Onions Make Us Cry Analysis

Despite the century-and-three-decades difference between them, Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Zainabu Jallo’s Onions Make Us Cry are studied for their indebtedness to two movements that have shaped human history and conditioned contemporary thoughts: the former as a play that inaugurates the modernist discuss in literature and pioneered the feminist subject, and the latter expressively reflecting this gender-based discourse. Aside the woman question, the texts, however, share some other important elements. They both provoke the question of being: the being of human reality and of truth. In Ibsen and Jallo, we witness Nora’s and Malinda’s experience of existential structures, their perspectival grappling with the perceptual realities of their

humanity in general). For Andrew Finch and Park-Finch, A Doll’s House portrays the feminist advocacy of women’s right for self-expression. The play, they wrote, “opened the way to the turn-of-the-century women 's movement,” this pioneering role being signified in Nora’s “closing the door on her husband and children” (p. 4). On the other hand, R. M. Adams (1957) believes that though its main character, Nora is “a woman imbued with the idea of becoming,” the text proposes nothing categorical about women; for him, the real theme of the play “has nothing to do with the sexes” but with humanity in general (p. 416). Thus Einar Haugen insists that “Nora is not just a woman arguing for liberation; she is me. She embodies the comedy as well as the tragedy of modern life” (as cited in Joan Templeton, 1989, p. 28). Templeton, nevertheless, takes up issues with this relegation of feminism to an inessential position in the play. For her (and many other critics would agree with her), dismissing women’s right as the subject of A Doll’s House is a gentlemanly refusal to acknowledge the existence of a tiresome reality (1989, p. 29). Templeton (1989) further argues that despite Ibsen’s disavowal of having consciously written with a feminist vision, “A Doll’s House is

213). Lurking around this fluidity is the choice of authenticity or inauthenticity. Authenticity, for Heidegger, is Dasein’s ownmost potentiality; “it is about glimpsing and living towards one’s deepest potentials in life. It is not about honesty or sincerity as the normal English word will suggest. Rather, it is a kind of consonance between how one is living and what one can actually be, between one’s reality and one’s possibility” says Eric L. Dodson, 2014, n.p). In Onions Make Us Cry and A Doll’s House, we are bothered with the question of being: foremost of which is the being of humans (Dasein, in Heidegger’s term) and the reality of perceived things (truth). However, the characters of the plays are seen for who they are, beings subject to the thrownness of human existence, and the accompaniment of this: the concealment of their ownmost potentiality for