Your Doll's House?

The other day I was in New York City talking to a youngish professional.  He was asking if I knew a particular woman whom he thought could have been a mutual acquaintance and, in describing her, mentioned that she “is very into Women’s Lib…”  Women’s Lib?  Seriously?  I thought they only used that term in 1970’s England.  Apparently not.  But it got me thinking about antiquated women’s issues that are STILL women’s issues in the modern world, no matter what you call them.  What I call one of these myriad issues is faking perfection.

One of my favorite modern takes on this long-standing issue is encapsulated by a short film called Nora, based on the 1879 play written by Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House.  The play has been a favorite of mine since I first read it in college.  The premise, in a nutshell, is that the lead, Nora, is a young mother of three, living in a world concerned with appearances, choked by her shallow life revolving around her husband and her children, whom she plays with like dear, little toys.  Nora comes to the realization that she has never developed an independent self— that she floated from being merely decorative in her father’s home to being merely decorative in her husband’s home, and she is now perpetuating the pattern with her own children.  Determined to take back her life, she abruptly leaves her family to find herself, a person whom she has never even met. (And this in the 1800s!)

Sounds selfish, I suppose, but the idea is that society robbed her of her own life and she was righting that wrong by not only getting her own life back, but also by disrupting the pattern that would have inevitably robbed her daughter of life as well. 

(Watch the modern short film HERE)

I was introduced to this play by a professor of Humanities.  At one point, this professor had also moonlighted as an LDS Bishop.  When counseling young, engaged couples, he would often gift them with a copy of this play.  An odd gift at the time of one’s engagement, but his message was meant to zing straight into their hearts a couple of important questions— 

     Are you really ready to give up your independence?  

    Will you regret this decision in a few years and have your life crumble to bits, taking down others in its fall?  

Sadly, I have known many young women to jump into the arms (and wedding bands) of men without first knowing themselves.  Sometimes I think that many of these young women want an Instagram post of their bedazzled right hand, adorned with 300 likes, far more than they actually want to their intended husbands.  

I am not even 30 years old and have seen more of my peers, even “righteous” people, get divorced than you would believe.  And I think it has a lot to do with this— a young woman asked to become subservient to the wants of others, before knowing what she actually wants, is likely to someday realize that she had been robbed of her own free will.

Building a life that is what we believe others want to see, versus building a life that is what we want it to be, is killing the mental and emotional health of so many women.  In a very metaphoric way, I think that writer Jessi Klein hit the nail on the head when she compared women "enjoying" a bath to women retreating from their unjust lives.  Sounds like a stretch, but read what she had to say in The New Yorker recently:

ILLUSTRATION BY JEAN JULLIEN

To me, there has always been something vaguely miserable about bathing. The soaking, the sitting, the water getting dirty and cold, the inevitable random hair floating up against your skin, the pruning. It makes me feel as if I were stewing up the world’s saddest soup out of myself. It hurts my neck.  …  I get hot and thirsty in the bath, and when I stand up I always feel like I’m going to pass out. Because I feel less clean than when I got in, I have to take a shower afterward. Ultimately, it feels like I’ve gone backward, hygiene-wise.

But these are just my physical issues with bathing. My conceptual problems begin with the same ideology some adman for Calgon decided to trade on forty years ago: the idea that the bath is the last space a woman can escape to, like a gazelle fleeing a lion by running into water up to her neck. Getting in the bath seems a kind of surrender to the idea that we can’t really make it on land, that we’ve lost the fight for a bedroom corner or even just our own chair in the living room. And, once the bath becomes our last resort, a Stockholm syndrome sets in. We cede all other space to the husband or boyfriend or kids and then convince ourselves that the bath is awesome. Yay, I’m submerged in a watery trough! This is incredible! This is my happy place! I definitely wouldn’t prefer to just be lying in my own bed watching “Bachelor in Paradise”! I would much rather have grainy bath crystals imprinting themselves into my butt than be in my own room! What luxury! This is perfect!

…

This is why Virginia Woolf stressed the importance of having a room of one’s own. If you don’t fight for it, don’t insist on it, and don’t sacrifice for it, you might find yourself in that increasingly tepid water, pruning and sweating while you dream of other things.

~ Jessi Klein, The Bath: A Polemic 

Now wasn’t that just a tad more illuminating that scanning your Facebook feed for the fifth time today?  Wasn’t that more thought-provoking than those new dance moves or cute animal interactions that you just watched on YouTube?  Such unworthy media simply wastes time.  And if there is anything that I have learned about mortality, it is that time is of the essence. 

Here are some interesting quotes:

Regarding the internet, “You can get caught up in endless loops of triviality that waste your time and degrade your potential.” 

~Randall L. Ridd, The Choice Generation

 “A prominent thought leader, Arthur C. Brooks, has emphasized this point. He observes that when using social media, we tend to broadcast the smiling details of our lives but not the hard times at school or work. We portray an incomplete life—sometimes in a self-aggrandizing or fake way. We share this life, and then we consume the ‘almost exclusively … fake lives of [our] social media “friends.”’ Brooks asserts, ‘How could it not make you feel worse to spend part of your time pretending to be happier than you are, and the other part of your time seeing how much happier others seem to be than you?’

“Sometimes it feels like we are drowning in frivolous foolishness, nonsensical noise, and continuous contention.”

~Quentin L. Cook, Choose Wisely

Carve out a space for you, your ideas, and your dreams that is larger than a screenshot or selfie, and even larger than a bathtub.  MUCH larger.  Create a life that is real, not just a doll-like semblance of reality.  If we only have one mortality to live, it ought to be more meaningful than a social media-fueled pretense of a happy life.

Be Nora: find yourself.