LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 21:8 August 2021
ISSN 1930-2940

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         B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
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         Pammi Pavan Kumar, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.

Managing Editor & Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.

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Interrogating the Hegemonic Male-Chauvinistic Socio-Cultural Backgrounds and Emancipation of Women: A Study of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House

Suresh Kumar
Assistant Professor, SLET, UGC-NET

Abstract

Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) is considered one the most significant dramatists in the world. He ponders over and reflects the socio-cultural webs influencing the lives of the individuals in his writings. Patriarchy has left indelible imprints in many societies since times immemorial. Men have enjoyed all the privileges over women. Subjugation and subordination of women have remained the most common and widely accepted features of such societies. The women attempted well to stand and prove themselves as good companions under such socio-cultural milieus but whenever the men started turning dominating ones, the resistance was bound to happen. This paper aims at the analysis of the depiction of women in a male chauvinistic society in late nineteenth Century Norway in A Doll’s House. This paper also analyzes the hegemonic relationship of a woman being a wife with her spouse, with other men-women in society, her husband’s perceptions about her, her selfless attitude, her psychological agony and sacrificial nature.

Keywords: Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House, emancipation, subjugation, subordination, resistance, socio-cultural milieu, hegemonic, male-chauvinistic society, psychological agony.

Introduction

In his A Doll’s House (1879), Henrik Ibsen projects enthusiastic Nora while preparing for Christmas and her experiences thereafter. Nora’s experiences with her husband, Torvald Helmer and with the couple’s friends form the plot of this play. The action of the play in three Acts takes place at Mr Torvald Helmer’s house. Undergoing through the financial crisis, Mr Helmer suggests Nora carving extravagance. Over time, ideological differences start developing into clashes between them. Although Nora attempts well to let him feel relaxed from the financial context, she desires to treasure the festive moments as benchmarks had been set during the last Christmas. Once Mr Helmer had fallen sick, he had to be taken for treatment to Italy, but the couple had no money. In this scenario, she had not considered it appropriate to borrow money from someone else hurting her husband’s dignity, so she managed money from the bank by doing her father’s signature illegally. Mr Krogstad is the only person who knows this act of forgery and has kept the records of her forgery. Mr Krogstad is a bank employee where Mr Helmer works as a lawyer. Once, Mr Helmer warns Mr Krgstand to fire him from his job, the latter starts blackmailing Nora for her act of forgery. After knowing his wife’s act, his ego gets hurt and turns angry worrying about the social grace and reputation. Besides these, Helmer’s friend Dr Rank, Nora’s old friend Mrs Linde contribute to the plot.

For emancipating the status of women in a family and largely in society, female writers started expressing their anxiety regarding the role of a woman in society from the late eighteenth century, although after the 1960s it took the form of a movement. Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) responds to the educational and political theorists of the eighteenth century like Milton, Pope, and Rousseau who believed that women should not obtain a rational education. Here, Wollstonecraft argues that women are also human beings and deserve the same educational as well as other rights like men, and treating them as mere property or ornament for men is against the moral foundation of the society (Nayar 85). Olive Schreiner’s Women and Labour (1911), and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) vividly portray the unequal treatment given to women seeking education and alternatives to marriage, and motherhood, and a section of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) projects the depiction of women in D. H. Lawrence’s novels.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Suresh Kumar
Assistant Professor, SLET, UGC-NET
Department of English
Govt. College Seraj, Lambathach, 175048
Mandi, Himachal Pradesh, India
vijaysuresh8890@gmail.com
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