In Act 3 of “A Doll’s House”, Nora waits in anxious anticipation of her husband’s opening Krogstad’s letter. She knows about it, of course, before they go to the dance, and learns from Mrs. Linde that the letter is still in her husband’s letter box awaiting him. Her nervousness and fear are shown not only in her enthusiasm to go back to the dance but also in her unwillingness to pursue sexual relations with Torvald despite his advances. She seems to have an innate sense that Torvald will not react to the letter in the way that she hopes, which would be to come to her defense, put his reputation on the line to protect her as she has done for him, perhaps because of the way in which he continues to refer to her in terms of possession: “Why shouldn’t I look at my dearest treasure?—at all the beauty that is mine, all my very own?”.
However, as the two of them talk and Torvald assures her that he has always dreamed of doing something heroic to save her from some great danger, she begins to hope that perhaps her dawning realization regarding her own unhappiness under his control might again relax into acceptance if he would once sacrifice for her like she has done for him. What stands in her way, then, is her own fear of Torvald’s reaction, knowing that he views her as a possession rather than a human being, and her irresistible hope that he will accept what has happened and prove he feels a stronger love for her than she suspects.
In fact, it is Torvald’s assertion that he would risk everything for Nora’s sake that raises the stakes in this scene. Before he makes the statement, Nora is nervous and fidgety, afraid of his reaction when he opens the letter and thinking of suicide as a means of protecting his good name, but when he makes this statement, everything changes. He tells her, “Do you know, Nora, I have often wished that you might be threatened by some great danger so that I might risk my life’s blood and everything for your sake.” Nora can’t help but wonder whether he really would sacrifice everything for her and suddenly decides she must know right now whether he truly loves her or still only sees her as an object. Because of the many sacrifices she has made for him, including considering the ultimate sacrifice of suicide as a means of saving him, she has very good reasons for her position as she needs to know whether the many discomforts, confinements and unhappiness she suffers on his account are reasonably compensated by the real love of a good man.
The character of Nora is symbolic in that she represents the type of women everywhere during this time period who were the products of the environment the men around them chose for them and to which they acquiesced. She is childlike in her experience because she has always been sheltered by first her father and then her husband, yet she has also opted to go along with this sheltering instead of insisting upon being taken seriously in her various interests. That she has more serious interests is also revealed in this scene as she talks with Dr. Rank about his scientific experiments, knowing far more about the truth of what was going on than Torvald could guess for himself. The idea that she is symbolic is suggested in the speed with which she comes to her realization regarding the condition of her marriage and her immediate and apparently irrevocable decision to take care of herself before she will consider trying to take care of anyone else. She does not seem to hold this against Torvald, telling him, “I won’t see the little ones. I know they are in better hands than mine” despite the fact that she has already told him he was not the right hands to teach her the lessons she still needs in life.
Torvald, incredulous as to his wife’s determination and ability to think, leans heavily on her to stay, proposing several ways by which they might find a way to work through these issues and providing her with numerous reasons to stay, but her newfound dedication to herself supercedes these entreaties and she goes. Rather than suggesting women should walk out on their marriages, this symbolic character suggests that women should remain true to themselves, matching themselves with men who can respect them as human beings and taking the time to educate themselves on the facts of life and living so as to make this sort of match.
In Susan Glaspell’s play, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale want to discover the truth regarding the murderous death of John Wright, wondering if his wife, then being held in the county jail, might have been the criminal. Although they pursue the question with little more than seemingly mild curiosity at first, as they discuss more and more about the accused woman’s life since her marriage, they begin to feel more sympathy for her. “She didn’t even belong to the Ladies’ Aid. I suppose she felt she couldn’t do her part, and then you don’t enjoy things when you feel shabby. She used to wear pretty clothes and be lively when she was Minnie Foster; one of the town girls singing in the choir.”
They do not feel as if they will ever likely know the real answer because the investigation is up to the men, who continuously ridicule the women’s ability to make sense of these confusing events. The women feel so constrained within their worlds that they don’t even attempt to find the answers to their questions, but plan to just sit back and wait for the men to tell them what happened. Thus, both external factors, that the men are in charge of the investigation, and internal factors, that they don’t believe themselves capable of finding the answers to the crime, stand in their way of attaining what they seek.
