Appearance Verses Reality in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Ghosts

A close reading of Henrik Ibsen’s dramas reveals that most of his critics and scholars
capitalize on the playwright’s creation of rebellious female characters. Very little or
nothing is often said about the hypocritical or pretentious lives led by the female
protagonists that eventually leads to their rebellion. Sometimes, statements about the
pretentious existence of these female characters are limited to hypothetical
pronouncements. The hypocritical existence of women in Ibsen’s plays is probably due
to the strict Victorian values the playwright satirizes in his works. The Victorian
conventional norms like the respect of ‘’law and order,’’ the subordination of the woman
in the family and society had very debilitating consequences on the female sex. In an
attempt to respect these principles, women generally led inauthentic hypocritical lives.
They put on social masks which were betrayed at some crucial point as the drama
unfolded. This paper seeks to examine how Henrik Ibsen in A Doll’s House and Ghosts
represents his female characters as individuals who lead a double existence, namely, that
of appearance and reality. Women are portrayed as having a double consciousness, one
which conforms to what is expected of them by the patriarchal society and another which
is in consonance with their true natural inner selves. Reading the plays from the New
Historicist and Feminist, perspectives, the study submits that societal norms and values
constraint women to lead untrue non-self-fulfilling lives that are diametrically opposed to
their real natural desires for self-assertion. The study also demonstrates that women, tired
of societal unrealistic principles against them, generally shade off their unreal selves at
some critical moment in the plays and reveal their real personalities. They rebel against
obnoxious societal norms that inhibit their search for self-assertion and fulfilment.

Key Words: Appearance, Reality, Victorian, societal norms, values.