"A Doll's House" is the masterpiece of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Here, I will briefly analyze the main characters and my own understanding of this play.
The male protagonist Helmer is timid and cautious by nature. He works hard in society and almost loses his fortune and life before he can gain a foothold. The first attitude he expresses after appearing on the scene is that he does not agree with Nora's wasteful spending. Money, and then disapproval of Nora's loan, and then presented to the reader through Nora's words, he does not even have the courage to calmly face unexpected blows in life. When he is in trouble, he still needs the petite Nora to comfort him. and assistance. Helmer's so-called strength is just borrowed from the social system, which just proves that he is not strong. In terms of inner strength, Helmer is just a fake man, not even as good as Nora.
The real crux of Helmer and Nora is the absence of love. There is no love between them that can resolve conflicts, and there is only the name of husband and wife under the social power-based ethical system. In the third act, Helmer asked Nora: Does that mean you don’t love me anymore? Nora replied: Yes, I don't love you anymore. Nora's explanation is undoubtedly a fact. According to Nora, this is the first serious conversation they have had in the eight years since their marriage. This lack of love is not a sudden turn of events, but the truth after removing the illusion and pretense. In the past eight years, Helmer had no love for Nora, only real captivity and entertainment; Nora also had no love for Helmer, but she thought she had love, and used the illusion of love to blind herself everywhere. Love strives to save herself, but she only lives in a virtual happiness.
The way Helmer treats Nora is the usual way in secular society. Helmer is not its inventor, he is just an ordinary user and surrenderer, but such a system has done great harm to Nora. How much is the punishment for Helmer. On the surface, it seems that he is consciously acting as a puppet of the power system and enjoying its various superior gifts, but this is done at the cost of damaging his masculine soul as a man. Such gifts are essentially a kind of castration. Helmer meekly submitted to such a system. He was nominally the free owner of power, but in a powerful system, he was an out-and-out slave. Look at Helmer's tearful and pitiful look when Nora ran away from home, and then think about the poor sleeping children upstairs. For a man, this is quite a severe punishment.
From here, this play has a certain tragic meaning. According to Aristotle's theory, tragedy can bring fear and pity to people emotionally. In a way, Helmer's situation brings us a hint of fear and pity. From the opening of Helmer and Nora, their minds are not in the same dimension. When Helmer wakes up, the situation has reached an irreversible point.
Nora is a beautiful and tough mirror that reflects Helmer's sad and timid soul. She also has more of a living spirituality than Helmer. She always carries a natural longing for love and rejects it in her heart. She was included in that rigid and cold system, so she has been trying to use actions to inspire Helmer, whose soul has died, and inspire their so-called love. When Helmer was impoverished and critically ill, it was Nora who stood up bravely and forged her father's signature without authorization to borrow money to treat Helmer's illness. This kind of independent and responsible personality was something Helmer did not have at all, and his pursuit of love and his Nora is also sincere and brave despite her hard work. This is a mature and powerful side of her personality. Difficulties are the best witness to the soul. When facing the same dilemma, Nora showed persistence and courage, while Helmer would only escape and resort to lies. In terms of personality strength, Helmer and Nora were on the same earth and in heaven.
The heroine Nora initially appeared as a so-called "doll" with no self-awareness. From the first scene, we can understand that Nora has always been someone else's doll, her father's. "Clay doll daughter" is her husband's "clay doll wife". But sadly, her husband, Helmer, is a selfish and hypocritical bourgeois image. As the plot deepens, his true nature is revealed. His purpose in life is to pursue money and status. He neither loves nor knows how to be loved. His wife is just a private property of his. Under this situation, Nora's rebellion is natural. Even if you can't see a way out for the time being, you must have this attitude.
The tragedy of Nora is that her persistence has no results and her redemption has no way out. The soul of the lover she longed for has been squeezed out of the possibility of budding love by the power system, and Nora before running away did not She did not realize this, so until she ran away, she was hoping for a "miracle" to happen. When the miracle did not appear, the disappointed Nora used the past self-rescue for the two of them to save herself. In my opinion, Nora who ran away is not a winner either. Lu Xun wrote an article called "After Nora Runs Away", which explores Nora's path after she ran away. According to the social situation at the time, she would either degenerate, starve to death, or come back.
The best way out for Nora is of course to return, but a miracle happens, and this miracle requires Helmer to care for and protect Nora like a real man. Under the power system at that time, this change was not just a matter for Helmer alone, but a matter for the entire society. Ibsen made Nora slam the door and leave, but it gave everyone who watched the play a sudden blow in the heart. In the early days of China, "A Doll's House" was used as a tool for the independence movement to tear open the long-standing shortcomings of the old China.
But Ibsen did not just discuss women's issues. He used women's issues to express the moral concepts of people in the social environment in order to realize the highest moral ideal of being a human being. Thinking about life and society made Ibsen think about a path of moral self-improvement, which is to achieve a brand new person through spiritual rebellion. This is consistent in Ibsen's early and late creations.
Plekhanov said that in short, Ibsen supported women's liberation. But here, as elsewhere, it was the psychological process of emancipation that interested him, not its social consequences, not its impact on women's social position. The third act of "A Doll's House" fully revolves around Nora's psychology.
The playwright is more concerned about Nora’s psychological development from obsession to sobriety and then to rebellion. Ibsen used this family as his own testing ground in life.
In addition, I think that the setting of Dr. Ruan Ke has shown the clues of Ibsen’s later symbolic drama. He went to say goodbye to Nora and said to Nora, I will play the invisible man next time there is a masquerade party. Helmer said, this is really funny. Ruan Ke went on to say, I want to wear a big black hat - haven't you heard of a hat that is invisible to the eyes? With a hat on your head, people can't see you.
From this passage, Ruan Ke did not say that he was going to die. But we vaguely feel that he understands his destiny. The audience gets it too. There was something mysterious about what he said. This is undoubtedly a stroke of genius in this realistic drama with sharp contradictions, rich in poetry and imagination.
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