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@article{192624,
        author = {Dr. Dolly George},
        title = {Fractured Dolls and Top Girls: Trauma, Patriarchy, and the Female Psyche in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2026},
        volume = {12},
        number = {9},
        pages = {2130-2135},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=192624},
        abstract = {This paper offers a psychoanalytic trauma-based feminist reading of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) and Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls (1982), two landmark plays in English-language drama that stage women’s struggle to inhabit, survive, and sometimes resist patriarchy. Drawing on trauma studies and psychoanalytic feminism, the article argues that both plays dramatize not only visible acts of patriarchal control but also the slow, repetitive wounding of female subjectivity through internalized gender scripts, affective silencing, and the commodification of women’s bodies and labor. In A Doll’s House, the domestic interior becomes a psychic “theatre” of trauma in which Nora Helmer’s cheerful femininity masks the effects of infantilization, emotional manipulation, and moral blackmail. In Top Girls, Churchill exposes how late-capitalist, neoliberal versions of “success” compel women to reproduce patriarchal violence against other women and against themselves. Together, the plays trace a historical trajectory from the private, marital home to the corporate office, while revealing that patriarchal trauma mutates rather than disappears. By reading Nora Helmer and Marlene as differently situated traumatized subjects, one seeking psychic rebirth outside the home, the other compensating through power and denial. This article shows how both characters embody the contradictory desires to belong, to succeed, and to escape. The conclusion suggests that psychoanalytic trauma theory, when integrated with feminist critique, illuminates how drama can stage not only the visible conflicts of gender but also the invisible economies of pain, repetition, and desire that structure women’s lives.},
        keywords = {feminism, patriarchy, psychoanalysis, trauma theory, neoliberalism},
        month = {February},
        }