مشخصات پژوهش

This study focuses on patriarchy as a factor of repression and oppression in women’s lives, portrayed in three selected plays by Henrik Ibsen entitled as Ghosts, A Doll's House, and Hedda Gabler. Ibsen's drama represents a specific concern for female suffering within a patriarchal community. The protagonists of these three plays are all repressed and victimized to the male dominance, either directly by their husbands or other male figures of the society. Mrs. Alving is victimized mainly to society's so-called duties of motherhood which prevents her reaction to the explicit sexism by her husband. Nora Helmer is shocked enough to end her delusional marriage, however, with her children, and Hedda Gabler, a victim of gender roles, is aggressive enough to prefer suicide over submission. This study aims to prove that although protagonists’ responses to patriarchy may differ, They share the common sense of loss and suffering as the victims. To examine common agencies of patriarchy deeply, the researcher penetrates in to the concepts of repression, motherhood, gender roles, and female suicide as the consequences of patriarchal systems. While some prior studies believe patriarchy to be the result of biological, psychoanalytic or humanist associations with reference to Freudian studies or critics such as Joan Templeton, feminist critics including Kate Millet, Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Virginia Woolf, Nicole Loraux, and Margaret Higonnet believed that patriarchy is a matter of male dominant society which leaves women desperate to survive, and in some cases ends in her self destruction.