A Doll's House is the representative work of Ibsen, a Norwegian playwright. Here, I briefly analyze the main characters and my own understanding of the play.
Haier Mao, the hero, is timid and cautious by nature. He struggled hard in society and almost risked his life to gain a foothold. His first attitude after his appearance was that he disapproved of Nora's reckless spending, then he disapproved of Nora's borrowing, and then he showed the readers through Nora's words that he didn't even have the courage to calmly face the unexpected blow of life. When he was in trouble, he needed petite Nora to comfort and help him. Haier Mao's so-called strength is just a blunt appropriation from the social system, which just proves his weakness. As far as inner strength is concerned, Haier Mao is just a fake man, even worse than Nora.
The real crux of Haier Mao and Nora lies in the absence of love. There is no love between them that can resolve conflicts, but only the name of husband and wife under the social power ethics system. In the third act, Helmut asks Nora: So you don't love me? Nora replied, yes, I don't love you anymore. Nora's exposition is undoubtedly a fact. According to Nora, this is their first serious conversation since they got married for eight years. This love is not a sudden turning point, but the truth after brushing away the illusion and disguise. In the past eight years, Haier Mao has no love for Nora, but only real captivity and recreation; Nora doesn't love Haier Mao either, but she thinks she does. She blinds herself with the illusion of love everywhere, and of course saves herself with the efforts of love, but she just lives in a virtual happiness.
Haier Mao's way of treating Nora is a common way in secular society. Haier Mao is not its inventor, but an ordinary user and submissive. However, as much as this system damages Nora, it will punish Haier Mao. On the surface, he consciously acts as a puppet of the right system and enjoys all kinds of superior gifts, but this is at the expense of his masculine soul as a man. Such gifts are essentially nothing but castration. Haier Mao docile submission to such a system, nominally he is the free owner of power, but in a powerful system, he is a real slave. Look at Haier Mao's tearful appearance when Nora ran away from home, and think of those poor sleeping children upstairs. This is quite a heavy punishment for a man.
Seen from here, the play has a certain tragic meaning. According to Aristotle's theory, tragedy can bring people fear and pity emotionally. To some extent, Haier Mao's situation has brought us a little fear and pity. From the opening ceremony of Haier Mao and Nora, their hearts were not in one dimension. When Haier Mao woke up, the situation had reached the point of irretrievability.
Nora is a beautiful and tenacious mirror that reflects Haier Mao's sad and timid soul. She is also more vivid and spiritual than Haier Mao. She always has a natural longing for love and refuses to be included in that rigid and cold system, so she has been trying to inspire Haier Mao, whose soul is dead, with actions to stimulate their so-called love. When Haier Mao was poor and sick, it was Nora who bravely stood up and forged her father's signature without authorization to borrow money to treat Haier Mao. This kind of independent personality strength was not possessed by Haier Mao at all, and Nora was sincere and brave in seeking and working hard for love, which was a mature and powerful side of her personality. Difficulties can best witness the soul. In the face of the same difficulties, Nora is persistent and courageous, while Haier Mao will only escape and seek help from lies. As far as personality strength is concerned, Haier Mao and Nora are on the ground and in the sky.
The heroine Nora first appeared as a so-called "doll" with no self-awareness. From the first scene, we can know that Nora has always been someone else's doll, her father's "clay doll daughter" and her husband's "clay doll wife". But sadly, her husband, Haier Mao, is a selfish and hypocritical bourgeois image. With the deepening of the plot, his essence is also revealed. His purpose in life is to pursue money and status. He doesn't love or know to be loved, and his wife is just a piece of his private property. Under this situation, Nora's rebellion is also natural. Even if there is no way out for the time being, there must be such a gesture.
Nora's tragedy lies in that her persistence has no result, 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, but Nora didn't realize this before she left, so she hoped for a "miracle" until she left. When the miracle didn't appear, the disappointed Nora saved herself from the past for herself. In my opinion, Nora who ran away was not a winner either. Lu Xun wrote an article called "After Nora left", discussing the road after Nora left. According to the social form at that time, she would either fall, starve to death or come back.
Of course, Nora's best way out is to return, but a miracle will happen. This miracle requires Haier Mao to be a real man and care for Nora. Under the right system at that time, this change was not only a matter for Haier Mao, but also a matter for the whole society. Ibsen let Nora slam the door, but it gave everyone who watched the play a sudden blow. China used A Doll's House as a sharp weapon of independence movement in his early days, tearing open the old China. But Ibsen didn't just discuss women's issues. He expressed people's moral concepts in the social environment through women's issues in order to realize the highest moral ideal of being a man. Thinking about life and society made Ibsen think about a road of moral self-improvement, that is, reaching a brand-new person through spiritual rebellion. This is the same strain in Ibsen's early and late creation.
Plekhanov said that in a word, Ibsen supported women's liberation. But here, as anywhere else, what interests him is the psychological process of liberation, not its social result, not its influence on women's social status. The third act of A Doll's House fully revolves around Nora's psychology.
The playwright is more concerned with Nora's psychological development from obsession to sobriety and then to rebellion. Ibsen regarded this family as his own life testing ground.
In addition, I think that from the setting of Dr. Ruanke, the clue of Ibsen's later symbolic drama has emerged. He went to say goodbye to Nora and told her that I would play the invisible man at the next masquerade. Haier Mao said, this is really funny. Ruanke went on to say, I want to wear a big black hat-haven't you ever heard of a hat that can't be seen by your eyes? With a hat on your head, people can't see you.
From this passage, Ruanke didn't say that he was going to die. But we vaguely feel that he knows where he belongs. The audience also understands. What he said contained some mysterious image. This is undoubtedly a stroke from God in this sharply contradictory realistic drama, which is full of poetry and imagination. ?