A Literary Character Review

Paper Summary:

This paper looks at two female characters in Henrik Ibsen's "A Doll's House" and Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie". It specifically discusses Nora in the Ibsen work and Amanda in the Williams. The paper compares and contrasts the roles these women fill and how they are treated and perceived and their response to that treatment. The argument is that it isn't the women's situations that are different, but rather, their response to their situations.

From the Paper:

"The two plays A Doll House by Henrik Ibsen and The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, written approximately sixty years apart reflect two very different aspects of womanhood and gender expectations, although perhaps in unexpected ways. Using the characters of Nora and Amanda, we can see two very different ways in which western culture treats and reacts to feminine independence. We will see how these characters represent changing attitudes from the expectation that women are weak and unable to care for themselves in the Ibsen work to that of Williams' play in which women are not only assumed to be able to work and function on their own, but expected to do so. In the nineteenth century world of a European upper middle class, we have Nora who is the wife of Helmer, a lawyer who has suddenly been given a high position at the bank. Even in their poorest times, when ..."

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