Notesale: Turn your study into money

Document Preview

Extracts from the notes are below, to see the PDF you'll receive please use the links above

---

Rebecca Lyons

Religion, morality and identity

Coleridge

Ibsen
- The play is set around Christmas time, yet lacks the

religious vigour of the Victorian era; Christmas is

seen as an excuse for materialism and selfish

expectations
...
’ – M
...


- Torvald’s warped view of morality is dictated by

money, which he vows to ‘never borrow’
...


- Torvald insists that living a life of lies ‘spreads

disease and infection’; Torvald’s use of corrosive

imagery is ironic, considering his marriage is based

on lies and deceit
...
Nora is subject to Torvald’s
perverted desires, encapsulated in his demand

that she dress as a ‘Neapolitan peasant girl
...

The association of Geraldine with blue has
religious connotations, echoing the presentation
of the Virgin Mary wearing the cloak of ultramarine
...

AH – There is a meeting between higher and
humanly thoughts ‘Which meets all motion and
becomes its soul’, creating life within a body
...
He asks to walk
humbly with God in Christ’s footsteps, imploring
God to shape his ‘unregenerate mind’ into one
resembling God’s own
...
’ The maid to which
Coleridge refers is his wife Sara, who he came to
detest; yet, his mentioning of her in a thank-you
letter to God shows an understanding of the value
and goodness within her
...
Unitarians
and various sorts of deists, adhered to a divinity
which was known through sensation: a Nature god
of sorts
...
He explores the possibility that all
religions and mythical traditions, with their general
agreement on the unity of God and the
immortality of the soul, sprang from a universal
life consciousness, which was expressed
particularly through the phenomena of human
genius
...
” – E
...

C – Geraldine refuses to pray due to weariness, a
rejection of religion which foreshadows the
poem’s immorality
...
Both characters possess tragically

complimentary moral blindness, lost in the

superficial aspects of their lives until the threat of

blackmail jars them apart
...

‘It is no accident that Ibsen’s most famous
emancipated woman character achieves selfactualisation by turning her back on her husband
and children’ – Gail Finney
Torvald’s desperation to reconcile his relationship
with Nora is because she is his ‘most precious
treasure’; her likeness to a priceless material
object makes her a definitive part of Torvald’s selfworth, to lose Nora would therefore be an
encroachment on his very identity
...
’
Ibsen forms a conflicting contrast between duty
and identity, in his presentation of characters’ duty
to other robbing them of their own identity
...
It is only in
her shunning of wifely duty in the play’s final scene
that she establishes a ‘duty to myself
...

Christabel is the ‘lovely lady’, whilst Geraldine is
described as a ‘prison’ to Christabel, she casts a
‘cold’ controlling spell upon the damsel
...
Through this representation,
Coleridge suggests that goodness may be
deceptive beneath the surface

---