A Doll's House: Ken and Barbie All Grown Up

Up until the concluding scene of the play, it is difficult to pinpoint the exact message the author was trying to get across. One could imagine that the play was about women’s rights, but pro or con? The scenes contained so many sexist stereotypes and the date and era that the play was written and performed in can not help but confirm the reader’s suspicions that Ibsen was against women’s rights.


Upon further inspection, however, the reader can find much evidence of Nora’s attempts to cross over the gender lines in a positive light. Her actions are examples of what many prominent women would later do to help facilitate the women’s rights movement.


Initially, the reader sees Nora as a childish character, merely her husband’s pet. Then she confesses to Mrs. Linde her attempts to be an independent person, taking on work by herself and handling business matters behind her husband’s back; but even this is questionable as she approaches these matters with a substantial amount of naivety and blunders about quite a bit. But in the end, Nora has transformed into a motivated, driven individual who realizes what she wants for herself and is ready to do anything to achieve it. This when the reader realizes that her confessions of the secrets she had kept for many years was provoked by her jealousy of Mrs. Linde’s individuality and independence.


There is also a good amount of criticism of the male gender involved in the play. This can be seen in Torvald Helmer’s character, who is set up by the author in such a way that it is difficult not to dislike him. His selfishness and eagerness to look out for only himself is easily despised by the audience. Ibsen is making a point when, in the end, Nora decides to look for only herself and nobody else- clearly showing that she had crossed over the gender lines set by the society of the era and on to independence. (329)

Hamlet's Sanity- Part 1 in the Series of Analyses of the Works of Eric Tiberius Fram

“Hamlet's sanity became a question for me when I realized that he was going to change the course of his actions and of his life based on a conversation he had with a ghost.” This shrewd statement, by Eric Tiberius Fram, is one that I unexpectedly had to disagree with. Hamlet’s actions in the primary segment of the play point to anything but insanity. “However, while at the beginning of the play, the only person who comes into contact with the ghost in Hamlet, later in the play, Horatio too hears the ghost. This validates Hamlet's contact with the ghost as an actual event and not just a hallucination.” This statement, also taken from the blog of the Great One, nullifies the initial statement as Hamlet’s willingness to follow the ghost is given credibility, which was expected anyways as a survey taken in 2003 showed that more than half of the adults in the United States believe in ghosts.

“It is interesting to consider that idea that the main character of a Shakespeare play may possibly be insane. Since the play is centered around Hamlet, if he was insane, would the audience be seeing the story through the lens of a madman, or would the audience be able to tell the difference between the rumination of a madman and the actual events that occur?” This proposition is similar to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which questioned the effect that language had in shaping one’s reality. If there is no word for a concept, one can never truly understand the said idea. Similarly, the audience can never know if the recitation of the events they are seeing before them are accurate.

“In the end though, when all of the evidence is collected and compiled and analyzed, we must conclude that Hamlet is perfectly sane.” This concluding sentence proves to merely be evidence of one of the author’s few downfalls, uncertainty. The fact that Dr. Fram ever questioned Hamlet’s sanity when he decided to follow the teachings of Confucius in filial piety by listening to his father- regardless of the fact that it was actually an apparition of his father- or when Hamlet repeatedly made sure of the legitimacy of the ghost’s statements and delayed the murder of his uncle is silly.

I initially intended this to be a study of a piece of writing by a great man but I realize now that it kind of got out of hand and turned into a blatant criticism of all this man stood for in relation to literature. However, I stand unashamed because I am now done with my assigned blog- results that my fellow friend and Hava Java cult member will accept in return for his pride. (453)