Hacettepe Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergisi (Dec 2018)
A Cultural Materialist Approach to Gender Relations in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House
Abstract
The Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) explores gender relations which were fiercely debated in the late nineteenth century. The play deals mainly with the oppression of a bourgeois woman named Nora, who forges her father’s signature to save her husband’s life. Regarded as a member of the inferior sex, Nora is dominated by her patriarchal-minded husband Helmer. As she lacks socio-economic freedom to earn her own money, she is forced to obey the will of her husband, who imprisons her in the domestic sphere where she is degraded as an ignorant, inferior being who needs intellectual and moral guidance. Moreover, Helmer manipulates his position as a wage earner and treats Nora as an object that is to be possessed and controlled. Since Helmer benefits from his ‘superiority’ in terms of his gender and economic position, he represents both a domineering patriarch and a manipulative capitalist master. However, Nora is not depicted as a passive receiver of male domination for she develops counter discourses against her husband’s patriarchal discourses which focus on the inferiority of the female sex. Frustrated with the dominant moral and legal discourses of patriarchy that despise women, Nora decides to move from the restrictive domestic world to the outside world of power, money, and business. Her removal from the domestic sphere where she is expected to perform certain normative roles associated with the female sex is important in that it heralds women’s emancipation from male domination. The present study examines A Doll’s House from a cultural materialist perspective to argue that Nora’s departure from her husband’s house is not only a personal experience but a social challenge against the dominant patriarchal capitalist culture.
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