"Cliff Notes - Doll's House, A" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

marriage and their home is debt-free. Nora seems content and Torvald
is in control. Scandal can't touch them. Everyone concerned wants to
keep up appearances. But, little by little, as the play progresses,
reality replaces appearances.

Nora is upset when Dr. Rank shatters the appearance that their
relationship is innocent. Torvald insists on keeping up the
appearance of marriage even after rejecting Nora for her past crime.
He is appalled when Krogstad calls him by his first name at the bank-
-it doesn't appear proper. Dr. Rank wants to appear healthy.
Krogstad and Nora want to hide their deeds and are enmeshed in a
tissue of lies.

Only when the characters give up their deceptions and cast off their
elaborately constructed secrets can they be whole. Ask yourself how
all the characters achieve this freedom from appearances by the
play's end. Do any of them fail?

5. THE COLLAPSE OF THE PARENTAL IDEAL

Nora seems to be under the impression that her father was perfect,
and she tried to replace him--first with Torvald, then with Rank.
When she realizes her father wasn't looking out for her best
interests, it's only a short step to discovering that Torvald isn't
either.


A DOLL'S HOUSE: STYLE

After finishing an earlier play, Ibsen wrote a letter saying, "We
are no longer living in the age of Shakespeare... what I desired to
depict were human beings, and therefore I would not let them talk
the language of the gods." This doesn't seem unusual to us today
because we expect the major characters in contemporary plays and
movies to speak in everyday language. But in Ibsen's day the use of
common speech was shocking. Writers in the mid-1800s were largely
devoted to the tradition requiring plays to be about larger-than-
life heroes who spoke grand and noble language. Even Ibsen's early
plays were about heroic events and contained dialogue filled with
poetry.

But later he wanted to do something different. He wanted to write
realistic plays about the average middle-class people who made up
his audience and who spoke the way they did. In A Doll's House, the
characters use everyday vocabulary and colloquial expressions. They
interrupt each other, correct themselves, and speak in incomplete
sentences. This switch to realistic dialogue is considered one of
the major breakthroughs in the development of modern drama.

It's also important to note that Ibsen was writing in Dano-Norwegian.