A Doll’s House: Criticizing Through Exaggeration

*My apologies for my late post, my internet was not functioning for some time last night.

The theme of Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House is simple and has been used many times in literature: to criticize the accepted customs of a time by depicting an exaggerated version of them. Ibsen makes his statement by criticizing the customs of relationship between husband and wife in nineteenth century Norway. And yes, it is exaggerated. Were most wives treated like pets or toys by their husbands? Most likely not. However, through his use of exaggeration, Ibsen is able to convey this sense of inequality between spouses, subordination of wives, and comical misunderstandings of marriage in a mere couple hours, that many women lived through for many years.

In Ibsen’s play, Helmer literally treats Nora like “a doll.” While I seriously doubt most nineteenth century husbands treated their wives like dolls, women of the time had practically no say in marriage or family matters beyond accepting or declining a proposal, and even many proposals were accepted for the wrong reasons (such as money, aristocracy, etc.) as depicted in Ibsen’s work and many others of the time.

Of course this large, general, central theme of the play is supported by less developed surrounding themes, including women’s rights, the morality of lying and forgery, and conflicting ideas of why and when a woman should marry. However it is very interesting to consider the play’s overall theme with relation to its author. We can gain a sense of Ibsen’s character by considering the fact that he, a man in the nineteenth century, for whom society’s customs benefited, wrote a play criticizing said customs. Therefore we come to understand that Ibsen was a very forward thinking individual. We also come to understand that said customs of inequality in marriage must have been great for a man of the time to find them substantial enough to write a play criticizing them. (307)

Reading Claudius like a Book: Body Language in Hamlet

Hamlet: a play and playwright who need no introduction. In the play Shakespeare consciously discussed many moral issues (issues of the mind if you will), including suicide, religion, adultery, and the afterlife. However there is one issue of the mind that Shakespeare discusses only subconsciously: the issue of psychology, and body language in particular.

When Hamlet finds himself unable to kill Claudius, he devises a plan to prove Claudius’s guiltiness in the murder of Hamlet’s father. Deeply moved by an excerpt from a play about the fall of Troy, Hamlet realizes that the players’ ability to evoke human emotion through acting is far greater than his own, even though his own pain is quite real. Therefore, Hamlet decides that he will write a short “speech of some dozen or sixteen lines” which will closely resemble Claudius’s murder of King Hamlet. When the play is performed the following night, Hamlet will judge his uncle’s reaction to this speech in order to determine his guiltiness. Essentially, Hamlet will read his uncle’s body language to gain the information he needs without directly asking for it.

The concept of body language is a very interesting one that we have been discussing for the past week in Psychology. Non-verbal communication, meaning communication through body language and voice tones, accounts for 93 percent of all human communication. However, the study of modern psychology began after Shakespeare’s death with thinkers such as Descartes, Locke, and Darwin, and human awareness of the importance of body language has only been existent in the past few decades. How, then, does Hamlet know his uncle’s body language will give away his guiltiness?

The answer is simple. It is because we have always had the ability to subconsciously interpret body language. It is and has always been the major form of communication between humans. So although Hamlet does not know that his plan is based off what future generations will call body language, he does know that the knowledge he can gain from observing his uncle’s reaction to a similar reenactment of the murder he committed will tell Hamlet all he needs to know to decide whether or not to murder his uncle. Although this knowledge of body language may have only been subconscious in Shakespeare’s time, it was prevalent enough for Hamlet to decide that “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.” (407)