Although written almost fifty years apart from each other and by two authors from completely different contexts, Nella Larsen's novel Quicksand and Henrik's play Ibsen's A Doll's House (also known as A Doll House) addresses similar issues regarding the oppression of women by society, and in particular by the institution of marriage. The paths that Helga Crane of Quicksand and Nora Torvald of A Doll's House follow in their respective works are related in theme but vary in event. However, each travels the other's path backwards. Nora lives most of her life under her husband's control, but at the end of the play she leaves him to seek a free life, while Helga begins the novel by abandoning Naxos for a free life, only to end up with even worse oppression as wife of a minister in Alabama. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay It's hard to imagine that these two women could have anything in common when you consider their backgrounds. Nora is a spoiled Norwegian housewife, married to a successful banker with three children. Initially she presents herself as a carefree and inexperienced child. “What do I care about boring society?” he asks Dr. Rank in the first act (Ibsen 134). Although she doesn't seem to mind the way her husband Torvald patronizes her, guiding and teasing her as a father would a foolish child ("Look, Nora, in many things you are still a child. I am older than many ways and I have had a little more experience" [Ibsen 184]), tries to rebel in small, meaningful gestures, such as eating macaroons, even though he has forbidden them, and admitting: "I have the most desire amazing to say, 'Damn it!'" While she may not have initially realized the weight of her actions, Nora also rebelled in a major way by taking pride in how she had illegally procured money for the family's trip to Italy, and how she worked hard to repay it (both things Torvald considers disgusting and unfeminine respectively). "It was really fun to sit there and work and earn money. It was almost like being a man." (Ibsen 162) As the play progresses and Nora becomes more and more aware of the injustice in which she lives with Torvald, she reveals herself to be much more than the frivolous outward person she projects when she finds the courage to face him and leave him. “But you don't talk or think like the man I could bond with... I was simply your songbird, your doll, and from now on you would handle her more delicately than ever because she was so delicate and fragile. .. I realized that I have been living with an unknown man for eight years and have given him three children. Oh, I can't think about it, I could tear myself to pieces (Ibsen 320) Helga Crane, however, is introduced for the first time as a teacher a Naxos, a school for black Americans dedicated to racial uplift based on the Tuskegee Institute. Helga comes from a lower-middle class background, with an absent black father and a deceased white mother. Unlike Nora, she begins her novel relatively free as a single woman, becoming even more independent when she leaves Naxos due to her regressive philosophy "This great community, Helga thought, was no longer a school. It was now a place of entertainment in the Black Belt, exemplifying the magnanimity of the white man, refutation of the inefficiency of the black man" (Larsen 4). She is also much more experienced and "modern" than Nora, having the opportunity to travel in other cities and states, even in other countries, and meets more people than Nora is allowed in her sheltered life. Helga, on the other hand, travels because she feels she doesn'tfit into any of these places. When she reaches Harlem, she initially feels "that magical feeling of being back home" (Larsen 43), but it eventually fades, and she leaves again, this time for Copenhagen (where she can't find happiness either). Even the feeling of "simple happiness, a happiness unburdened by the complexity of the lives he has known" (Larsen 114) that he feels at his "conversion" is lost as he longs to escape "the oppression, the degradation that his life [is] become” ( Larsen 135) as the almost literally barefoot and pregnant wife of a minister. Both Nora and Helga are oppressed, it can be argued, primarily because they are women in a man's world, even if the factors complicating their lives are different: in A Doll's House it's money, in Quicksand it's race. However, after a careful reading of both works, one can clearly see the parallels between Nora and Helga. They are both intelligent, ambitious, and determined to achieve their goals (even if Nora must achieve hers in secret). Both feel the need to rebel against oppressive circumstances; Nora's need for rebellion and freedom grows: she first imagines freedom as freedom from Krogstad's debt. "To be free, absolutely free. To spend time playing with the children. To have a nice clean house, the way Torvald likes it" (Ibsen 163). But as the show progresses, he realizes that true freedom is more than just free time, it's an opportunity to live your life as if it were your own. Helga, meanwhile, changes her definition of freedom as she tries to feel comfortable in different situations, but her need for rebellion is always present, especially when she is dissatisfied, even if it comes more from a sense of not belonging anywhere . Rather than direct oppression from a certain person (like Nora and her husband), almost everyone Helga encounters tries to control and manipulate her. "This knowledge, the certainty of the division of his life into two parts in two lands, in physical freedom in Europe and in spiritual freedom in America, was unhappy, inconvenient, expensive... and mentally caricatured itself by moving like a shuttle from the continent to the continent." (Larsen 96) Both women, however, are exploited by specific people, especially men. Nora is patronized and pampered by Torvald and then blackmailed by Krogstad; Helga is manipulated by men like James Vayle and Doctor Anderson and disrespected by Alex Olsen. While Nora is forced to "play pranks" (Ibsen 181) for Torvald, Helga is presented as "attractive, unusual, in an exotic, almost wild way" (Larsen 70) by her Danish relatives. similarities between them too: both women have absentee fathers who have affected their lives in negative ways. Nora “was daddy's doll” (Ibsen 186); Helga's lack of family "[is] the crux of the whole issue. For Helga it represented everything, her failure here in Naxos, her former loneliness in Nashville." (Larsen 8) Both are also highly concerned with appearances, which deteriorate through their respective jobs: Nora's personality, like her Christmas tree, starts out impeccably manicured but slowly becomes disheveled, and Helga, who is seen for first seen in her luxuriously decorated personal quarters on Naxos, at the end of the novel, she is stranded in small-town Alabama. But the most significant parallels in Nora and Helga's lives are questions of identity. Both suffer from identity confusion and lead "double lives". Nora's dichotomy is metaphorical; she lives one life as Torvald's perfect "doll-wife" (186), and another as a frightened woman indebted to the weight of her crime on her conscience. Helga, as a mulatto, has a more literal division..