themes.
On one hand as a story-telling technique, Open Endings are unsatisfying for most audiences: the pay-off of the play's conflict never arrives. Playwrights using this device often do so because they doubt there's a real possibility of a solution to the problem and conflict they've just explored. They take the risk of using them because they believe strongly that this is how they must end the play. Open Endings are not an idle choice.
On the other hand ,many authors of contemporary short-stories are opting for the open endings. There is an interaction between the reader, character and writer-- an understood agreement that life just like the story is an open ending, but many people prefer endings with a precise conclusion.In this category the reader’s position is particularly so strong.
The drama A Dolls House although laden with symbolism is purely by chance this is backed up when reading Henrik Ibsen’s own words in a letter he wrote in 1887 “As to symbolism, [Ibsen] says that life is full of it, and
therefore his plays are full of it, though critics insist on discovering all sorts of esoteric meanings in his work of which he is entirely innocent .
The last door, is a representation of the menacing reality of the outside world. It does however; eventually become the door of liberation, for the newly awakened Nora .
At the last scene there is an emphasis to the tragic color black and on the darkness of the night. Rank, Torvald and Nora all wear prominently black colors; (the men's evening dress; Nora's colored dress is covered with a black shawl).
The slamming of the door as Nora leaves the house is interpreted as a rebuff to the role which Torvald imposed, that being a doll in a dolls house, this rejection is explained in the Metheun Edition of A Dolls House as essential in Nora’s quest to realize her full potential in the outside world
The ending of this Ibsen play is a powerful one that emphasizes the finality of Nora's decision to leave Torvald. She doesn't merely close the door to their relationship; she slams the door. That chapter in her life as Torvald's "doll" wife is completely over; Nora is never coming home. She has made her decision deliberately and explained it calmly to Torvald before she walks out, but the slammed door punctuates her statement with an exclamation point that she no longer suffer his treatment of her silently. Nora declares she is an individual first, and she leaves to pursue her life as one. The audience is not left wondering about her choice; we don't know, however, whether she will succeed in her new life as a woman who has abandoned her family .
But is there any hope for Torvald and Nora getting back together? The last line of the play seems to suggest that maybe there is. Torvald is alone in the living room. Stage directions tell us that, "A hope flashes across his mind" and then Torvald says, "The most wonderful thing of all?" He's referring to the conversation he and Nora had right before she walked out of the room. Nora says that if they're ever to be more than strangers "the most wonderful thing of all would have to happen," that their "life together would be a real wedlock" .So, has Torvald realized what this means? Has he figured out that they both have to respect each other as individuals in order to have a real marriage? Has he taken a bite of the forbidden fruit as well? Ibsen doesn't tell us for sure. Maybe Torvald runs out into the snow and makes it all better. Maybe his pride keeps him in the apartment and maybe there are other final actions .
Open ending can make a profound statement about the human condition and about and the absurdity existence , they can leave an audience contemplating for days , months , even years about their significant endings . As in A Doll’s House , many critics until now right articles and essays on it’s significant open ending . These endings manipulate the audience to make them dance to the author’s tune .
Another reason why Ibsen wrote his ending in that way , because he is writing about a new strange attitude by a mother in his time . He writes about a mother who give up all her duties toward her husband and her children to search and create her own life . He is like lightening the mind of his audience , that one day women may explosion and face their society with a rebellious and different personality .
When Nora walks out on Torvald and her family, she has asserted the final step on her first course to independence. This active step towards independence leads her into new and uncharted territory. However, it is a place that she knows that she must enter, scared and excited at the same time. She decides to face the harsh society in a snowy night and shuts the door of her back dependent life .
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