Model Essay
In what way(s) can the term 'artificial' be applied to the two of the works you have studied?
The term “artificial” can be applied productively to both A Doll’s House and The Handmaid’s Tale because each text exposes lives shaped by what is constructed, imposed and performed rather than what is authentic. In Ibsen’s realist play, artificiality operates most clearly through Nora’s manufactured identity as a “doll-wife” within a marriage built on appearance. In Atwood’s dystopian novel, artificiality expands from the individual to the entire state, as Gilead manufactures a social order through ritualised language, costume and ideology. Although the scale differs, both writers use artificiality to critique systems of power that deny genuine selfhood; what appears stable is, in both works, deeply fragile.
In A Doll’s House, Ibsen constructs artificiality first through the performance of domestic femininity. Torvald’s repeated pet names for Nora, such as “little lark” and “squirrel”, reduce her to something decorative, trivial and controlled. These diminutives create a performative domesticity in which Nora is valued not as a complex adult but as an ornament within Torvald’s household. The artificial is therefore not merely a personality trait: it is a role scripted for her by patriarchy. Ibsen’s stagecraft reinforces this manufactured identity. The action is confined to the Helmers’ domestic space, a setting that resembles the title’s “doll’s house”, suggesting a carefully arranged interior in which Nora herself has become part of the display. Dramatic irony intensifies this effect, because the audience knows that beneath her apparently frivolous exterior Nora has acted with courage and initiative in taking out the loan. Her authentic moral seriousness exists beneath the façade that Torvald prefers. In this sense, Ibsen exposes the marriage itself as artificial: Torvald loves the performance of femininity Nora provides, not Nora as she really is.
This artificiality reaches its most striking theatrical expression in the tarantella. While Ibsen’s tarantella exposes the performative nature of Nora’s domestic role, it also reveals how exhausting and precarious that performance has become. On one level, the dance presents Nora as spectacle, the decorative wife entertaining her husband; on another, its frantic energy externalises her panic and desperation. The scene therefore subverts the very image it seems to uphold. What Torvald sees as charming display is, for the audience, a moment in which the strain of manufactured identity is almost unbearable. Symbolically, the tarantella becomes the last flourish of a false self. By the final act, Nora’s recognition that she has been treated “like a doll” by both her father and her husband crystallises the play’s critique of artificial identity. Her marriage has been sustained by illusion, by role-play, and by Torvald’s investment in reputation rather than reality. When that illusion collapses, Ibsen implies that rupture is necessary: the famous ending is shocking precisely because Nora rejects the artificial script assigned to her and chooses the uncertain possibility of authenticity.
Atwood presents artificiality in a broader but equally disturbing form through Gilead’s manufactured social system. If Ibsen focuses on a single household, Atwood imagines an entire society built on ritualised artificiality. Everyday speech is no longer natural communication but linguistic distortion: formulae such as “Blessed be the fruit” impose an artificial piety on ordinary interaction. Such greetings do not express sincere religious feeling; rather, they function as state-approved verbal performances that regulate thought itself. Atwood reveals how ideology becomes embedded in language, so that oppression is disguised as virtue. This is one of the novel’s most unsettling forms of artificiality: Gilead does not simply control behaviour, it manufactures the terms through which reality is perceived.
Costume and ritual further reinforce this manufactured order. The Handmaids’ red clothing reduces women to a state function, transforming identity into dystopian iconography. Red is visually powerful, but it is also dehumanising: the uniform erases individuality and turns the Handmaid into a reproductive symbol. Names operate similarly. “Offred” is not an authentic personal identity but a patronymic label, marking possession rather than personhood. Atwood thereby foregrounds how artificial systems overwrite private selfhood with social function. The Ceremony is the most grotesque example of this process. It ritualises sex into a cold state procedure, dressing coercion in the language of duty and biblical legitimacy. By rendering something intimate in rigid, prescribed forms, Atwood exposes Gilead’s moral order as profoundly unnatural. The regime insists that its values are divinely sanctioned and traditional, yet the novel continually unmasks them as fabricated, anxious and violently maintained.
Offred’s narration is crucial to this critique because her ironic consciousness continually undermines Gilead’s official version of itself. The state’s language is solemn and absolute, but Offred’s perspective exposes its absurdity and hollowness. This tension between public ritual and private thought reveals the fragility of the regime’s artificiality. Gilead depends on constant repetition, surveillance and performance because its authority is not natural at all; it must be endlessly staged. Atwood’s dystopian form sharpens this point. By taking tendencies already present in patriarchal and authoritarian cultures to an extreme, she reveals that such systems are themselves constructed rather than inevitable. Artificiality in the novel is therefore political as well as psychological: it is the mechanism by which power disguises itself as moral truth.
Read comparatively, both texts suggest that the artificial is not simply fake; it is an instrument of control. In both works, power depends on people performing identities that serve dominant structures. Nora must act the cheerful, dependent wife; Offred must enact submission through clothing, ritual and speech. Yet the difference in form matters. Ibsen’s realism locates artificiality within the intimate sphere of middle-class marriage, allowing the audience to see how ordinary domestic conventions can become a constructed façade. Atwood’s dystopian fiction magnifies that same logic into a total social system, revealing what happens when performative gender roles are codified by the state. Both writers therefore critique the denial of authenticity, yet through contrasting formal modes: Ibsen through stagecraft, symbolism and dramatic irony within the home, Atwood through ritual language, dystopian iconography and narrative irony across an entire regime.
