Hedda Gabler and a Dolls House

"The door slam heard around the world", or Nora, the protagonist in A Doll's House, leaving her husband was the catalyst for the feminist movement. A Doll's House, by Henrik Ibsen, is a social problem play, while Hedda Gabler is merely a problem play. Henrik Ibsen makes social comments all throughout A Doll's House, and uses characters that disagree on certain views with each other while the other focuses more on household problems and women's oppression, all while using realistic and historical context.

Ibsen writes in such a way that captures the natural speech of each individual character in relation to who they are interacting with. This helps the realism that accompanies his genre. Such as in A Doll's House when Mr. Helmer states "Is that my little lark twittering out there?".This line illustrates the natural, yet condescending way that Torvald speaks to his wife when he calls her things like "skylark", "squirrel", and "singing bird". He's calls her "cute" little nicknames just like most people do in relationships, which adds to the realism. Hedda Gabler follows the main principles of a problem play, with social issues being shown to the audience by the use of the characters on stage. In Hedda Gabler's case, the social issue is woman's oppression, with Hedda being forced to stay at home. Another feature of the a problem play form is that it is in a realistic context. In the case of Hedda Gabler this is true because it has a very believable setting of a loveless marriage, along with the social norms and values that were around at the period the play is set in. This realism helps to convey the messages that Ibsen wants, in this case, women's oppression.

A Doll's House is a social problem play in that women in that time period were not allowed to make decisions on their own, they weren't allowed to borrow money, and they were supposed to obey their husbands one hundred percent. Nora did the exact opposite of what women of the time period were supposed to do. Nora secretly owes a man named Krogstad a large sum of money from trying to save her husband's life with a trip to the warmer climate of the south. She doesn't want her husband, Torvald, to find out because it would hurt his pride. To borrow money is bad enough in Torvald's eyes, to have his wife borrow money behind his back is unthinkable, even in the eyes