Two Women and Their Frustrations

Illustration by Gemini AI

Nora and Millie are two unforgettable women in literature. Both are frustrated with their married life, though Nora’s frustration is a late experience. How they deal with their personal situations is worth a deep study. One redeems herself while the other destroys herself as well as her husband.

Nora is the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House, and Millie is her counterpart in Terence Rattigan’s play, The Browning Version. [The links take you to the respective text.] Personal frustration leads one to growth into an enlightened selfhood while it embitters the other. Nora’s story is emancipatory and Millie’s is destructive. Nora questions patriarchal oppression and liberates herself from it with equanimity, while Millie is trapped in a meaningless relationship.

Since I have summarised these plays in earlier posts, now I’m moving on to a discussion on the enlightening contrasts between these two characters. If you’re interested in the plot summaries of the plays, here are the links:

A Doll’s House

The Browning Version

Millie’s husband, Andrew Crocker-Harris, is an emotionally withdrawn man who is senior to her by many years. Moreover, he is rigid and passionless. His students call him Himmler. He is cold and unresponsive to Millie too. Millie, on the other hand, loves warmth and jollity. She loves to show off a little too. But her marriage has trapped her in a dry, conservative domestic life with no joy whatever. She develops an extramarital affair with Frank, a young colleague of her husband’s.

The problem is that there is no love in that adulterous relationship either. It’s just a means of escape from her barren marriage. Frank doesn’t love Millie really. He loves the sex they have together. This realisation only serves to add to her self-disgust. Her betrayal of her husband doesn’t bring her any reward, after all.

Instead of facing her own frustrations, she projects them outward in rather cruel ways. She becomes cruel towards her own husband whom she belittles in front of others. By doing that, she is also exerting a kind of power on her husband. She should have exerted such a power on herself, on the causes of her frustrations. Instead of seeking ways of self-fulfilment, Millie finds joy in hurting her husband who, of course, has his personal flaws which are not insignificant. But loathing your partner (or anyone at all) is never a remedy for your personal frustrations.

Millie hates herself for her sense of failure, entrapment, and wasted potential. She is not loved even by the other man to whom she surrenders as best as she can. Love is a surrender to some extent. A surrender of one’s selfishness, mostly. And also other ego hassles. Millie is unable to rise above her ego. Hence her affair with Frank does not grow into genuine love-relationship. Instead, it is just a quest for personal validation. The affair is compensation, not connection. Even Frank is not able to establish an authentic relationship because his respect for Andrew makes him feel guilty of his betrayal. Guilt and self-validation: no way for trust and intimacy.

In the post-war England that Millie inhabited, divorce and marital breakdown, especially in middle-class professional circles, would have been frowned upon. Millie has no independent career or identity, either. Leaving Andrew would mean stepping into insecurity, which Millie is incapable of. And she knows that Frank is not going to accept her. So she clings to the security of what Bernard Shaw ridiculed as “middle class morality”, even if that means mutual misery for her and Andrew.

Moreover, Millie seems to need Andrew as the object of her scorn. He provides a target for her frustrations, a scapegoat for her disappointments. In other words, without Andrew, Millie would have to face her own emptiness directly – and that’s a far more terrifying prospect.

Ibsen’s Nora, on the other hand, shuts the door on her husband and walks out in order to reinvent herself after her shattering realisation of his utter hypocrisy. She had lived her whole life like a doll, playing into the hands of her husband who pretended to love her more than anyone else, anything else. On the surface, theirs was a happy marriage, even playful. Nora was Torvald’s “skylark,” “squirrel”, and what not. She sacrificed herself much too for her husband. She was happy to be his “doll”.

The realisation that Torvald’s love was a sort of pretension shatters Nora. When the hour of her personal crisis comes, Torvald fails her utterly. He values social status and the Shavian middle class morality with all its sham more than his wife. However, unlike Millie, Nora’s frustration is rooted not in self-loathing but in a delayed self-understanding. Her disillusionment opens her eyes clearly. She sees the reality of her relationship with Torvald, which is not worth prolonging anymore.

Nora doesn’t hate Torvald, however. Her anger is directed at the role she has been forced to play, not only by her husband but by the patriarchal society as a whole. Her rebellion is against a system, not against any person. That is why, unlike Millie, Nora doesn’t turn bitter and cruel. She turns her frustration into a courageous self-assertion. “I have to educate myself” is what she says in the end as she walks out of her husband’s life. She is maturing into an enlightened person.

Nora learns the essential lessons of life and saves herself. Millie fails to learn that and remains bitter and makes others bitter too.