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Dress Symbols in A Doll’s House and Blood Wedding
Amy Nguyen
World Literature Essay #1
Language A1 (HL)
1/04/11
Word Count: 1,007
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Dress Symbols in A Doll’s House and Blood Wedding
In the two plays, A Doll’s House and Blood Wedding, the authors incorporate a dress as a
symbol of what their characters are going through. A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen is about a
married couple that cares mainly about their image and reputation rather than who they truly are.
Blood Wedding by Federico Garcia Lorca is about a conflicted bride who runs away with her
previous fiancé, Leonardo, during her wedding reception. Although A Doll’s House and Blood
Wedding have different themes, which both dresses relate to, Ibsen uses a torn dress as a symbol
for the couple’s irreparable marriage, while Lorca uses a black wedding dress to symbolize the
Bride’s despair and sadness for going through with the wedding.
A Doll’s House has two main protagonists, Nora and Torvald Helmer, who are very
different from each other. At first, Nora comes off with a child-like personality, but as the story
progresses, she no longer is the naïve girl everyone thinks she is because of the secret she has
been hiding from Torvald. Torvald is a self-centered person. He cares more about his reputation
rather than what his wife has done for him to save his life. Although, before finding out Nora’s
secret, he was the type of husband who wanted to protect his wife and give her whatever she
wanted. Nora’s child-like personality and Torvald being a representation of her father made their
marriage irreparable. Nora says, “That’s just it. You have never understood me. I have been
greatly wronged, Torvald—first by Papa and then by you” (110). The torn dress symbolizes their
irreparable marriage because by the end, she realizes that she has married a stranger because his
reaction to her secret revealed his true self. Nora also realizes how their home has been a
playroom and how she has been his doll passed on by her father. She says, “He called me his
doll-child, and he played with me just as I used to play with my dolls. And when I came to live
in your house—I mean that I was simply handed over from Papa to you” (110-111).
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The Bride in Blood Wedding, on the other hand, has been deceiving throughout the whole
play. Even though the Bridegroom has spent three years of his life to win her heart by buying a
vineyard, the Bride doesn’t truly love him because she is still in love with her previous fiancé,
Leonardo. The only reason why she is going through with the wedding is because she wants to
forget about Leonardo and she’s trying to make the best of what she has. On the Bride’s wedding
day, she decided to wear a black wedding dress. The black wedding dress symbolizes her despair
and sadness for going through with the wedding. This is also the irony in the play because when
Leonardo and the Bride had an argument before the wedding, she said, “A man on his horse
knows a lot, and he has the power to squeeze the life out of a lonely girl stranded in a desert. But
I have pride—that’s why I’m getting married! And I will shut myself up with my husband,
whom I must love more than anything!” (47). The Bride and Leonardo both know that she has no
true feelings for the Bridegroom and that she cannot deny that her feelings for Leonardo no
longer exist. During the wedding reception, Leonardo and the Bride fled off and escaped
together.
The torn dress in A Doll’s House relates to the theme of unreliability of appearances.
Torvald has cared too much about his image rather than what is more important, which is
happiness. Torvald’s reaction to Nora’s secret supports both the symbol and theme by showing
how much they have lived their marriage behind an image rather than their true feelings and in
the end, Torvald lost Nora because all he wanted was to keep up a good image. Torvald says to
Nora, “You’ve destroyed all my happiness. You’ve ruined my future” (105). Nora then realizes
that she is not happy with Torvald and leaving him would help her find herself as a new person
and an individual.
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The black wedding dress in Blood Wedding relates to the theme of choice. The black
wedding dress shows the Bride’s despair and sadness for going through with the wedding, but
she chose to marry the Bridegroom so she can make the best of what she has. Though in reality,
she is still in love with her previous fiancée Leonardo, but she knows for a fact that she can’t get
back together with him because he is married with someone else, but Leonardo still has the same
exact feelings for the Bride even though it has been years since their engagement. In the end, the
Bride loses both Leonardo and the Bridegroom because she chose to run away with Leonardo at
her wedding reception, but Leonardo and the Bridegroom both die together. The Bride says to
the Neighbor about the Mother after the death of her son and Leonardo, “Let her! I have come so
she can kill me and I can be buried with them” (101). The Bride says she would die just to be
with them and that she deserves it. The Bride also tells the Mother, “Take your revenge on me!
Here I am! See how soft my neck is? It will be easier than cutting a dahlia from your garden”
(102).
Henrik Ibsen and Federico Garcia Lorca incorporate a dress into their play to convey
their characters’ situation and both of the dresses relate to their play’s theme. The torn dress in A
Doll’s House symbolizes an irreparable marriage because of a secret and the black wedding dress
in Blood Wedding symbolizes a bride’s despair and sadness for going through with a marriage.
Ibsen and Lorca used these dresses to show how marriages can be deceiving and people are
living behind an image that would soon be shattered.
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Works Cited
1. Ibsen, Henrik. A Doll’s House. Trans. Nicholas Rudall. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1999.
Print.
2. Lorca, Federico Garcia. Three Plays: Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda
Alba. Trans. Michael Dewell and Carmen Zapata. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1993. Print.