Communication Skills 099

A Doll House

A Doll House, a play written by Henrik Ibsen is a play that takes place in 1879 and portrays marriage and the relationship between the main protagonists, Nora and Torvald, in a way that was controversial for its time. The way that Ibsen portrays marriage in this play would not be considered revolutionary in today’s society because marriage now has broader ‘guidelines’, is not considered something that is necessary for a woman to complete in her lifetime, and women have become much more independent than they were at the time of Ibsen’s play. Marriage no longer has universal rules that most people used to follow, and the meaning of what marriage is, is interpreted by the citizens of today’s modern society in all different ways. The role of a woman breaking away from a controlling spouse is no longer seen as a revolutionary idea, and is not looked down upon as it was in the nineteen-hundreds.

Traditional martial roles are no longer followed in two-thousand fourteen. The woman does not need to be the homemaker, and the man does not need to go out and be the breadwinner. Marriage is loosely defined as a union between two consenting people and no longer includes the gender roles the idea of marriage used to entail. These gender roles are almost at the point of being split evenly according to an article on Psychology Today that states “…far more couples share the load of earning and housekeeping today than ever before. (Rutter 1)” It is now common for both partners to work, or even for the woman to have a greater income than the man. In A Doll House the reader sees that this is not the way Nora and Torvald conduct their marriage. Torvald is the “successful” one, while Nora is simply there to be his trophy wife and make sure the house is in order when he gets back from a long day of work. “To be able to be free from care, quite free from care; to be able to play and romp with the children; to be able to keep the house beautifully and have everything just as...