What Do I Read Next?
Last Updated on July 29, 2019, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 368
- Joyce Carol Oates's short story, "The Lady With The Pet Dog," offers an interesting contrast to the way Nora chooses to deal with her marriage. This is the retelling of the Chekhov story, only from the woman's point of view. The theme of deception is also important in this story, since Anna chooses to keep secret important events in her life. Her efforts to escape her marriage and establish a new identity are different from Nora's because she internalizes the changes and so is not forced to confront her husband in the same manner that Nora must.
- In both William Shakespeare's Hamlet and Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, there is a huge disparity between image and reality. If a character is known by what he/she says or he/she does or by what others say about him/her, then both these plays offer interesting opportunities to compare how the differing perspectives of personality affect the outcome of each play.
- Susan Glaspell's Trifles was written almost forty years after A Doll's House. In Glaspell's play, the relationship between men and women is certainly as oppressive as in Ibsen's. The differences in setting, notably the dirt and poverty of the Wrights' home, serve as an interesting contrast to the decor of the Helmers'. Still, the female inhabitants face similar struggle, and Mrs. Wright's chosen method of escape offers an interesting opposition to Nora's.
- James Joyce's short story, "The Dead," can be compared to Ibsen's A Doll's House. Both depict a woman's struggle to become emotionally independent of the husband who seeks to control her. In both cases, there are secrets and deception involved in the wife's past. Both also feature Christmas as a background for some of the play's events.
- In Ibsen's Ghosts, the author further explores the ramifications of a father's actions on his family. As in A Doll's House, this play embraces naturalism as an explanation for human behavior. In the play, the sins of the father become manifest in the son when the son discovers he has inherited his father's venereal disease and that he is in love with his illegitimate half-sister. In A Doll's House, Dr. Rank, too, inherits the venereal disease of his father.
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