One Big Decision

Once Mama receives her check in the mail the question over who will receive money from the check arises. This point has been brought up before but now Mama realizes she needs to make her decision. The question I have is who is Mama going to give the money too? What is going to be her final decision? Mama tries to ignore the fact that she is going to have to make a large decision soon. On page 69 it states “I spec if it wasn’t for you all… I would just put that money away or give it to the church or something” (Hansberry). Mama is trying to walk around the idea that she needs to decide who to give her money too. I think that all of the members in the family are being greedy about the money from Mama. In the end it is her money and she should do what she wants to do with it. If she wants to give the money to church then she should. She should not feel obligated to give the money to her daughter and son. I would love to hear what other people think.

Money Problems

It seems to me that everyone in the family of A Raisin in the Sun is worried about the check that Mama is going to receive, but Mama is not. While this may just be because they are all greedy and want some of it. I think it mirrors our society today in a sense. That everyone is worried about money except when they are making it. Today everyone hypothesizes what they would do with their money if they won the lotto, or won big at the casino. Yet they people do not seem to think twice about the regular money they receive from their pay checks. This is because most people spend a good amount of it on food, clothes, and savings. This may become a routinely habit for them. On the contrary some people may need to divvy up their pay checks to survive with minimum income. This may be due to the greedy tendencies of the human kind to always desire more and to dream. It also may just be that since Mama is older, she has less to desire in the world. She has children and grand children. Now she just wants to see them be successful. That is probably why she plans on giving them the money.

Whatever the fact is, I do not feel like I am alone in feeling it is odd that most of everyone in the family is worried about money. What do you think/feel?

Was leaving the best choice?

It is obvious to the reader within the first few pages of the play that Nora is not the superior in this household. Her husband Torvald calls her demeaning names such as "lark" or "squirrel" and she seems to push it off as if it does not matter. For nearly the entire play she is allowing others to think for her and at the end, when she finally brings about ideas of her own, she leaves. This occurrence struck me as very strange. She has finally revealed her deepest secret to Torvald, who minutes later forgives her and at the time of her departure has already offered to change for her and respect her more. At the time of her departure Torvald has already offered to change for her as proved by his statement, "I have the strength to make myself over."(Ibsen 113) At this point in the story I felt a shift in power. Nora has changed from her carefree, spendthrift ways to a seemingly more confident and knowledgeable woman just by discovering and acting upon her current situation. She however, seeing her husband begging for her to stay, should have seized control, demanded more authority in decisions, and dropped the previous restrictions placed on her outside the house. It seems rash and selfish to leave her children when she could have easily stayed. I found myself slightly disappointed with the ending involving her withdrawal from her family and I think several options could have worked to achieve her goal of education and control, better than the one she chose.

The Unequal Relationship of Torvald and Nora

      In Act Three, Torvald says, "From now on, forget happiness. Now it’s just about saving the remains, the wreckage, the appearance" (Ibsen 105).Torvald has superficial and shallow characteristics. Krogstad is a threat to Nora, but Torvald is consumed by other people's perceptions of him and his marriage. He is so focused on his business and social standings that he refuses to acknowledge Nora's feelings about her situation. He would rather Nora live unhappily in a facade of content than she ruin his image. His marriage is important to him, but not because of emotional ties; he only loves Nora for her beauty. Unconcerned with her well-being, Torvald proves himself to be selfish. 
       This is significant because it is an example of Ibsen's critique of 19th century marriage and gender roles. During the 19th century, women were still second-class citizens. They were denied rights and were often in unequal relationships, as men held more power. Marriages were often not for love, rather they were for social standing. Women were not valued for their potential, and men were seen as the only worthy people to hold a family or marriage together. Because of the nature of their relationship, Nora is expected to sacrifice her happiness in order to protect Torvald's ego, as she is a woman in a male-dominated society. Torvald is not to help her recover from her situation; he is only to look out for his own best interests. Roles in the relationship are valued more than trust, equality, and ethicality, proving Nora and Torvald's relationship to be an embodiment of the relationships that commonly existed during the 19th century. 

