The Last Time Anyone in This Class Should Talk About A Doll’s House

Although we have already analyzed the crap out of this play, I believe that there are some more possible points of view that we have not completely explored. The first point is that, even though Ibsen obviously intended for Torvald to be the bad guy, Torvald may not be the worst person in the world. Another, is that Nora, the supposed protagonist, became a character that resembled an antogonist in my eyes. 

I know that we have been calling Torvald an insufficient husband and a rather heartless person over the past month or so, but I don’t believe he deserves all of this heat.  Sure he was rather miserly and a somewhat shallow human being, but I firmly believe that Torvald is more of a victim in the story than Nora is.   An angle that makes Torvald out to be the antagonist in the story that is set up by Ibsen, is the one that Nora desperately wants to keep her secret safe from Torvald.  This view of Nora’s struggle against Torvald’s outreaching knowledge makes Torvald out to be a monster trying to bring down the villain when in fact Torvald is just bumbling through his own life. Now it is true that Torvald’s anger at Nora at the end of the play reveals what an angry and spiteful man he can be, but he did have a right to some of his anger.  His wife had kept secrets from him when if she had simply been open with him in the first place, many of these problems could have been avoided. In class we have also pointed out that Torvald treated Nora as he would treat a small animal with all his bet names such as, “songbird,” or “”little squirrel.” Although these names do deteriorate the status of women, Nora has done nothing in their long marriage to say that she did not appreciate her treatment.  Torvald was just going off of what he had always done because he had assumed that what he was doing was okay with Nora.

At the end of the story, Nora leaves Torvald in a quick turn of events and tells him that they can never be together again. Through Torvald’s eyes, this looks pretty rough. Your wife of many years has forged a check to save your life and your family name is possibly at stake and she has been hiding this for all these years. You get a shade too much angry at her and now she is telling you that she wishes to leave you and the children behind. To me, it sounds more like Torvald is the victim of a poor relationship and that Nora is becoming a rather unpleasant individual. Now, Torvald is still not the most thoughtful or loving person in Norway and he certainly does not deserve to be credited as the hero of the play. The fact that Ibsen intended that Torvald be the antagonist and Nora the protagonist is obvious and clearly supported. The fact that Ibsen intended this alone is reason enough to call Nora the protagonist.  However I still have a hard time believing that Torvald is somewhat entilted to some backup at the end of the play, and Nora more blame then she is recieving. Besides the point that she kept secrets from her husband that hurt their relationship and that she expected (expected!) him to take the fall for it, she also abandons her children in search of her own life.  A very selfish move if you ask me.  This is ironic because earlier in the play, Torvald mentions how the absence of a mother is usually what leads to criminal tendencies in children.

Overall, Torvald Helmer maybe isn’t quite the big bad wolf after and perhaps Nora should shoulder some of the blame on this one.  They both have done wrong, and they both have been the victims of the other’s actions at one point, but Torvald was given an unproportionate amount of blame by this class in my opinion.

Mike Folta’s Take on Marxist Views of Song of Roland

In my opinion, Song of Roland was a classic Middle Ages story.  There was plenty of fighting and death and lots of honor and enough religious allusions to please God.  I can’t help notice however that several of these Middle Ages tales would appear thouroughly dissapointing when looking through a Marxist lense.  Now, I’m no Communist but I do see several injustices involving the economic and social classes that Marxists would agree with me on. One of these blaring crimes that the author commits is the neglect of the thousands of lower-class lives that were lost in the battles.  Also, the complete control over the other soldiers in the story by Charlamagne, Roland, and others.  The third class discrimination made by the author is when Roland refuses to be taken by a Saracen who is a mere foot soldier; someone that Roland considers very inferior to him. 

According to the story, one hundred thousand Moors squared off against twenty thousand Frenchmen (but the French had Roland and he usaully counts for around eighty thousand people anyway so they were ok) in the passes of the Pyranees Mountians. Now  apparently, blowing his horn and saving twenty thousand of his countrymen was less honorable than getting them all killed by not calling for backup.  The story does not elaborate on the gory details, but because one noblemen wanted to be a martyr, he got twenty thousand lower class soldiers killed.  This occurs very dramatically and the author still manages to leave out great portions of the story where the French die by the hundreds surrounded on all sides by the Saracens.  Obviously to the writer and the audience of the time, the lives of thousands of foot soldiers can’t possibly be as exciting as important or as interesting as Count Roland blowing on a horn.  We also see this forgetfulness in authors in other old stories such as in the Illiad (though not nearly as prevanlently) when Homer chooses to write about Achilles and Paris’ personal problems rather than the Acheans and Trojans dying in the fields of Troy.  To be fair to Homer, he did give the foot soldiers some shoutouts whenever Achilles or Hector were fighting but the descriptions were in broad terms such as, “they died in hordes”, or “and none of them were left.”

When Charlemagne makes the decision to help Roland, he tells his sixty thousand soldiers to ride hard directly into the Moors.  It should be expected that a military leader have strong control over his forces, however with the ease that Charlemagne sent sixty thousand men into danger hints at the fact that perhaps he thought of them as dispensible.  This also shows when Roland orders twenty thousand men to their certain deaths. 

Honor among the upper class in the Middle Ages was obviously very important as Roland needed this honor more than twenty thousand Frenchmen. Apparently, back then, honor also had to do with who killed you. Not just any old peasant would do, certainly not a lowly foot soldier.  No if you were a noble such as Roland, only some seriously heavy duty  royalty would suffice.  When Roland insults the soldier by saying “how dare you touch me?”, he infers that he is superior to the Saracen.  Some people might judge this as just battlefield anger, but  I see this as a severe class division. 

In short, the Song of Roland was a cute little story about saving ones honor, however Roland did this at the disregard of thousands of other lives simply because they were poorer than he was.  The upper class in the story truly did see themselves as more important than their soldiers and they believed that these lives were dispensable.  A Marxist would be very dissapointed with this story and when I look at the story through that point of view, I am too.  But remember, I’m not a Communist!