A Doll No More

In “A Doll’s House” we see Nora in the first scene portrayed as a frivolous spender and a sickeningly sweet wife. This first impression of her sticks with her through the play until the very end. Even when confronted with Krogstad’s blackmail she remains on the whole the same character. Through the play she dances and flirts and acts as childish as her never seen children all in an attempt to get what she wants. She even flirts with a man to whom she is not married in an attempt to procure a large sum of money to pay off her debts. Nora, although the focus of the play, becomes in the reader’s eyes an almost despicable character whose antics grate on our very nerves. Nora is the “typical” woman as described by Ibsen’s play and in the time period the typical woman was dependent on her husband for everything and had endless time to practice dancing or shop. From the beginning we see Nora as a very silly thoughtless woman who does not take the time to think about the consequences of her actions, and would not know about those consequences if she were to actually think about them.

In the third act of the play we see Nora break out of her role as the doll and become an independent woman who must rely on her own abilities to survive. She quickly finds out that, because she could not save his job, Krogstad intends to reveal her illegal money borrowing to her husband and she knows that she can not pay off her debt in time to save herself. Her naiveté leads her to believe that getting the money back will solve all her problems but she fails to realize that Krogstad, who has been accused of fraud, has lost his job and is in very little position to acquire a new one. When she learns that even had she paid him back he would have kept the IOU she begins her change from the “little squirrel” to the independent woman she becomes. Once Torvald finds out about the whole affair Nora is catalyzed into her change and she realizes that the reason for all this trouble was her attitude in general. She was so used to being the “little spendthrift” that she had assumed all aspects of that role, but she realizes that there is more to life than being your husband’s “kitten.” In the end we find Nora leaving Torvald because of the mess she has made and not the other way around. Nora stands up for herself and makes the biggest decision of her life to not be an unthinking shopaholic but to be a woman who makes her own way in the world. Nora evolves, though slowly, over the course of the play into a woman who can bravely leave her husband and children and start anew. (483)

The Devil Went Down to Denmark

The argument has been made that the ghost in Hamlet is actually the Devil come to trick Hamlet into killing everyone connected to him. I personally believe that there is a good chance that this argument is valid because of the outcome of Hamlet’s revenge and the significant absence of the ghost at said outcome. Posing as Hamlet’s father the Devil convinces him that Claudius killed Hamlet the elder and took his wife as his own. Hamlet’s fragile mental state and his position as the “emo prince” as well as subsequently mourning for his late father makes for a perfect opportunity for the Devil to plant the seed of revenge. Once the seed is sown he needed only to sit back and watch the body count go up.

One of the points brought up as a counterargument is that the ghost argues for Gertrude’s innocence and that she should not be hurt. I feel that this only strengthens the fact that he is not Hamlet’s father, if he was truly the late king he would be a bit more upset about his wife sleeping with his brother so soon after his death. By arguing for Hamlet’s sympathy he gives away the fact that he is an imposter, after all, the greatest trick the Devil ever played was to convince us that he didn’t exist.

In some of his more sane moments, or arguably his more insane moments, Hamlet questions whether the ghost is truly his father or the devil come to snare him. Hamlet plants the idea that the ghost is the devil in the audience’s mind and once he has done so the earlier scenes with the ghost take on a whole new light. The ghost’s every word takes on a dubious meaning and every motive becomes suspect.

Hamlet’s revenge kills more people than he had anticipated, approximately seven more, and I don’t believe that there was any other way that it could have ended. The ghost gets him so incensed to kill Claudius again in Gertrude’s chambers that he mistakenly kills Polonius. Polonius’s death leads to Ophelia going insane and drowning herself, which leads Leartes to seek revenge for both his father and his sister. Claudius takes advantage of Leartes’ anger and plots to kill the now threatening Hamlet, which leads to the deaths of the Leartes and the entire Danish royal family. And in the course of events Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are killed in Hamlet’s place in England.

Not only does Hamlet’s revenge take away everyone who ever mattered to him but it also robs Denmark of its entire royal lineage. After the turbulent events of the “bloodbath” the king is replaced by a Norwegian. The outcome of Hamlet’s plot with the ghost only further convinced me that the ghost had a nefarious intent for the whole scheme because if he were truly Hamlet’s father he would have tried to stop the carnage of his young son’s vengeance. If the ghost is the Devil he profited nicely from the entire deal, he gained at least three souls for Hell in Hamlet, Ophelia and Claudius. The ghost was the only character to make it through the play unharmed, or as unharmed as a ghost can be, and in the end he got what he wanted no matter if he were the devil or not.