Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House Essay

The role, treatment, disadvantages, and sacrifices of women in their societies are vital themes in both Federico L’Orca’s The House Of Bernarda Alba and Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. In Federico L’Orca’s The House Of Bernarda Alba, to start with, all characters that appear on stage are females, and men are merely talked about. In Ibsen’s A Doll’s House the protagonist is Nora, a woman who gets treated by her husband as though she were a little girl. At the time when Federico L’Orca and Henrik Ibsen wrote their plays, it was normal for women to get treated as anything but equal to men. Women were expected by men and by their society to do nothing more than stay at home, cook for their family, get children, and then take care of their children as well. Although Ibsen and L’Orca wrote these plays several decades apart, since Ibsen wrote his play at the turn of the century in Norway and L’Orca wrote his in 1930’s Spain, the expectations of women were pretty much the same. It was not normal for women to receive an education, let alone a good one, and women were not allowed to vote. In A Doll’s House there are three female characters: Nora, Mrs. Linde, and the maid working for Nora. All of these women have to sacrifice something and have disadvantages, simply because they are women. Every character in The House Of Bernarda Alba has to suffer because they are women. Spanish tradition in the 1930’s forces them all to isolate themselves from the outer world for eight years of their lives. In The House Of Bernarda Alba, Bernarda Alba and all of her daughters have to mourn the death of their father. This is Spanish tradition, and so they all have to live in their house for eight years, completely isolated from the rest of society. They may only wear black, even in the scorching heat of southern Spain. This already shows how harshly women were treated. Bernarda Alba and her daughters are forced to isolate themselves from the outside world completely, whether they want to or not, because of tradition. The eight women are forced to give up eight years of their lives in which they may do nothing but mourn. Also, the fact that a woman has to kill her own child when she gets pregnant, and is then hunted down by the whole town and killed herself, shows how women were viewed and treated. Also, a woman could often not decide who she wanted to marry, and when a women got married it was often just nothing more than a business deal, and the feelings of the woman were completely ignored.