Gender Relations in A Doll’s House and How Did I Miss You? Essay

Gender Relations refers to the situation relations amid men and women. Under aged society, men and women do not stand on an get even ground, men shows superiority and women have lower status than men. Under remote values, men possess higher status and act a dominant role, women argon obliged to live according to their gendered roles, to be submissive. This notion of gender relations is like a culture, it affects how men and women interact and perceive one another, it also propagates though interactions between men and women. The imbalanced power relations between men and women can be found in a lot of Western and Chinese writings. A Dolls House is a play written by Henrik Ibsen. In A Dolls House, Henirk Ibsen presents the female protagonist, Nora, as a conventional woman living in a patriarchal society. Nora had to follow the rules and customs. She always had to mask her unconventional traits in front of her husband. Through the interaction between Nora and Torvald, the imbalanc ed power relations between men and women is shown. Torvald had more rights than Nora, and he just treated Nora as a possession of him. For Nora, she had to mask herself to accommodate to the patriarchal society. Finally she transformed into a New Women, breakthrough the patriarchal values and leave the confinement to search for her self. Through A Dolls House, Ibsen criticizes the patriarchal values that society accepts. For How Did I Miss You, Zhang Xinxin presents the imbalanced power relations between men and women through the nameless female protagonist and male protagonist. They twain symbolize the many men and women who lived in China during the Cultural Revolution. In the story, the female protagonist tried hard to pursue come to status wit... ...ates to men. To wrench an real individual, a woman has to leave her gendered role and seek her own life. It would be a difficult time for women. Henrik Ibsen thus reminds society of the imbalanced power relations and society shou ld solve the problem. For How Did I Miss You, Zhang Xinxin presents the imbalance of power between female and male sex in China. The female protagonist acts as a mirror of millions of female in China. She suffers due to her unconventional traits and through How Did I Miss You, Zhang Xinxin depicts the difficult process of a woman to pursue an equal status with men.Works CitedHenrik Ibsen. Four Major Plays. Trans. James McFarlane and Jens Arup. Oxford Oxford UP, 1981.Tam, K.K., Yip, Terry S.H., and Dissanayake, Wmal, eds. A place of ones own stories of self in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. New York Oxford UP, 1999.