Comparing Gender In Candide And A Doll's House

The Role of Gender in Candide and a Doll’s House In the novelCandide Voltaire writes a humorous yet gruesome satire of society by telling the story of a man named Candide, the bastard nephew of a German Baron, who grows up in his castle and falls in love with Cunegonde. Candide is thrown out of his home and forced into many awful situations, due to his relations with Cundegonde. Candide joins forces with many others who have gone through traumatic experiences in his search for Cunegonde. In the DramaA Doll’s HouseHenrik Ibsen demonstrates how he views the inequality that women of his day had to suffer through just to live average lives, by showing us the transformation of Nora Helmer, from a subservient housewife into an independent woman.
There are many different types of sexism in Candide and a Dolls House. However, it would seem that in A Doll’s House the women can escape the sexism and unfairness,
to an extent. The different types of sexism that are expressed in Candide include, but are not limited to, rape and other elements associated with rape. Sexism isn’t one of the main themes in Candide whereas it appears to be a major theme in A Doll’s House. However the sexism, in the form of rape, in Candide is easily underplayed due to the characters reactions to rape. When a female in Candide explains their history or outright states that they were raped the characters don’t react very strongly at all, in fact they treat it as if it were commonplace. The reader feeds off that feeling, further underplaying the fact that a terrible thing has happened to the female character. In this society "A lady of honor may be raped once, but it strengthens her virtue." (Cunegonde) This is an example that even the female characters in Candide are accepting rape as a common thing.
Rape itself is not always sexist, but often comes off as exceedingly sexist, vulgar and somewhat evil in modern society. Rape seems to be a commonplace occurrence in the world of Candide, and the act of rape removes any sense of purity that a character has. (QUOTE) Purity, often in the form of virginity, is seen as a desirable trait to the men of Candide’s world yet at the same time they take the purity of the women that they find so desirable, then proceed to defile them with no consideration for the woman. This is likely because purity is such a desirable trait that the men are willing to steal it from the women they desire.
The blatant sexism in A Doll’s House at first seems very potent and focused, but it can be argued that it is not nearly as sexist as the men in Candide’s world, simply because in the world of A Doll’s House Nora’s friend Kristine has escaped Nora’s terrible predicament and is not looked down upon because of her gender.
When Kristine and Krogstad had their secret conversation it could have been predicted that Krogstad would turn her away or make her seem silly and useless simply because of her gender; However he revealed that they used to love each other and that Kristine left him. The reason Kristine left him was that she needed to go and work to earn money for her family. This introduced two new concepts to the story that we had not seen before, one being that women could go and work to support three people (her two brothers and her mother) and the other being that there were women that weren’t simply looked down upon solely for their gender. It is assumed that Kristine was looked down upon by men but not so much as Nora or one of the women from Candide’s
world.
The only sources of information we had about women in the world of a dolls house were Nora Helmer, the Helmer’s nanny, and Kristine. Nora Helmer was subjected to sexism that