i entertain myself.

“In the essay, Key analyzes the female characters created by Henrik Ibsen, whose 1879 play A Doll’s House shook the theatrical world when its lead character, Nora, departed her marriage rather than continue to be treated by her husband as a compliant doll.  Key notes that the playwright took pleasure in portraying the precise moment when his women characters, feeling confined by their milieu, revolt and struggle for freedom…’It is the woman who has wholly desired, wholly loved, yes, often wholly sinned…Almost invariably it is the woman who breaks out of the cage, or the ark, or the dollhouse.  And [Ibsen] believes that she, without the barriers, will find her right road, led by a surer instinct than man.  For Ibsen, there is no higher moral…law than the devotion of the personality to its ideal.’  In Ibsen’s view…the proof of a person’s greatness is ‘the power to stand alone; to be able, in every individual case, to make his own choice; in action to write anew his own law, choose his own sacrifices, run his own dangers, win his own freedom, venture his own destruction, choose his own happiness.’”