Role Of Nora In A Doll's House

Nora as the voice of every woman

Every time I read A Doll house, the song “I’m every woman” from Whitney Houston comes to mind. That song can be seen as the product of many years of fighting for equality between genders, a cry of triumph in the 90’s, which was the first decade our society started to taste equal rights. If it were not for women like Nora, the movement for equality would have not been successful. Although Nora from A Doll House is a fictional character, Henrik Ibsen portrayed the kind of woman this society needed in order for equal treatment to be a possibility. Nora’s development throughout the play does not only represent what was needed in order to change as a society (from Ibsen’s perspective), but also as a dramatic, I would dare to say tangible, personification of the changes in women’s attitude towards degradation and inequality. She is a condensed version of every woman in this society that has denied to be degraded as inferiority and has decided to give herself importance, as history books show us woman have done throughout the story of mankind. We can start this asseveration by concentrating in Nora’s first line to Torvald in the play, which is answering “yes, it is” when he asks her, and I quote, “Is that my squirrel rummaging around?” The natural instinct of Nora is to accept her inferiority to Torvald and accepting she is only a domestic, even animal, property. If I am not mistaken, that is how women acted towards the way they were