Feminist Literary Theory In A Doll's House

Feminist literary theory, as a term, gained currency during the mid-1980’s, the term feminist literary criticism had previously been applied. Conventionally, criticism was used to refer to a practical approach to literary study, i.e. the close reading of texts; while theory referred to the interpretation, evaluation and examination of the philosophical and political underpinnings of the texts. Today, criticism and theory appear simultaneously in feminist anthologies and the feminist literary theory includes both, practical and theoretical, approaches to literature (Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories, 261). As mentioned by Code, the function of the feminist literary theory is “analys[ing] the role that literary forms and practices, together with the

Most of the women were act passively as they are expected to not to go outside their houses and child bearing and child rearing was their main role in family and they do not actively participate in society. In the words of Marianne Sturman, “In A Doll’s House, he especially probed the problems of the social passivity assigned to women in a male-oriented society” (Cliffnotes: Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler, 51). It was the time when men and women had been following the age-long traditions, as they were assigned specific roles to play. The question, whether A Doll’s House is a feminist play or not, depends on Ibsen’s relationship to feminism. Gail Finny writes,
The question of Ibsen’s relationship to feminism, whether one is referring specifically to the turn-of-the-century women’s movement or more generally to feminism as an ideology, has been a vexed one. The view supporting Ibsen as feminist can be seen to lie along a spectrum of attitudes with Ibsen as quasi-socialist at one end and Ibsen as humanist at the other. (The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen,