Ellen and Nora

For the past few weeks, we have essentially been studying gender roles and social customs throughout the late 19^th century in literature, first through Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, and more recently through Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Now after having read both works, it has become increasingly clear just how much the two literary works have in common with each other, not only through their not-so-subtle criticism of the roles of men and women and the overall setup of a hierarchical and rather brutal society, but in some of the themes as well, the greatest of which I believe to be the struggle for individualism and freedom. The theme of course involves the overly explained gender and social norms of the time, but it transcends past the times in which they are set in, and is as real and applicable to this very day as when they were first written. In Wharton’s work, the struggle for individuality is most clearly epitomized by Countess Ellen Olenska, a concept I have also touched on in a previous blog. Throughout the course of the novel, Ellen is forced to fight off not only the scorn of society for having left her husband as a married women, but worse must face an equally condescending and malicious family, who see her solely as a woman of scandal. Early on the text when she is fighting for legal freedom from a man she does not love, she is struck down by the family’s pressuring to have her maintain her marital status for the sake of their integrity. To this, Ellen can only speculate, “But my freedom-is that nothing?” (Wharton 93). It is for her desire to lead a life of individual freedom that Ellen is discredited by her family, who increasingly act more and more like primitive people than the sophisticated upper classmen they claim to be. Indeed, the family functions no better than, “a tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe” (Wharton 278). For the sake of integrity, they would rather Ellen remain in misery than express her individual right for freedom. In A Doll’s House, the idea of freedom is a concept again taken on by a lead female protagonist, this time Nora Helmer. For her the idea of freedom is heavily contrasted with the early emphasis on her husband Torvald’s ownership of her, treating her more like a dog than a wife. Torvald comments, “It’s incredible how expensive it is for a man to keep such a pet” (Ibsen 4). Nora accepts this until she starts working toward her own struggle for personal freedom, which is working toward her own “miracle” (Ibsen 84) to happen, her having saved Torvald’s life through a borrowed sum of money and him now realizing how grateful he should be toward her. But that would mean the destruction of Torvald’s reputation, and as Nora harshly found out after Torvald read Krogstad’s letter, “Nobody sacrifices his honor for the one he loves” (Ibsen 84). To this, Nora realizes that she must put herself as an individual over her social obligations as a wife and a mother, in this case meaning that she must leave her husband to go out and discover who she really is and find the freedom that has been denied to her all her life by her father and Torvald. Both Ellen and Nora leave their marital obligations for a chance to discover something about themselves, something that neither could have done without having felt the need to discover their individuality. They were both tired of having men constantly believing that they were the ones pulling the puppet strings of their lives. Nora put it best describing how her “house has never been anything but a play-room. I have been your doll wife, just as at home I was Daddy’s doll child” (Ibsen 80). For Ellen and Nora, this was the chance to reject what everyone else believes to be right in exchange for what they know to be right, an idea that transcends past the world of 19^th century literature into our own lives today.