In many of the stories that we have read over the semester, plenty were about the end or beginning of something. Some of the stories involved the end of a relationship while others were about the beginning of a journey towards happiness or clarity. When choosing what stories I wanted to compare for my essay, I decided to chose two stories that end with things falling apart, one in favor of the main character, while the other negatively effected the main character. I have chosen to compare A Dolls House by Henrik Ibsen and “The Thirteenth Night” by Ichiyo Higuchi.
In A Dolls House, we see Nora’s marriage fall apart. In the beginning we hear about how she went behind her husbands back, and signed loans in her deceased fathers name so that she and her husband could take a trip to Italy. Since that time, we learn that Nora has been paying the loan back slowly over the years, When a man named Krogstad, who works under Torvald at the bank, arrives to discover that he will most likely be fired from his position at the bank, he blackmails Nora by threatening to tell Torvald that Nora took out the loan. While Torvald never sees the end to their marriage coming, Nora has decided that the…show more content… The strain on Nora and Torvalds marriage is caused by Torvalds lack of respect for Nora. This is also the case for Oseki and Isamu. The main difference between them is how the husbands express this disrespect. Torvald treats Nora more like a pretty possession; he believes she is too fragile to face the world outside her home, and that she should always be happy “… and you needn’t tire your blessed eyes and your delicate fingers” (Ibsen pg.537). Isamu is blatantly disrespectful to Oseki in a very different manner, as he openly mocks her for not being well educated. “He starts in at me at the breakfast able, and it never stops. In front of the maids even he complains how I can’t do anything right, how ill-bred I am.” (Higuchi