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Shanta Gokhale on Nora, Feminist Reading, and Storytelling
Shanta Gokhale writes about how books have shaped the way she sees the world.
She focuses on Nora, the main character in Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House.
Nora realizes that her husband treats her like a child instead of an equal person.
She decides to leave her home so she can learn who she really is.
Gokhale explains that this idea was shocking in many places, including Maharashtra.
A Marathi play showed a woman leaving home, but she still planned to care for her husband’s parents.
Gokhale also discusses how feminist ideas changed the way people looked at women in stories and films.
However, she says literature should be appreciated for many things, including its stories, humor, and descriptions of society.
Shanta Gokhale revisits Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in her new book Of Ancestors and Friends: A Life With Books.
She presents Nora’s decision to leave Torvald as a rejection of patriarchal roles and a demand to become a self-respecting human being.
Gokhale places Ibsen’s 1879 play within Norway’s earlier intellectual traditions supporting egalitarianism and gender equality.
She contrasts Nora’s independence with the more limited choices available to women in the 1942 Marathi play Kulavadhu.
Gokhale argues that feminist analysis can expand literary reading without replacing her appreciation for storytelling, humor, and a novel’s wider social world.
- Who
- Shanta Gokhale discusses Henrik Ibsen, Nora, Marathi theatre, feminist critics, and several influential novelists and theorists.
- What
- She examines A Doll’s House, its feminist significance, its reception, and her broader approach to reading literature.
- Where
- The discussion ranges across Norway, Copenhagen, England, Maharashtra, and Bombay’s theatre world.
- When
- A Doll’s House was published in 1879; Gokhale also discusses responses from the 1890s, the 1942 play Kulavadhu, and feminist debates of the 1970s.
- Why
- Gokhale uses Nora and other literary examples to explain how social values, feminist criticism, and her love of storytelling shape her reading life.
Feminist and Social-Critical Reading
Broader Literary Appreciation
How to read women characters
Feminist and Social-Critical Reading
Feminist criticism examines how stories depict women’s restricted roles, objectification, and the social structures that limit their independence.
Broader Literary Appreciation
Gokhale says her feminist perspective expanded her reading rather than reduced it, allowing her to consider characters alongside their societies, economies, traditions, and landscapes.
The purpose of A Doll’s House
Feminist and Social-Critical Reading
Nora’s departure is a powerful challenge to patriarchal ideas and expresses her duty to become a reasonable, self-respecting human being.
Broader Literary Appreciation
Some contemporary critics questioned whether the play’s emotional appeal and rejection of accepted ideals placed it on the wrong track, despite its technical and psychological strengths.
Story versus anti-storytelling
Feminist and Social-Critical Reading
Literary approaches may emphasize texts, ideas, and social criticism over conventional narrative or storytelling.
Broader Literary Appreciation
Gokhale prefers a well-told tale and rejects E. M. Forster’s regret that novels tell stories, while still remaining interested in books that challenge storytelling.
Key facts
- Book
- Of Ancestors and Friends: A Life With Books by Shanta Gokhale
- Play
- Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House
- Publication date
- A Doll’s House was published in 1879.
- Nora’s decision
- Nora leaves Torvald’s home after rejecting the idea that her primary duties are only to her husband and children.
- Marathi comparison
- The 1942 play Kulavadhu depicts a wife leaving home to live with and care for her parents-in-law.
- Feminist criticism
- Gokhale discusses John Berger’s analysis of women being viewed as objects and Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze.
- Literary preference
- Gokhale says she values well-told stories and enjoyed Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy after adjusting her reading approach.
Quotes
Unnamed critic from The Social Democrat
Critic writing for the Danish newspaper The Social Democrat
“This play touches the lives of thousands of families; oh yes there are thousands of such dollhomes, where the husband treats his wife as a child he amuses himself with, and so that is what the wives become…Is there anyone who does not feel that it is this young and delightful young woman’s duty, her inescapable duty, to leave this gentleman, this husband, who slowly sacrifices her on the altar of his egotism, and who fails to understand her value as a human being?”
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“The statement that Ibsen’s plays have an immoral tendency, is, in the sense in which it is used, quite true. Immorality does not necessarily imply mischievous conduct: it implies conduct, mischievous or not, which does not conform to current ideals.”
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Sources
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