Toxic Relationships in The Play “Doll’s House”

Nora Helmer from the drama, A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen and Adam Sorenson from the romantic drama, The Shape of Things by Neil Labute are two characters that are very similar, but also have many differences. The plays take place in completely different times and places, with A Doll’s House taking place in a Norwegian town in 1879 and The Shape of Things taking place at a liberal arts college in a conservative midwestern town. The difference in eras is shown in the way that the relationships are portrayed. Nora and Torvald are a traditional married couple with expectations of how men and women are to behave very different from the portrayal of Adam and Evelyn. They are shown as a young couple in a less than a traditional relationship. Even though the relationships are extremely different, they both show that it is unfair to try to make someone become a completely different person. Adam was in a relationship with someone who didn’t care for him. Nora was in a relationship with a man, who cared for the woman who she pretended to be. He told her how much he disliked her when he found out about a secret she was keeping from him. Nora and Adam are both very dynamic characters. They undergo huge character arcs. Although they go through completely different situations, they share similar experiences, in what they go through.

Nora and Adam share a lot of similarities in their character arcs. A girl named Evelyn uses Adam for a project and completely changes his physical appearance. As his physical appearance changes and he sees that someone is interested in him his personality changes also. Evelyn uses him for an MFA thesis project. He is used as an experiment. During the experiment, Evelyn pretends to be interested in Adam romantically. Adam believes that she actually has feelings for him. In reality, Evelyn manipulates him for her own benefit. When she presents her experiment on him to the class, Evelyn says, “…you may be asking yourselves, ‘well did she at least tell him?’ Of course not, no, I couldn’t. Not until tonight, or he really wouldn’t be a piece of art. Adam’s turning point occurs at this moment when he realizes that he was just her experiment and that the relationship he thought they had formed was just for her thesis. When Adam confronts Evelyn asking if she cared for him at all or if everything was completely false she tells him the only true thing she ever told him was what she whispered to him during a romantic encounter. The audience is never told what that was. they are left to come to their own conclusion. Did she have feelings for him or did she whisper the truth to him but he did not want to hear it? This hurts Adam a lot because the entire time he liked Evelyn so much and to not only find out that he was her experiment but to also find out that she basically had no feelings for him crushed him. Adam was stunned, bewildered, and taken aback.

Nora’s character arc occurs when her husband finds out the secret she has been trying to keep from him. Torvald becomes outraged that she could possibly do anything illegal. Even though Nora did something illegal so that she could take Torvald to Italy, he did not care what the reason was. Nora was fearing the moment when Torvald would read the letter that would expose the fact that she forged her father’s signature. Eventually, Torvald reads the letter and reacts very poorly by telling her she is not the person he thought she was. He says, “From now on, forget happiness. Now it’s just about saving the remains, the wreckage, the appearance” (33). Similarly to Adam, Nora’s husband didn’t care for the real her the same way that she cared for him. Nora is willing to take her own life to save her husband from embarrassment. Torvald is so self-involved that he is only concerned about how he feels and how others view him and his reputation. The realization that Nora was going to kill herself does not seem to bother him. He can not understand how Nora could think differently from the way he had strongly believed women were supposed to act. Nora walks out on Torvald. As she walks out and leaves her wedding ring the audience is left to figure out if she comes back or not. The fact that Nora wanted to find herself and figure out what makes her happy, is the absolute opposite of what she had been doing all of the years that she spent being married to Torvald. Nora was hurt, wronged, and saddened.

Nora and Adam were both shocked and blindsided by their supposed partners’ behavior. Everything that they thought was the truth was indeed not that at all. They were both used in different ways one for an experiment or the other for appearances. Adam was used as an experiment by Evelyn to see if she could change his world. She was told to do her thesis on something that would change the world. She decided to take Adam and use him to show how she could change him. Torvald uses Nora in a similar way because appearances are important to him and he is only concerned about himself. Nora spent her life trying to make someone happy that would never be happy. It is with great horror that Nora finds out from her husband the main reason he was with her was just solely to make him look good to other people. Luckily, Adam and Nora both realize their worth and stick up for themselves by telling their partners how they feel and how they were hurt so badly by the people they thought cared for them. For example, when Nora decides to advocate for herself against Torvald, “I have been performing tricks for you, Torvald. That’s how I’ve survived. You wanted it like that. You and Papa have done me a great wrong. It’s because of you I’ve made nothing of my life”. The biggest difference between Nora and Adam’s character arcs would be the fact that the person who betrayed Nora was her husband for several years, whereas Adam was in his toxic relationship for less than a few months. Although there is a difference in time in the two relationships, it can be argued that Adam and Nora both went through the same amount of trauma and hurt, based on their character arcs. Nora and Adam had partners without love, relationships without dedication, and caring without reciprocation.

Overall, Nora and Adam do share a few differences in their character arcs, however they definitely share more similarities. They also share similar experiences. When they confront the people that have hurt them, both of them are told that they should be happy with the way they have been treated. Evelyn tells Adam that he should be grateful that she influenced him to change the way he looked and behaved. The changes made him a much better person in Evelyn’s eyes. The fact is that Adam was happy with the way he looked in the beginning. In a very similar instance, Torvald tells Nora that he doesn’t love her and that she can remain married to him only for appearances. Nora responds by standing up for herself and tells Torvald that she is leaving him to find herself. In the end, once Adam had found out that he was just an experiment, he realized that Evelyn did not care for him. Similarly, Nora realized that she had lived her life to please Torvald, who really did not love her as she had thought. Evelyn and Torvald were both people that only cared about themselves, so Adam and Nora were lucky that the events occurred and they could escape from the toxic relationships.

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