A Doll's House Analytical Essay

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Nora on the other hand, comes to symbolize the mysterious past of the father, previously unknown to the narrator. Unlike Tuppertown and the narrator’s mother, Nora is neither ordinary, nor familiar. Her vitality is shown through the clothing she wears: “her dress is flowered more lavishly than anything [the narrator’s] mother owns, green and yellow on brown, leaving her arms bare” (12). The vivid colors of her dress are not only direct contrasts to the mother, but they reveal a complexity to her, the cool green clashing against the warm yellow. Her exposed, “bare” arm invites sensuality; for she is uninhibited as she flirts with the father. Nora creates disruption, reminding the narrator of her father’s mysterious sexual past. In the last passage, …show more content…
There is much about the father that she will “never know,” leaving her to grapple with the idea that the knowledge she has about her father is only superficial (18). The important words in the last passage—flowing, darkening, turning, changing, weathers —all suggest secrecy and transformation. Once again, Munro emphasizes the importance on movement landscape and description of scenery to probe beneath the realistic surface, to be suspicious of what is underneath. The comfort that the narrator takes in working with her father—who knows “the quick way out of town”—turns into a feeling of uneasiness when he goes “outside his territory” to visit Nora, the unmentioned past (6,8).“Distances” suggests a dual meaning: the physical space between Tuppertown and Nora’s home, as well as, the distance between past and present, father and daughter. Though the past meets the present with Nora, the narrator “cannot imagine,” or refuses to imagine, the past to be repeated in the present. The change in her reality comes “once [her] back is turned,” suggesting betrayal from her father (18). When the father brings Nora into the narrator’s life, she feels as though he has turned on her, depriving her of accustomed normalcy, rupturing her imagined reality. She can never go back to the ordinary and familiar that she had
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