LCS Lecture Series - “This is a bogus marriage!” Readers’ Empathy in a Hong Kong Classroom

Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 play The Doll’s House ends with a door slamming shut as the female protagonist Nora leaves her husband and children in order to discover herself and be “educated.” She realizes that she has been treated like a doll her entire life – first by her father and later, as a married woman by her husband Torvald. While audiences of Ibsen’s time reacted to the ending with understandable shock, I am interested in studying the impact of the play on my students in a literature class at the Education University of Hong Kong. This paper comes out of a study I did with Dr. Matthew DeCoursey when we both taught this play in separate courses. We interviewed thirteen students (male and female) to garner their views on dating, sex roles in marriage, gender roles and divorce, both in the context of their own lives and in the context of the play. The study attempts to detect shifts in perception and attitude that may be attributed to the experience of reading the play and discussing it in class. By bringing together theories of narrative empathy with Stanley Cavell’s notion of “moral perfectionism” in my analysis of this empirical study, I posit that reading literature creates the preconditions for attempting to lead an ethical and more human life.

Speaker: Dr. Bidisha BANERJEE

Dr. Bidisha Banerjee is Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies at The Education University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include postcolonial studies, cultural studies and film studies. She has presented her work widely at conferences in Europe, Asia and the US. Some of her work on South Asian diasporic fiction and film has appeared in journals like Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Asian Cinema and Postcolonial Text. She has recently developed an interest in urban studies, particularly the Hong Kong cityscape.