Dramatists often criticize society through the characters and situations they depict on stage. When the playwrights do so, they may approach the subject by looking through the world in which they live to what they believe the world should be. They may be writing at a turning point, an era in which social change is in the offing but which is being resisted by the dominant order. They may merely be commenting on aspects of the human condition, which persist into their age and which they see as detrimental to society. Whatever their particular situation may be, playwrights criticize society by having characters who represent some social class or ideological position and by using symbolism as well as direct statement to make the audience see something they believe to be wrong. The characters are shaped by the society in which they live and then behave in certain ways because of the conflict that develops between their psychology and their personality on the one hand and the demands and strictures of the society in which they live on the other. The same is true of novelists and fiction writers. The process can be seen with reference to several women coincidentally named Nora, three in plays by J.M. Synge, George Bernard Shaw, and Sean O'Casey, and a real-life Nora who served as model for the character of Gretta Conroy in James Joyce's "The Dead." All might be compared to the prototypical middle-class woman emerging from her cocoon, Nora in A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen.
In Ibsen, the modern tragic hero and the modern tragic conflict are to be found in the bourgeois individual--often a woman--who rebels against society and tradition. Ibsen develops a type of dramatic realism and creates a pattern of dialogue which combines the ease of daily speech with the urgency of the drama. In A Doll's House, Ibsen challenges the assumptions about the place of women in society and finds that the confinement of women has produced a situati...