Doll's+house+symbolism

This was not one of my better pieces. This was more of a challenge to do, since I couldn’t fully understand everything. We had to show how each thing had a literal and symbolic meaning in the story A Doll’s House. I didn’t try as hard as I should’ve on this, and I can tell when I’m reading it that it wasn’t enjoyable. But, even though this wasn’t fun, I think that I pretty much described each literal/symbolic meanings to some point. Looking back, I actually liked that it was difficult, because I had to take it seriously, and come up with answers on my own instead of it being in the book.

__Slamming door__ //A Doll’s House// ends with Nora slamming the door on her way out of the house. As simple of a gesture this seems, it was actually a big deal. Nora is now going against **everything** that’s been taught in her lifetime. But, she was tired of playing these games, and by slamming the door, she was shutting out that life and starting anew. Also, it shows Torvald, her husband, that there’s absolutely **__no__ __way__** they’re going to get back together. Back then, a woman should never do that, but Nora said screw it and she was entering the real world, not the fantasy world she’d been stuck in for the longest time. **That’s** what her slamming of the door represents. She’s saying, ‘Out with the old, in with the new!’

__Masquerade__ The masquerade ball that Torvald and Nora attended represents so much of the story. A mask is something people put on to transform them, to become something other than themselves. And, that’s EXACTLY what Nora’s been doing with Torvald, as discovered in the book. She’s a totally different person with Torvald; she puts on the costumes and masks to hide her true self. Nora’s life was sort of like a masquerade ball every day, playing so many different characters around the people in her life. She pretends to be clueless, she pretends to be happy with life, and she’s always pretending to be whatever she needs to, which is perfect for the masquerade. That is my interpretation of the masquerade.

__Letters__ Whenever someone writes a letter, it’s a way of communication, telling tings, and sometimes a way of saving face, like what was being shown in the book. The letters from Krogstad were in the letter box, represent’s Nora’s future. As they lay there, trapped in the box, Nora was doing the same, sitting, trapped in the house and her pretend life. Once the letters were exposed, Nora was, too. An envelope can be decorated and adjusted to look one way on the outside, like Nora was doing, pretending on the outside. But, no matter how the envelope looks, the letter //inside// is what counts, and the envelope is just a digression of what lay inside, and that’s another similarity between Nora and these letters, she’s all happy outside, but it’s not the same of what lie inside her. The literal meaning of the letters is that they will provide the outcome of the entire Helmer household, and determine Nora’s actions.

__Tarantella__ For the masquerade ball, Nora preformed the Tarantella dance. The tarantella is a dance that was created in Italy long ago, as a way to survive a bite from a tarantula. The dance itself involves a lot of spastic moves, spinning, jumping, swift and quick movements are made, and it’s also exhausting. In the book, Nora uses the dance as a way to digress Torvald away from the letters, and as she dances for him, he’s quick to tell her that she’s not doing it right, yet she ignores him, and continues to dance, wilder that before, her hair falling from her bun, disheveled. Literally, she seemed to be ignoring Torvald, because she wanted to do her own thing, but really, that’s only half of it. Nora dancing the Tarantella is actually pretty ironic, the dance was first done to rid a person of the poison in them, and in a way, and Torvald is the tarantula that bit Nora. She’s dancing to shake him off, rid herself of his comments, controlling words, his actions everything that prevents her from being herself. That is what the dance is truly representing.

__Macaroons__ Nora’s only self-indulgence in the story was her macaroons. These coconut –flavored cookies were Nora’s favorite, and she often bought them whenever she had to go to town. Torvald doesn’t like her buying this, as we found out in the beginning of the story, because when he suspects Nora had them, she lies and hides them in her pockets. You would think the reason he doesn’t like her getting these is because it’s a waste of money, or something small, but it’s really something bigger. The reason why Torvald disproves of her buying the cookies is because of the fact that she’s not doing what he told her to. She’s breaking that rule, and doing it constantly. Torvald is realizing that Nora will do what she wants, regardless of his words. That is a crack in the Nora Doll Torvald was supposedly to have 100% total control over.