"My Little Songbird"

 Throughout the book "A Doll's House" I feel as if Nora is seen as a very incapable woman that does whatever her husband tells her to do. Torvald, Nora's husband, touches Nora playfully and calls her many names like "songbird" and "skylark". Calling Nora names that refer to birds are just ways that Torvald would play around with her to make her feel happy and make him feel as if he is enjoying his time with her and to show that he "loves" her. When Nora needs a real husband and someone to discuss serious matters with Torvald does not seem to know how to change his ways. What I wonder is how Nora and Torvald even first met and felt it was right to become married. It is possible that Nora was forced into it or that she found his playfulness fun and nice at the beginning.

 I find it interesting when it is brought up that Nora had to find someone to loan her money so that she could take a trip to Italy to cure her husband. Krogstad, the person who loaned her over 4,000 dollars uses the thought of Torvald finding out that Nora tried to cure him as a threat. I would think that Nora going out of her way to cure her husband would be seen as a good thing but considering the setting and timing of this book I can understand how it is seen that women should not be helping their husband in large cases like the one presented to Nora. It is also weird to see that traveling to somewhere like Italy could cure someone.

The book shows how a Woman changes from being the play doll for men to standing up for herself and really changing things for the better. Nora was tolerating her husband but she really had no real love for him. Her finally making a stand and moving is definitely the best thing she could have done.

Nora Helmer: A Different Kind of Women in Her Age

Throughout the duration of the play, A Doll House, Nora Helmer exposes herself to the reader as a cunning and capable woman, which is contradictory to the way her acquaintances view her. In the opening act Nora is portrayed as a spoiled housewife who dotes on her husband in the hopes of receiving money in return. At this point in the play one has the notion that Mrs. Helmer is a gold digger, and married Mr. Helmer so he could provide for her shopping addiction; however, this idea is refuted when Nora confesses to Mrs. Linde that her love for Mr. Helmer is so strong that when his life was in danger, she borrowed 4,800 crowns in order to save him. In the end of Act I it is revealed that Nora borrowed this large sum of cash from Nils Krogstad who works at the bank with Nora's husband. Krogstad threatens to tell Mr. Helmer of Nora's debt to him if she fails to convince her husband to allow Krogstad to keep a job a the bank. This in turn results in Nora using her only skill of feminine charm to her advantage, and distracting her husband from reading the mail, which contains proof of her debt to Krogstad. In the end of Act III when Nora's lie is exposed, the play has a drastic change of events. After Mr. Helmer yells at Nora, telling her that she has ultimately ruined his life, Nora realizes that she does not love her husband at all. Nora informs Mr. Helmer how he has done her a disservice by viewing her as a toy which he could play with and love, but never see as an equal. She goes on to say how she plans to leave him and their children to explore and learn about the world, and how she refuses to be merely a play thing for him or anyone else.

The ending of this play was something that I found quite unique. Due to the fact that in the time Nora Helmer was living in, women were seen as mothers and wives and nothing else. Nora defies this stereotype by professing her desire to become educated. Once Nora stood up to her husband, I gained a new respect for her, and can only wonder what became of her after she left Mr. Helmer.

Nora: a product of her envronment

An examination of Nora as a product of her environment:

Our first impression of Nora is the stereotype of a light headed housewife. She comes off as greedy, insensible, and stupid. As a woman in the late 1870s she has been brought up her entire life with the roll models of other such seemingly unsubstantial women. I would like to consider the role of “flimsy housewife” as a kind of camouflage used by women in order to survive in their social environment.

As we see in Acts II and III, Nora is in no way lacking intelligence. Knowledge and wisdom may be at fault, but these are all things not taught to a woman of her time and stature. Nora uses her feminine charms and skills in ways that were most socially appropriate to her time. She was able to slip under the radar of the law and do what she felt needed to be done. She charms her husband into giving her money, and she fools Krogstad into giving her a loan which he later finds out to be false.

She used the options available to her to save her husband's life. Nora is a prime example of a master manipulator, a skill I believe many women of that time may of possessed. As a woman without direct access to political, social, or economic power it would have been of extreme importance to find someone with that kind of power and use it to their advantage.

I believe Nora left her husband, her children, because she realized for herself that she was just the sum of parts imbued into her by her environment. She no longer wanted to manipulate, she wanted to able to have a genuine conversation with her husband. In the end she left because she believed that Torvald would never be able to see her as anything other that what she had shown him. Nora says “You never loved me. You’ve only thought it fun to be in love with me, that’s all.” In this statement Nora is explaining how Torvald perceives her. Torvald sees her not as an equal capable of mature love and understanding, but as as the collection of parts society has given her. A pretty thing to keep on his shelf and admire.