Irresponsible Nora and Blanche Escaping Reality

        Nora from Henrik Ibsen's 1879 A Doll's House, filmed twice in 1973 by Joseph Losey and Patrick Garland respectively, and Blanche from Tennessee Williams' 1947 A Streetcar Named Desire, filmed in 1951 by Elia Kazan, are very similar to each other. Neither one of them is very responsible and tries to escape reality.

        Nora (Jane Fonda/Claire Bloom) forged her father's signature, and Blanche (Vivien Leigh) had relations with a student of hers. They both do not know how to take responsibility for their actions. Instead they run away from them. Nora left her family to go to her old home to get a job, and Blanche fled from her Mississippi home to live with her sister. Also neither one of them likes to live life in the world of reality. They both completely ignore what it going on around them and make believe that they are in some happy little fantasy world. They like to pretend that they are someone else, so they do not have to deal with anything that matters.

        Unlike Blanche, Nora is not mentally insane. She has just refused to ever grow up or she was not allowed to grow up. Her father and husband had treated her like a tiny fragile object that could break. They never made her deal with responsibilities. They wanted to keep her as something they could play with and something that would amuse them.

        However, Blanche has gone mentally insane so that it the reason why she acts the way she does. Blanche has never been right in the head since the time her husband had shot and killed himself when they were both very young. I believe she has blamed herself his death, and she tries to deal with it by getting involved with young boys. She tries to make herself look young so young boys will be attracted to her. I think that she might see a little piece of her late husband in everyone of them, and she misses him so much that she must be with someone young to remind herself of him. In so doing, she became an immature sex toy doll for all those men, especially in the Flamingo Hotel.

        Even though Nora and Blanche have different problems caused by different things in their lives, they both are similar in the fact that they both live in a pretend world. They do this so they do not have to deal with the real world and all of its troubles.

Ashley Veigl

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