Nora's social delimas... and do they carry on today

This past week in AP lit we have be analyzing Ibsen’s play, Doll’s House, we have focused on how society defines the individual. The society appears affluent and agreeable enough for those who can operate in it successfully. The Helmers have a very nice home and are looking forward to even more commodious living once Torvald gets his appointment. There is room here to celebrate Christmas with presents, to employ servants, to play music, to enjoy all sorts of creature comforts, and to celebrate with one's friends. Many of the most cherished ideals of middle-class life, then and now, are clearly on display. Nora, the main character in the story, is faced with dilemma of tarnishing her family’s pure societal reputation by leaving her family to find what it means to be an individual or stay with her husband to keep up this facade of this perfect marriage to conform to social morals. Outside the warmth of the house, the world is bitterly cold, full of snow. There is here no consoling sense that nature offers any alternative to society: nature here is brutal, a symbolic extension of the wintry life outside the respectable social group. Throughout the novel there is a clear separation between the inside of the Helmer home and the outside world. The conflict is that Nora lives in this doll’s house facade but wants to find a way to get out and defy society’s standards. Back in the day It wasn’t okay for women to live their life without a man, it wasn’t okay for them to abandon their children, but what I want to discuss is, have those moral changed or are women today obliged to stick to those same morals.

In the play Nora’s internal issue is that she doesn’t know herself as an individual and when she is faced with the harsh reality of society she doesn’t know how to handle it because she has been hidden away from society by her husband. Are women still hidden by society’s expectations? At the time this play was released to be performed people were so appalled and angry at the play because it ended with Nora sacrificing her family to go off and find herself. Today it usually reverse we go and find our self before jumping into finding family, but eventually we are pressured into creating a family. Society today I think still set social obligations for each gender and it’s hard to become an individual when there are so many pressures to find perfection, but how do we determine what society portrays as perfect. I also don’t understand why people stick those standards when society has so many moral flaws.

Nora’s story presents a controversy about self versus society, and which one we should follow when it comes to determining our lives. Nora’s dilemma also reveals a huge flaw within the perfect image of family that society imposes on people to follow. The perfection that people strive for is fake it’s a facade that people strive for because society has such a huge influence on some individual views.