Subordination In A Doll's House

Consequently, the subordination of women in marriage has been presented and reinforced in various contexts. The play, “A Doll’s House”, is a prime example, exposing the restricted role of women during the time of its writing and the problems that arise from a drastic imbalance of power between men and women. The female protagonist leads a difficult life because society dictates that her husband be the marriage’s dominant partner and she has promised total obedience to him. Additionally, she begins questioning the limited position she has as a woman in marriage, subjected to her husband’s orders and edicts. Over the course of the play, she breaks the barriers of the role women should play and challenges the previous perception of motherhood.

I know most people agree with you […] and that’s also what it says in books. But I’m not content anymore with what most people say, or what it says in books. I have to think things for myself, and get things clear”(Ibsen 173). By the end of the play, she wishes to be relieved of her familial obligations in order to pursue her own ambitions, beliefs, and identity. The more fundamental issue is with domestic life as it was conceived and lived at the time, in the way it legally and culturally infantilized women and made it impossible for them to be recognized or treated as full individuals. Meanwhile, marriage has been viewed as an institution in which the wife is trapped in her assigned traditional role and she will have to pay a price when she breaks with tradition. “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a tale of one woman’s descent into madness, is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s response to the male-run medical establishment and the patriarchal structure of the nineteenth-century household. With the use of conventions of the psychological horror tale, the position of women within the institution of marriage is critiqued, especially as practiced by the “respectable” classes at the time of the play. It presents within its tale the conventional nineteenth-century middle-class marriage, with its rigid

With this, many cultures place a special emphasis on the headship granted to the husband and the role of subordination belonging to the wife. In various places, men have authority over their wives, in law and in practice. Modern values such as gender equality may be at odds with some traditions, one example being a traditional Jewish marriage, which is based on the man acquiring the woman. The traditional framework of Jewish marriage relies on the traditions of the subordination of women in marriage being engrained. The inherent inequalities allow women to be acquired by men and with this, men taking possession of exclusive access to a woman, which is unilateral and non-reciproal. “Traditional Jewish marriage is based on the man acquiring the woman, which has symbolic and actual ramifications.”(Landau 3). Within this, women are simply property of men and they are expected to obey their husbands and their domination. The institution of marriage is an evident reflection of cultural expectations. These traditions are ingrained into cultures and various individuals use these principles to guide their life. With this, it has been engrained in society that women should be subordinate to their husbands in everything. This created a cultural basis of the inferior status of women as well as the role of women as being