# Paper 2 Prep
[TOC]
## Vocabulary
1. Social mores
2. Iconoclastic
3. Milieu
Ibsen changes the structure of a well-made play, it's more serious and the reversal of fortune is unexpected
## Context of production
### A Doll's House
- Beginning of feminist movement in Norway
- New law that women can take out a loan
- Men were dominant in society
- Growth and prosperity in Norway
- Well-made play structure (Ibsen took it from comedic to realist)
- Ibsen's family was wealthy but they lost everything
- Ibsen's father abused his mother
- Manifestation of Ibsen's belief in Human rights and women's rights
### The Handmaid's Tale
- Written in West Berlin and Alabama in the 1984
## Quotations to memorize:
- Stage directions from Doll’s House
- Nora sits across when she doesn't want to have sex
> One can't have anything in life without paying for it. -Dr. Rank
### A Doll's House
> "Is that my little lark, twittering out there?...When did my squirrel get home?" Torvald
> look at all the beauty that is mine, all my very own - Torvald
> **I have another duty equally sacred ... My duty to myself - Nora**
> **I believe that first and foremost I am an individual, just as you are.**
### The Handmaid's Tale
> "Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary."
> "I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will" Chapter 13
> "I said there was more than one way of living with your head in the sand and that if Moira thought she could create Utopia by shutting herself up in a women-only enclave she was sadly mistaken."
## Context of reception
2020
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# Question outline
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- Introduction
Machiavelli
>“The ends justify the means”
- Ideas have been explored extensively in both texts
### Thesis: While each of these texts was formulated in very different historical and social contexts, they both have elements of consequentialist justification. The key difference is in how these justifications are portrayed-- negatively in A Handmaid’s Tale and almost empathetically in A Doll’s House.
#### P1: Negatively in Handmaid’s Tale
In "The Handmaid's Tale", the society of Gilead utilized rape, sexual violence, and extreme oppression in order to achieve their 'means', which is the survival of the human species. They justify this by explaining that the society would die out because of the rise of infertility due to radiation poisioning.
- Quotes: “You can’t make an omelette without breaking the eggs” (Atwood 211)
- “Better never means better for everyone. It’s always means worse, for some”
#### P2: Empathy in Doll’s House
Empathy towards Nora mostly comes from the interpreters in modern day (context of interpretation). Empathy toward Nora, in the context of production, comes from the women in the audience, and even from them, not many have a feminist perspective yet.
- Quotes:
- "Almost everyone who has gone to bad early in life has had a deceitful mother" (Ibsen Act 1)
- Her actions: manipulation, flattery,
- How is the book empathetic towards her actions
- How Torvald treats her “my little person”, “
- Mrs. Linde treats