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Similarities Between Trifles And A Doll's House

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Similarities Between Trifles And A Doll's House
The female characters in the two plays, Trifles and A Doll's House, choose duty to family and friends over duty to the law. Lawbreakers are often portrayed as selfish and rough people, but just the opposite is true here. Love and compassion led these characters to ignore their duty to the law in favor of helping the people they cared for.

Desperation plays a large part in their motives and the treatment of women in the time periods of these plays is the cause of that. Women's lives were controlled to a great extent by men. They couldn't even secure loans on their own, and they had to get their husbands or fathers to sign for them. This is what happened in A Doll's House, and that is why Nora disregarded the law and forged her father's signature in order not to burden him while he was severely ill. Unaware that he had died, she signed his name and left herself open to prosecution with this proof of her transgression. She was ignorant of the law in the matter, but she was also desperate to save her husband's life. Since she knew that her husband would have refused to borrow the money himself, she felt like she had no other choice than to do what she did.

In Trifles, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters are also …show more content…
Wright was by hers. Yet that is only when he is pleased by her obedience to him. When he learns of her transgression, he becomes cold towards her and shows his selfishness. He doesn't care that she did it to save his life, and he has no regard for her at all. It is only when the problem is solved that he claims to love her again. Both plays show how dependent the women were on their husbands, and how the whims and temperaments of these men controlled their lives. Nora's husband called her his songbird, and she realized in the end that he had been keeping her in a cage of sorts. Ironically, Mrs. Wright loved her canary much more than Nora's husband loved
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