A DOLL S HOUSE

A DOLL’S HOUSE
As Modern
Tragedy
BY
Henrick Ibsen

_ Henrick Ibsen
Father of Modern Drama

_This play was written in 1879 in
Italy.
_The original language is
Norwegian.
_The setting is around the 1870s.
_The themes are the sacrificial role of women, the unreliability of appearances, and parental and family obligations.
_The symbols are New Year’s and

Aristotle:
According to Aristotle, a tragedy always centers around a high-ranking person, such as a noble or king. During the course of the play, this person faces loss of status, loved ones, and even his life, usually as the result of personal weaknesses or failings. Often this failing is hubris, an inflated sense of a person’s own importance and infallibility.
Aristotle believed such tragedies provided positive emotional and moral effects to the audience, a process he called catharsis.

Now lets see that how Ibsen’s
Doll’s
House is a
Modern
Tragedy

Ibsen wrote on Common
People:

Ibsen

broke the social barriers and wrote tragedies based on middle-class people.
Ibsen’s story does not fit the first part of the definition in that there is no royalty at all in the story.
The closest thing would be in that one main character was a prominent businessman, Torvald
Helmer, and the other main character, his wife, Nora.
Neither of them could be classified as royalty .
Other highly visible characters were a medical doctor and a lawyer. Again, none of these characters were anywhere near being members of royalty.

Written In Prose Form :
Henrick Ibsen, considered by many to be the father of modern prose drama.

In Shakespeare tragedy is mainly written in poetry, and written in a way that people normally don't speak in. In modern tragedy the language used is just like every day speaking which can be also said written in Prose style. For example
The story begins in the living room of the Helmer's, it is described as "furnished inexpensively, but with taste." Other items and their

No high dramatization:
_Earlier when tragedies were written in verse form they thought to be incomplete without super-natural elements and they contain fights and was incomplete without shed of blood. _But Henrick Ibsen wrote Doll’s House which has no high dramatization in a way that it donot contain lengthy dialouges, full length speeches, no war, no shed of blood but what it contains is domestic fights which is common in everyday life.
Like when Nora talk with Mrs. Linde
NORA: "How painful and humiliating it would be for
Torvald […] to know that he owed me anything! It would upset our mutual relations altogether." (1.197)
Instead of exaggerating she uses simple sentence and tell that The Helmers' marriage is based on maintaining a veneer of male dominance.

OLL'S HOUSE-ITS PLACE IN HISTO
_A Doll's House almost irresistibly invites sweeping generalizations. _It is the first Modern Tragedy, as Ibsen originally named it. _The strong divorce play and the social drama are alike descended from it.
Critic from Duke University said about Doll’s House that :
I thought about the universality of the woman figure portrayed in
Ibsen’s play. Now, about 130 years afer the publicaton of A Doll’s
House, many women stll face the same circumstances that Nora faced.
For instance, today’s women working in the same capacity as men make about 72 cents compared to a dollar for men.

NORA AS A modern TRAGIC
HEROINE:
She grows in stature, and is purged by suffering.
In defeat she is victorious. In the majority of theories about 'the tragic' these are significant factors.
When everything lies in ruins round her, Nora emerges strong and healthier.
She is essentially a doll, hence the title of the story. Nora must separate herself from her husband and his world to find out who she really is.
An example shown
Before she makes her grand exit, he scathingly critcizes her, saying that by desertng her husband and children she is forsaking her "most sacred dutes" (3.309). Nora doesn't see it this way. She tells him that the dutes that are most sacred to her now are the "dutes to [herself]" (3.314).

Nora as Character showing women
Liberation :
Nora Helmer, our main character, strives to achieve the perfect ideal that is set before her by the contexts of her society and her husband, Torvald.

Nora herself is trapped within the "dollhouse" that is her physical home.
Earlier women was thought to fragile characters living on sympathizes of their husbands but Ibsen through character of Nora showed that they are not “Dolls” anymore. For a play written nearly two and a half decades ago, A Doll's House certainly contains some shockingly modern feminist themes.
Ibsen modern heroin shakes the common world of women making them to think about themselves instead of considering them inferior.

Helmer: Before all else you are a wife and a mother.
Nora: That I no longer believe. I believe that before all else I am a human being, just as much as you are or at least that I should try to become one. I know that most people agree with you, Torvald.

Modern Tragedy uses irony
:
Irony is the use of words to convey a meaning that is opposite of their literal meaning. There are many instances of irony in Henrik Ibsen’s “A
Doll House”.
The type of irony found in this play, is better referred to as something called dramatic irony.
An example is in Act 1 where Torvald condemns Krogstad for forgery and not coming forward. He also mentons that this kind of acton corrupts children. We as readers know that this has more significant meaning to Nora because we know that she herself commited forgery and kept it a secret from Torvald.
Another example could be When Torvald then asks Nora if she has been eatng sweets, she lies and says she has not. Nora and the audience know this is a lie and so know more than Torvald making this an situaton of dramatc irony.

The modern elements in the technique of the play :
Ibsen is often thought of as the founder of realist drama.
In realist drama, the characters talk in a close approximation of everyday speech. A Doll's House. Sure the characters talk in a generally conversational way, but the plot is obviously and unapologetically contrived. There are melodramatic devices like secret revealing letters. The doorbell rings at convenient times, bringing trouble for Nora.
People enter and exit just when Ibsen needs to move on to the next scene and bring on new ideas. This wasn't a bad thing to Ibsen. His goal was to examine ideas, to challenge individuals to really think about their society, not to present photographic reality.
A Doll's House is widely considered to be one of the prime examples of realism. A Modern play by virtue of its message
:
A Doll’s House is a Modern Tragedy because a wife who has always led a conventional kind of life in the household takes a revolutionary step. to the women of the day to rise and demand their rights. The step taken by Nora was a triumphed call.
The play basically tells us about women role which is also explained by Nora at several points like she told Helmer .
Nora: That I no longer believe. I believe that before all else I am a human being, just as much as you are or at least that I should try to become one. I know that most people agree with you, Torvald.

Open Ending of Doll’s House :
A Doll's House ends with the slamming of a door. Nora turns her back on her husband and kids, and takes off into the snow to make her own way in the world. It's a pretty bold decision, to say the least.
Some might even call it foolish. She doesn't have a job. Not a whole lot of marketable skills. No home. No prospects of any kind. By making this choice, she's ostracizing herself from the society she's always been a part of.
Most "respectable" people just aren't going to hang out with her. The comfortable life she's leading will be totally destroyed. None of the plays written before show were open ended but Ibsen made his play open ended and let his readers think what happen to Nora afterwards.???? Conclusion:
IBSEN WROTE ON COMMON PEOPLE
WRITTEN IN PROSE FORM
NO SUPER-NATURAL ELEMENTS
NO HIGH DRAMATIZATION
A DOLL'S HOUSE-ITS PLACE IN HISTORY
NORA AS A MODERN TRAGIC HEROINE
MODERN TRAGEDY USES IRONY

A MODERN PLAY BY VIRTUE OF ITS
MESSAGE
OPEN ENDING OF DOLL’S HOUSE

THANK YOU…….

ANY
QUESTIONS..????

Thank you !!!!!