A Doll’s House Essay

Braden Fuller

English Period 5

Ms. Villanueva

15 September, 2016

A Doll’s House Essay

The play, A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen, describes the theory that conforming towards either side of the roles of gender can result in negative impacts among yourself and others around you. We are humans and we can decide who we are or are set out to be, there are many articles and books that show how conformists lose their way of life, and the freedom to feel emotions and do what they dream to do. Gender helps us know who we are, but that doesn’t mean we have to conform to be the perfect guy or girl. Conforming towards gender roles is a dreadful way of living because it causes emotional isolation, forces lifestyles that revolve in a continuous loop, and it determines how males and females should act and be on a daily basis.

Each gender are equal in competitiveness to be the best of their gender, but males have a set of rules that they must conform to, to become a “real man”. These sets of rules are called the Man Box, where a set of rules dictate what a dominate male is like. This is best shown in the article Why Traditional Manhood Is Killing Us by Mark Greene, Greene states several rules in the Man Box, including, “Real men don’t show their emotions (anger, yes, but little else)”(The Man Box-1st rule). Showing emotion is the most common action for any human being, and limiting it down to only anger would be something almost impossible to do. This causes a masculine figure to be in an emotional state of isolation because they are prohibited to display any emotions towards anything because if they don’t follow these rules, they think that they’ll be distinguishable as a weak and unqualified of being a real man.

We, as humans, have the ability to determine how we live, but conforming terminates our active qualification to do such a thing, and assembles us to constantly do things over and over. In the song “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds, the artist displays how the majority of conformists are in a constant spiral and unable to cease movement, by saying, “Little boxes on the hillside, Little boxes made of ticky tacky, Little boxes