A Doll's House

A Doll's House deals with issues in Ibsen's day that weren't even regarded as issues. Ibsen says,

"Modern society isn't a human society, it is only a society of males"

It is with this revealing statement that you should read this play. Once you see that, Nora's actions become clear. Her hiding her forgery from her husband, her taking money from a stranger - are all to protect her husband's pride and illusion of her as a child. Even after eight years of marriage, Nora has only lived in a doll's house. She has never been a real person. Playing first with her father, after her marriage, she molds herself into a plaything for her husband. It is when things become too real that her marriage suffers a crisis. Faced with social ruin, Torvald shows a side of his character that Nora had never seen: the side of reality. All her life she has suffered from what so many women go through; she has lived a lie to please the male members of her family and never known it.

Expected to be a wife and mother first, Nora realizes that for her, being a human being first, like any other man, is more important. As the play progresses, the spendthrift wife's character is developed to show a girl with an immature understanding of the social world. Nora has been content to live her life under the protection of a husband whom she believes loves her unconditionally. She herself, living in this fantasy world, would do anything to protect those she loves. But that the world is a make-believe one she quickly realizes with Torvald's reaction to her actions. He is obviously not the man she thought, but is she the woman he believed her to be? Nora, always honest, realizes that she herself has a lot to grow and decides to leave her husband and children to discover the truth of herself and society.

The play met with a lot of controversy when it was first published in 1879. Dealing with the sacred institution of marriage, A Doll's House came under severe criticism for it's portrayal of such a wife. It was considered unnatural for a woman to walk out on her children. Ibsen was famous for dealing with the 'incomprehensible' and 'unnatural' woman; his effort was to show exactly how it wasn't unnatural and how the roles of women shouldn't be defined but be simply shown as human beings.

Plays and their role: Ibsen, Brecht and Miller

Galileo Galilei or Life of Galileo is a play written by German dramatist Bertolt Brecht. I first read this play during my studies in English Literature, and although initially I didn't like it (maybe studying it had something to do with it) it soon became one of my favorites next to Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and Miller's The Crucible.

One of the things drama does for you is that it helps you make connections between problems in the play and the ones in your own society bringing them to your notice. Hedda Gabler had already introduced me to the repressed side of woman sexuality and how Hedda crumpled under its weight and her own denial of it. It also dealt with the fact that people don't always accept what they don't understand. Hedda was an anomaly in the time Ibsen wrote the play and many critics were in horror of such a woman even existing. But the fact is, that although now women are less repressed in western society, I saw how that 18th century Norwegian woman was still a reality in many parts of the world. 

Therefore, perhaps it was not unusual for me to connect Life of Galileo with the world of today. The point that interested me was not the real message of the play, but I found it important. What I saw most clearly was people's refusal to use their eyes and see things from a wider perspective. Galileo has discovered that the earth is not the centre of the universe; he has proof; but what stumps him is that his proof is of no use unless people choose to acknowledge it. Human reason was what had pushed Galileo towards discovery - the belief that man will reason and move forward with the evidence of his own eyes - and reason let him down. In Scene 4 we see how Galileo invites the scholars of the Venetian court to view his invention and with it his theory on the movement of the planets (Galileo presented the theory that the planets revolved around the sun - not the earth). With the scholars' refusal to even glance through the telescope and see the evidence with their own eyes, Galileo is defeated before he even started. It is just this obstinate refusal to look, to understand and to give others a chance that I still see around the world. 

The Enemy of the People

I thought I had taken a three day break from reading for Eid celebrations in my family. But then I found myself reading a play I saw in a High School English textbook lying around my sister's library. I stole the textbook from my sister (yes, I did!) and read it on the drive home. I managed to squeeze in some reading time after all!

The Enemy of the People is a play written by Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen. I first discovered Ibsen when I read his play Hedda Gabler as a part of my Master's course in English literature. His style of writing and the issues he dealt with instantly appealed to me. This is because many of these issues are still problems here where I live - Pakistan. The plays seemed like a portrayal not of 19th century Norwegian society, but my own here and now.  

The Enemy of the People dealt with some of the larger issues we find in the world today. The problems in politics and the concept of truth. Truth, again is an important part of Ibsen's dramas. Almost all of his plays have to some extent dealt with it. In The Enemy of the People, we are shown how a man struggles to keep himself clean from all the filth and lies around him; how truth is simply what the majority believes; and how people are easily manipulated and led by what they believe is the truth.