The Doll Metaphor and Dehumanisation

John Hathaway

‘The power of this metaphor lies in the somewhat uncanny presentation of humans as dolls…’

John Hathaway

‘…robotic creations with no humanity of their own.’

John Hathaway

‘She happily applies the same terms of dehumanisation to herself…’

Joan Templeton

“…her husband’s little woman.”

Templeton

“Buried [in] Nora are an intelligence, a courage…”

Brian Johnson

“Prevented from full growth… prettified and decorated in a domestic environment.”

Arthur Ganz

“Torvald has been… almost as much Nora’s ‘doll’ as she has been his.”

Carol Strongin Tufts

Nora becomes “progressively exhibitionistic.”

GB Shaw 1930

‘The ideal wife is one who does everything that her ideal husband likes and nothing else…Now to treat a person as a means to an end is to deny that person’s right to live.’

Anon 1906

Ibsen appalled us with sudden glimpses into the abysses of human nature at once unlike our experience and yet shotting across it vistas of interpreting and revealing light.

AS Byatt 2006

‘Nora is one of a wonderfully varied string of trapped and angry women…The men too are trapped in their beliefs, in structures that contain them as the walls of the stage contain them.’

John Northam 1952

…And so Nora’s frantic struggle against fate is represented inaction, in the tarantella, traditionally the dance of victims of the poisonous spider