Similarities Between A Doll's House And Girls Like That

Throughout ‘A Doll’s House’ and ‘Girls Like That’, both Nora and Scarlett are placed in situations where they are expected to behave in ways that society has pressurized them to. In ‘A Doll’s House’ Nora seems to be aware of the pressures society force upon both women and men, but for the early stages of the play she still implements her role as a “kept woman” despite it not being what she wants to say or do. Part of Nora wants to live up to what is expected with her, and have an easy, happy, work-free life with her husband and children, while the other part - the more dominant half - knows that it’s wrong. She doesn’t want to live under societal pressures, and inevitably it is the reason she leaves her family by the end of the play. Scarlett,
Society in Norway in the 1800s stated that a women under the age of 25 was under the authority of her father. After that, she was her own person until married, she would then move into the house that her husband provided for her, take his name, have his children and not speak a word against it. An example of when we see this is when Nora distracts Torvald from Krogstad’s letter by dancing the tarantella for him. Nora is clearly not dancing the way Torvald had taught her to [“I would never have believed it. You have forgotten everything I ever taught you”], and Torvald is getting frustrated. He exclaims that Nora is dancing “wild” and as if her “life depended on it”, and he wants her to dance slow and calm. Society has put pressure on Torvald here, instead of Nora, for him to want Nora and himself to appear to others as a happy, stable, married couple. He believes that if he can keep Nora under his control and not let her dance the way she wants, it would come across to everyone else that he is the dominant figure in their marriage. This in turn forces Nora to have to shrink away and be the “little skylark” that Torvald so often calls