Do We Live in a Doll House?
I first read The Doll House by Henrik Ibsen many years ago, while still in college. To be honest, the play did not have much impact on me at that time. However, when I read the play again, with a mature mind, it just blew me away. I realized that The Doll’s House is a deeply spiritual book, with layers upon layers of meaning.
The storyline itself is deceptively simple. It centres around one character, Nora, who is a homemaker. She leads a comfortable life with a banker husband and two little children.
On the surface, everything is fine with this family. Her husband treats her like a pampered pet, a prized possession.
Nora, however, carries a dark secret with her. She has made one mistake in her life, when she forged a signature on her father’s document, just a few days after his death. She did it with the best of intentions, to get some money to help her husband with some expensive medical treatment. She took money that would eventually belong to her, anyway, but still, she is haunted by guilt because she violated the norms of society.
The guilt gets worse when she is about to be exposed, and she tries hard to prevent this from happening. Eventually, the truth comes out, and her husband forgives her for her “mistake”. After this, she has a moment of self-realization and decides she did not commit a crime at all; it’s only wrongdoing in the eyes of society.
She realizes she has been living in a doll’s house all her life, like many other married women. She has accepted her husband’s values as her own. She has accepted his norms of right and wrong as her own. She has accepted his likes and dislikes as her own likes and dislikes. She is just like a pampered doll belonging to some one else, with a name given by somebody else. She has no identity of her own.
After this realization, she walks out of her husband’s home with no intention of returning. She is now fully awakened.
Many people think Henrik Ibsen wrote about women’s liberation and women empowerment, at a time when there were not too many empowered women around. I think the play is about much more than, it’s about both men and women. Both live in the self-made prison of what other people think.
This story made me wonder — are most of us living in a doll’s house? Not just women, but men too, are victims of society. We accept the norms of society as correct, we let society tell us what is right and what is wrong. We let politicians and religious leaders dictate our beliefs. We let thought leaders tell us what to think. We let past traditions control our lives; we never think for ourselves. We let the media decide what is happening around us; we never look beyond the headlines and the sound bytes. We never try to discover our own truth.
Sometimes we live out our entire lives consumed by unnecessary guilt. We break norms, sometimes we might even break a man-made law or two. Just as an example, if you ever lived in India, like I did, you know it’s very hard to survive without parting with a bribe or two to get things done. Very few people living in India can claim to be absolutely, completely honest. However, that’s just the way things happen in India and, indeed, in many other parts of the world.
In Indian culture, we have the concept of Maya, or illusion. According to at least one school of Indian philosophy, the universe around us is illusion, because we see what we want to see. Our vision is conditioned by our society, our upbringing, our traditions and what other people think about us. We are dolls, owned by somebody else.
What does it take to break free? Not very much, because there is no door keeping us locked inside the doll’s house. We can walk away any time we want, but not many do it. We are bound by our attachments, and the influence of others on us.
As the popular song goes, we are all prisoners here of our own device.
I find that The Doll’s House is extremely liberating, if read correctly. It will help us break out of the prison of our conditioning and become fully awakened.
All it takes is one moment of self-realization.
