A Doll's House Grief Essay

The five stages of grief in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House

In A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen portrays the five stages of mourning to symbolise the death of the protagonist, Nora’s, marriage. The five stages of mourning, also known as the Kübler-Ross Model of Grief, postulate the development of emotions exhibited after being informed of a death. The five stages are chronologically; denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally, acceptance. Although literal death is not a particularly prevalent theme in the play, the symbolic death of Nora’s marriage is a consistent and driving element of conflicts that occur. When Krogstad, Nora’s husband’s employee, threatens to expose Nora for forging her father’s signature to get a loan which saved her

During the start of the second act of the play, Nora begins to exhibit signs of unrest and agitation through her movements and body language. Since Nora is in a very controlled environment where she cannot openly express her emotions, she is forced to show the second, most explosive emotion of anger, in a subdued and muted way. Ibsen deals with Nora’s anger in a very interesting way, instead of verbalizing her anger, she instead has bouts of physical unrest which clearly indicate anger to the audience. Nora’s bouts of anger are subtly laced throughout the second act, an example of this anger can be seen when a stage direction is given for Nora to (-- removed HTML --) , this obvious show of discomfort suggests that Nora is being suffocated and wants to possibly hurt or harm herself as a way to relieve her anger, which, according to the Kübler-Ross Model, is one of the ways that people deal with the emotion of anger during loss. The suggestion that Nora may in fact hurt herself is confirmed when she deals with the next stage of grieving the loss of her