Nora: Birth of a Free Soul

Abstract

Nora is one of the most complex characters in the realm of 19 th century drama. At the beginning of the play, A Doll's House we find that Nora doesn't realize that she has got a self of her own. Rather, the purpose of her life is to please Torvald or her father, and to raise her children. But by the end of the play, she discovers that her "most sacred duty" is to herself. After the epiphany, she leaves her home to find out who she is and what she thinks. In the play A Doll's House, we learn and discover many things about the protagonist as Nora is presented differently at various stages in here. We notice how her character changes as a result of Ibsen's approach to creating her personality and the way in which she is presented. In this paper I will be looking how both Helmer and the society spark the beginning of the journey through the search of her inner self and how Ibsen is giving us an insight into Nora at each stage of the play. Through her, Ibsen portrays not only the universal position of women, but also their lifelong search for independence and renewal of an individual which seems to be a very important development for human beings. I don't want to see Nora as a free woman, rather as an independent individual-a human being-a free soul, Ibsen is not a feminist, rather a humanist. This paper is also a study which compares and contrasts Nora with other powerful characters in the dramatic literature like Antigone, Clytemenstra, Medea, and Lady Macbeth to show that Nora possesses totally different attitude towards life. I won't call A Doll's House a tragedy; rather, it proclaims an epiphany for Nora as well as for the mankind who are in chain. The main notification of this paper is to back up the concept that in Henric Ibsen's A Doll's House, Nora symbolizes not only a woman's quest for freedom, but also that to free one's soul.