Word: nora
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...seventies: that the women's problem is rooted in the most profound structures of the social order. The movie appeases the national trauma about women with a sophisticated sleight-of-hand. Not only does it couch its message in 19th century terms, but it refuses even to define Nora in relation to them. It thus disguises the problem and allays it by spreading a veneer of euphoria over it. The ending of the movie is an affirmation of individual female liberation that denies collective liberation. It overlooks the fact that the fight for human equality in the face...
...movie admits no more than a turn of the century secret: Nora's education in a system of sexual power that admitted no equality has cast her identity in a mold of submission. But in conceding this so generously, the movie attaches a seventies' relevance to a decades' old truism...
Torvald, for instance, is limned as the stuffed-shirt the more to accent Nora's radicalism. Torvald is the petty bourgeois straight arrow with no doubts about his superior sex role. But her rejection of empty role-playing is primitive and barely conscious. Her rebellion against what she knows to be wrong does not give her a clue as to what else is right. She sees no farther than the either-or choice confronting her directly: either she submits to the futile prospect of a life spent fortifying the egoism of her man, or she rejects men. Never does...
CONTEMPORARY feminists are not faced with Nora's dilemma at all, because there have been other routes carved out. From the twenties suffragette reformists to the sixties radical collectivists the consciousness of female deprivation has steadily deepened. Marxist thinking revealed the socio-political contradictions inherent in patriarchal oppression; psychoanalysis uncovered the neurosis wrought by male domination; and recent feminists have recognized that the oppression of women is traceable to a particular form of society...
...Unlike Nora, a contemporary feminist realizes the larger dimensions of her rebellion. Unlike Nora, she is not alone in her struggle and not an individualist idealist. She has the force of a history of public outcry to fire her collective faith. And because of this, she can dismiss Nora's dilemma without too much agonizing...