Contextual points Flashcards

Question

Why was the ending to 'A Dolls House' so controversial?

Answer 1

-Clement Scott claimed the denouement was psychologically implausible. -anathema for a victorian mother to leave her children.

Answer 2

-Ibsen wrote onehimself. 1880, a famous German actress, wanted to perform - would not accept ending. -Pirated version probably imminent. -Ibsen wrote new ending called it 'barbaric act of violence against the text.' -Nora is forced by Torvald into their children's nursery doorway and sinks brokenly onto the floor, overcome by maternal guilt. -proved violently unpopular with German audiences. -There were even riots. -Similar adapted version appeared in Britain in 1884 - did very badly.

Answer 3

Hegel argued: -women's roles confined them to the family unit. -Whereas man's actual substantial life derived from the state, learning, and from work. -man's struggle was with the external world and within himself - only through his division that he fights his way to self-sufficient unity with himself. -Women's law, meanwhile, was based on emotional and subjective family piety.

Answer 4

-Nora move past this family piety and subjective emotion that's governed her childhood and her marriage to leave home to begin her own struggle with the external world and with herself.

Answer 5

-Ibsen told friends that Nora was a pet name for Lenora - meaning Nora is never once addressed by her full adult name once in the play - treated like a child by everyone throughout.

Answer 6

-notorious theatrical flop. -By Comden and Green. -Nora tries a number of occupations - scullery maid, wardrobe assistant, mistress to a wealthy man. -The returns to talk at the table with Helmer about experiences. -Closed three days after it opened in 1982 - shows people are uninterested in seeing a woman returned to her societal role - people want change.

Answer 7

-figure of confidante in literature. -E.g. Romeo and Juliet. -Role of the nurse generally stands for rough common sense.

Answer 8

-Indicated that the young were not corrupted by lying mothers but rather by poverty and homelessness. Thus Torvalds views are already outdated and new understandings of criminality were growing.

Answer 9

-Viking name - 'thunder power' - big strong healthy male. -further emphasizes his masculinity and power.

Answer 10

Ibsen's play immediately draws attention to girls or women, thus gender was the focus of his play; he made his main character a woman so that he could point out a deep societal problem, namely how women are treated like dolls, or playthings, by the patriarchal society.

Answer 11

Some interpretations of the play argue that it is not concerned with the plight of women, but rather the universal need to find self-fulfilment in life. They often point to a statement Ibsen made late in his career about not being a feminist, "I thank you for the toast, but must disclaim the honour of having consciously worked for the women's rights movement." arguing that he was instead a humanist, a speech he rather ungraciously delivered to the Norwegian League of Women's rights who were giving him a birthday banquet. He explained that his emphasis was on art and poetry, not "propaganda."

Answer 12

Ibsen wanted to point out a deep societal issue, however, he did not write a prescription and solve a problem; he simply posed a question in the form of a play. Thus, his work is not "propaganda" directly associated with the women's rights league.

Answer 13

What are women in contemporary life supposed to do; how can they live in a male-dominated world?"

Answer 14

The societal problems it exposed in 1879 when it was first published and performed have by no means gone away or been fully resolved. This is a play that clearly dissects conventional bourgeois society, exposing its rigidity and the constraints it places upon character and on each individual life. The play also points out the prominent issue between parents and their children. Even more significantly, the dramatic innovations the play presented have left a long legacy on modern dramas in terms of how plays are written, beginning with the most basic element, the plot.

Answer 15

There are no dead bodies littering the stage at the end of A Doll's House, as in the classics of western drama that have provided a template for what we call tragedy, e.g. Hamlet, King Lear, Oedipus Rex etc... Ibsen challenges this age-old model of tragedy by bringing it up to date and saying that you don't need heaps of corpses (or even death) in order to have a tragedy. Women are forced to conform to a system that only recognises masculine modes of being and thinking. "A WOMAN CANNOT BE HERSELF IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY; IT IS AN EXCLUSIVELY MALE SOCIETY with laws drafted by men, and with counsel and judges who judge feminine conduct from the male point of view." By giving his play the subtitle, "a modern tragedy," Ibsen is announcing that this unacknowledged but fundamental difference between men and women, with the resulting impoverishment of women's lives, is the single greatest tragedy of contemporary life. He is also following induction of influential danish critic Georg Brandes that modern literature should "submit problems to debate."

Answer 16

Nora Helmer was modelled on young friend of Ibsen's, Laura Kieler. She was an aspiring writer who confided in Ibsen that: -her husband developed tb -in order to save his life and take him to warmer climate she had to forge a check -when her husband found out he divorced her and took away her children -she ended up in a mental asylum for a time. It is a cruel irony that a play that seeks to remedy the exploitation of women in society should so ruthlessly exploit one unfortunate woman in doing so.

Answer 17

Helped to unleash full force of women's rights movement and widespread agitation for the vote. His articulation of the double standards "two laws" directly influenced many other contemporary playwrights such as Wilde and shaw. Ibsen's life-long interest in the plight of women can be found in many of his plays, his work is, in a sense, one long mediation on women's issues eg head Ghosts, Hedda Gabler and so on. This ofc utterly refutes denial he made about supporting women's rights movement in 1898, this can be explained by his fear of being affiliated with any one group, whether feminist, socialist, anarchist etc.. he wanted to be his own man, with his own work.

Answer 18

Ibsen also wrote men plays about men juggling with family demands and all-consuming careers. He often asks the important question, How far does devotion to one's calling and vocation pre-empt other aspects of life, including family? His plays revolve around sacrifice and compromise. Ibsen and Idealism: Ibsen's plays also show the pitfalls of a too-rigid commitment to idealism, the "all-or-nothing mentality/ He shows the need for such engrained, archaic masculine traits to be stripped away from modern men.

Answer 19

" A Doll Home", "A Doll's house is a mistranslation. By using the literary technique Modernist writers call "estrangement" or alienation, Ibsen turns the strange into familiar: he takes a well known cliche and turns it into something similar, but also very different. Whilst "A Doll's House" suggests a little girl's plaything, "A Doll's Home" sounds much more sinister: how the idea of a girl playing with dolls has spread beyond the neat confines of a little house, to pervade the real home - the real life of the characters, and of every woman. And the tragedy is that Nora is living as a doll in her own home and passing the role on, unthinkingly, to her own children.

Answer 20

many productions choose only to allude to the children rather than actually show the, as Ibsen's script mad this possible. For example, the hide-and-seek game in Act 1 could be played entirely without them, with simply Nora alone and "hiding" on stage and speaking to them as if they are in nearby rooms we can't see. This can send out a powerful message, making a thematic point, by suggesting that through their absence, Nora is already gone from their lives.

Answer 21

The part requires a psychological awareness on the part of actress - at last, there was a depth and backstory to female characters. Anti-melodramatic and subtle.

Answer 22

A contrarian: just when people though they had him pinned down, he surprised them by doing something going against what he'd done before. -The pillars of society (1877) -Ghosts (1880) -An Enemy of. the People (1882) were his first four 'social problem' plays, each driving home a message about how important it is to tell the truth, to expose falsehood and illusion.

Answer 23

Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792, "A vindication of the rights of women." She states women are confined in cages as "the feathered race."