Word: helmer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Woman" has been proclaimed with a certain regularity for a century and more. Ibsen brought Nora Helmer out of her doll's house in 1879. and succeeding generations have invented her anew: in Shaw's drawing-room heroines, Laurentian sensualists, Brett Ashleys, flappers, women who smoked and drank and swore and brushed their teeth with last night's Scotch, got divorced or did not bother to get married at all, wore pants, and perhaps in the mellow suburban '50s, lived to grow old as Auntie Mame...
...Helmer: Before everything else you're a wife and a mother...
...Nora's husband, Torvald Helmer, Donald Madden is an excellent foil. His blond Scandinavian looks, his slightly mannered stuffiness, arrogance and condescension all contribute to a solid and coherent character. He conveys just the inflexible sense of property and propriety that is so necessary to the role. There is no falling off in the rest of the cast-in Nora's worldly wise friend (Patricia Elliott) or in the doctor (Roy Shuman), who is paying mortally for the sins of his father, or in the unscrupulous moneylender (Robert Gerringer), who is trying to keep a slippery foot...
Seductively Powerful. As everyone probably knows, Nora Helmer has saved her husband's life with a convalescent trip financed by an indiscreet secret loan from the moneylender, who writes a letter exposing her to her husband. Torvald plays a cravenly abusive blame game with Nora, then, when the threat lifts, wants to go on together as if nothing had happened. But Nora sees her idealistic love shattered. She feels that she has been treated like a doll-child in her father's house and a doll-woman in her husband's. She opts to leave...
...Helmer, a Harvard policeman, and Joel Porte, Allston Burr Senior Tutor in Quincy House, inspected rooms on the fourth and fifth floors of C and D entries that night, but they failed to find anything suspicious...