The stakes are raised as the women attempt to pass the time by glancing about the kitchen and tidying up what was left undone. As they do so, they begin to come across various clues to the murder that the men are missing. They find the quilting basket in which a single square is sewn completely out of character from the rest, “it looks as if she didn’t know what she was about.” While they attempt to explain this away by attributing it to perhaps Mrs. Wright had been tired when making that piece, other pieces of evidence begin to surface – the empty birdcage, the fact that the couple didn’t keep cats, Mrs. Wright’s previous love for singing, her isolation and finally, the broken body of the bird.
At this point, it is impossible for the women not to realize that they have found the evidence the men are currently searching the house for, but have also found, in the process, evidence of the greater crime that has been committed upon the person of Mrs. Wright by her husband. “I wonder how it would seem never to have had any children around. (Pause.) No, Wright wouldn’t like the bird–a thing that sang. She used to sing. He killed that, too.” As a result, the women decide, without actually discussing it, not to mention that they have solved the crime, realizing that the men would only discern the most recent crime of Mr. Wright’s murder rather than the deeper and more abiding crime of Mrs. Wright’s.
These characters are realistic in that they enter the farmhouse as suspicious country women attempting to help the male lawmakers provide proper care of a woman currently incarcerated on charges of murder. They are nervous, superstitious and morbidly curious, but still unattached. As they spend more time in the kitchen and share memories regarding the woman, Mrs. Wright, and what little they know of her life, they begin to piece together the events that led up to Mr. Wright’s murder. By the time they find the evidence, they have realistically come to the conclusion not to turn in the relatively innocent Mrs. Wright for the crime of freeing herself from the crimes of Mr. Wright who has deprived her of life for the past 30 years.
In Act 1 of Checkov’s play, Lubov, the mistress of the Ranevsky estate, reveals that the one thing she wishes to do more than anything else in the world is to escape from her present condition. Through various hints and conversations, it becomes clear that, while her presence was necessary in Russia to cope with the financial difficulties of the estate, up to and including the auctioning of it, her real motivation in returning to Russia is to flee from the depressing emotions that she encountered in Paris as a result of her failing relationship with a Parisian lover. However, upon arriving, it is also clear that she is incapable of facing the issues of the present as she immediately reverts back to memories of her childhood instead of the more recent and painful memories of the loss of her husband and son five years earlier.
“My dear nursery, oh, you beautiful room…. I used to sleep here when I was a baby. (Weeps) And here I am like a little girl again.” However, the march of time continues to get in her way as she cannot avoid the present. Characters show up to remind her of the more recent past, her daughter is grown to look as she did in the time she wishes to live in and the present legal troubles must be discussed. Russia is moving forward, finding out it has a middle class and beginning to make way for it, which is also distressing to Lubov because of the effects this will have in breaking up and tearing down her beloved orchard, where all her childhood memories are stored.
The vision Lubov has of her mother toward the end of the act ups the stakes as she continues to attempt to cling to the past instead of dealing with the future. It occurs just as she is beginning to completely lose herself in the images of her past, having just commented, “I used to look out from here into the orchard. Happiness used to wake with me every morning, and then it was just as it is now; nothing has changed. [Laughs from joy] It’s all, all white! Oh, my orchard! After the dark autumns and the cold winters, you’re young again, full of happiness, the angels of heaven haven’t left you…. If only I could take my heavy burden off my breast and shoulders, if I could forget my past!” However, she can’t forget her past as just after she has the vision of her mother, Trofimov enters the scene, instantly reminding Lubov of the double tragedy of her son’s drowning at age seven and her husband’s death only a month before this.
She does not really have good arguments for her position, having had the time to grieve and destroying the future of the living in her refusal to attend to matters of the present. The visions she has are manifestations of her guilty conscience. Although she wants to preserve the cherry orchard, her inability to focus on the present prevents her from being able to do anything about this.
Lubov is a symbolic character, representing the changing face of Russia as it entered into the modern age. The large families were disappearing while the concepts of feudalism and servants were dying out. Those who had been raised in this culture found it difficult to make this switch and often chose instead to turn their attention away from it, allowing it to happen behind their backs as it were. The past could not continue to be preserved just as the cherry orchard could not be saved, not necessarily from any essential need that it be sold, but because those with the power to do something about it refused to accept the changes the present was bringing them and were completely incapable of contemplating a future any different from what they had been raised to expect.