A Doll’s House Essay -- Literary Analysis, Kate Chopin

As a child progresses through the various stages of life, he or she may crawl across the knots of knit carpet, gallop around the plastic structures of a schoolyard and weave amongst a mass of people, each one traveling a different route to arrive at destinations poles apart, but unless a sense of worth, instilled by a parents assurance, overflows from the mouth of this developing being, the journey to find oneself amid the throng of individuals will prove an straining and extensive onepossibly spanning ones lifetime. Kate Chopin, in The Awakening, and Henrik Ibsen, in A Dolls House, understood the significance of a enate go for in the development of a young persons self-esteem, even in the Victorian Era, highlighting this fact with a void in the parental seat of the lives of their protagonists, Edna Pontellier and Nora Helmer, respectively. The vacant maternal role and feeble paternal relationship influences each of the protagonists sense of self-worth, which projects through re lationships with their husbands, children, society as a whole and, their supreme choice of releasement. Employing realism, ridding the work of all fantasy and overtly extravagant elements for the audience to recognize themselves in various situations, Chopin and Ibsen allow unfolding (Roberts 1664) events as their works progressed, to divulge events previous to the span of the work they cast shadows on events in literary present, exposing the cause of the problemthe mothers absence in the protagonists lives. In the skid of Edna Pontellier, her fathers authority (Chopin 77), putting his foot down good and hard (77), facilitated her mothers expedition to the grave, while Nora Helmers mother goes without indicate over the play... ...arch of others to tell her of her beauty, for she does not have this revelation within herself since her father seemingly forgot to inform her. Likewise, Nora, although the ratiocination lacked good, needed to Annes confirmation that her children w ould not forget their mother (Ibsen 30) if she were to leave, due to her inability to come to this conclusion alone both search for others approval and finding that it comes only from within, each abandon their oppressing forces which all stem from their societys establishments. In the denouements of both works, the protagonist realizes that their entire lives have been guided and charted by others rather than themselves and make a decision to press forward, without the superfluous contributions and disdain of others, despite the ramifications such a decision incurs, such as the repetition of the motherless child.