Throughout the play, emotional labor plays an imperative part in Nora’s deteriorating mental state until her epiphany, where she transforms into a woman determined to discover her authentic self, no matter the punishment. Subsequent to Nora’s epiphany, she explains to Torvald that she was her father’s doll-child, just like she is Torvald’s doll-wife, going “from Papa’s hands into yours. You arranged everything to your own taste, and so I got the same taste as you--or I pretended to; I can’t remember… I’ve lived by doing tricks for you, Torvald. But that’s the way you wanted it… You’re to blame nothing’s become of me” (Ibsen 1015). The entirety of Nora’s life revolves around the perpetual pressure to appease and entertain others, as a result, “from Papa’s hands” to her …show more content…
When Nora has her epiphany, she realizes she has “lived by doing tricks for… Torvald” and excavates herself out of the perpetual cycle of emotional labor. Nora inevitably admits and acknowledges her own emotional labor. Additionally, Nora recognizes the mask she has worn, a part of her emotional labor, of pretending to enjoy all of Torvald’s wishes and enjoying entertaining him, wearing her masks long enough that she “can’t remember” what she actually enjoys and likes. In this case, Nora wears her masks with such frequency and for an extended period of time that she is not just living with a stranger, but she is a stranger to herself. Through this acknowledgment, Nora realizes she must put herself first and look at the world through her own perspective, not Torvald’s. Similarly, in Jaffe’s “When Feelings Become Work,” she categorizes emotional labor as work that, “requires one to induce or suppress feelings in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others”