The power dynamics involved in language

Gender roles as reflected in the nouns and adjectives in the plays Casa de Muñecas by Henrik Ibsen, Querido Ibsen, Soy Nora by Griselda Gambaro, and Imágenes de una Puerta que se Cierra, written by students at the Universidad Nacional de La Rioja

Abstract

The study of the role played by female characters in literature was a growing phenomenon during the 20th century. However, Henrik Ibsen made a revolutionary treatment of this theme in the second half of the 19th century. Casa de muñecas produced scandals and debates because it generated a deep questioning of the pillars on which marriage and the role assigned to the female gender were based. The work shows us a woman who had to assume the role of wife and mother without questioning it. Her father called her little doll and reduced her to a manipulable object intended for play. After getting married, her husband replaces the father figure. The protagonist, Torvald, uses certain nouns and adjectives to refer to his wife, Nora, infantilizing her and generally comparing her to small, helpless and happy animals. In the 21st century, two rewritings of this work occurred: Querido Ibsen, Soy Nora by Griselda Gambaro and Imágenes de una puerta que se cierra performed by Arts students in the Universidad Nacional de La Rioja. In these two works, you can see the criticism of the terms used by Torvald, giving us a current look at gender roles. In this way, we take as an object of study the dialogues of the male character in the three plays, the objective of this paper will be to identify the nouns and adjectives used to address Nora, which denote an evaluative way to refer woman and the role assigned to them in the 19th century. For the study of grammatical categories, the manual of the Real Academia Española (2011) will be used and for the analysis of the ideological aspect present in the works, the theoretical proposals of the linguist Teun Van Dijk (2005) will be taken.