A Lesson Plan on Ibsen’s A Doll’s House: Revisiting the Victorian Myth of Home and Woman through Re-writings, Parodies, and Sequels

Abstract

This paper proposes a lesson plan for four sessions on Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, specifically designed to teach English-major undergraduates. Through the proposed four sessions, students will practice how to do a close-reading of literary texts and a contextual analysis. In the first session, students will examine socio-political context of the 19th-century England with intense focus on the period’s obsession with myth of home and woman. Students will discuss the emergence of the New Woman and women’s struggle to gain the right to education, property, and vote. In the second session, students will examine the myth of home and woman as a backlash to the feminist movement and conflicting anxieties deeply embedded in the Victorian discourse of gender. In the third session, students will practice a close reading of A Doll’s House and identify how the contemporary gender discourse is reflected in the play. In the fourth session, students will be introduced to diverse re-writings, parodies and sequels to the original play. When A Doll’s House was premiered, many popular playwrights revised the ending to assure a happy reconciliation of the couple or Nora’s repentance, which intellectuals or feminist writers ridiculed in their parody works. As a final activity, students will write either alternative ending or sequel to the play that would please conservative audience. The fact that the play continues to be re-interpreted in the 21st century demonstrates how a literary text can be reproduced with ever-renewed political significance.