Crucially, both works also present artificial systems as unstable. Torvald’s authority appears secure until it is confronted by Nora’s self-recognition; Gilead’s pious certainties appear absolute, yet Offred’s narration repeatedly exposes cracks, hypocrisies and fear beneath the surface. Artificiality demands maintenance because it has no organic foundation. That is why both texts link the artificial to fragility: the doll’s house can be walked out of, and the manufactured piety of Gilead must be constantly enforced. In each case, the exposure of artificiality becomes the beginning of resistance.
Ultimately, the term “artificial” applies to both works because both Ibsen and Atwood are concerned with the structures that manufacture false identities and present them as natural. In A Doll’s House, artificiality shapes Nora’s marriage and selfhood through performative domesticity and patriarchal expectation. In The Handmaid’s Tale, artificiality governs an entire society through ritualised language, costume and ideological control. Both writers expose the human cost of such constructions and, more importantly, reveal that what is manufactured can also be unmade. The artificial may seem powerful, but in both texts it is authenticity, however precarious, that ultimately has the greater force.
Tip:
The term “artificial” can be applied productively to both A Doll’s House and The Handmaid’s Tale because each text exposes lives shaped by what is constructed, imposed and performed rather than what is authentic.
This gives a clear controlling definition of the key term and immediately ties it to both works, so the argument begins sharply focused rather than descriptively.
Although the scale differs, both writers use artificiality to critique systems of power that deny genuine selfhood; what appears stable is, in both works, deeply fragile.
This is a strong comparative thesis move: it establishes both similarity and nuance, while forecasting the essay’s later focus on fragility and collapse.
In A Doll’s House, Ibsen constructs artificiality first through the performance of domestic femininity.
This topic sentence keeps the paragraph tightly aligned to the question and signals exactly which aspect of the text will be explored.
Torvald’s repeated pet names for Nora, such as “little lark” and “squirrel”, reduce her to something decorative, trivial and controlled.
This is precise textual support: the short embedded quotations are well chosen because they directly illustrate how Nora is made into an artificial, infantilised figure.
These diminutives create a performative domesticity in which Nora is valued not as a complex adult but as an ornament within Torvald’s household.
This moves beyond identifying the words to unpacking their effect, showing how Ibsen’s language constructs gender as a performance rather than an authentic identity.
The artificial is therefore not merely a personality trait: it is a role scripted for her by patriarchy.
This is an effective argumentative move because it turns a textual observation into a conceptual judgement, widening the point from characterisation to social critique.
This artificiality reaches its most striking theatrical expression in the tarantella.
The transition phrase clearly marks development in the argument, showing that the essay is building from domestic language to a larger theatrical symbol.
By the final act, Nora’s recognition that she has been treated “like a doll” by both her father and her husband crystallises the play’s critique of artificial identity.
This uses a precise textual moment to anchor the paragraph’s claims, and the quotation is integrated smoothly into the sentence rather than dropped in mechanically.
What Torvald sees as charming display is, for the audience, a moment in which the strain of manufactured identity is almost unbearable.
This is strong analysis of dramatic method because it distinguishes between Torvald’s perspective and the audience’s, showing how stagecraft creates tension and irony.
When that illusion collapses, Ibsen implies that rupture is necessary: the famous ending is shocking precisely because Nora rejects the artificial script assigned to her and chooses the uncertain possibility of authenticity.
This is a skilful evaluative sentence: it interprets the ending as the logical consequence of the essay’s argument and uses confident wording to shape a persuasive judgement.
Atwood presents artificiality in a broader but equally disturbing form through Gilead’s manufactured social system.
This opening sentence signposts a clear shift to the second text while maintaining the same conceptual focus on artificiality.
Everyday speech is no longer natural communication but linguistic distortion: formulae such as “Blessed be the fruit” impose an artificial piety on ordinary interaction.
The quotation is brief but exact, and it is paired with a precise textual detail about speech, which keeps the point rooted in the novel’s methods.
Such greetings do not express sincere religious feeling; rather, they function as state-approved verbal performances that regulate thought itself.
This is close analysis of how ritual language works in the novel, moving from what is said to how language becomes an instrument of control.
This is one of the novel’s most unsettling forms of artificiality: Gilead does not simply control behaviour, it manufactures the terms through which reality is perceived.
This is an impressive interpretive move because it escalates the point from social behaviour to epistemology, showing the writer can track the deeper implications of Atwood’s choices.
Costume and ritual further reinforce this manufactured order.
This concise transition keeps the paragraph organised and signals the next strand of evidence without losing the central argument.
“Offred” is not an authentic personal identity but a patronymic label, marking possession rather than personhood.
This is a sharply chosen textual detail: the discussion of the name itself shows exact knowledge of how Atwood encodes artificial identity into everyday forms.
By rendering something intimate in rigid, prescribed forms, Atwood exposes Gilead’s moral order as profoundly unnatural.
This sentence analyses method and effect well, linking ritual form to the broader idea that the regime’s supposed naturalness is actually constructed.
Atwood thereby foregrounds how artificial systems overwrite private selfhood with social function.
This is a strong writerly move because it condenses several examples into a single conceptual claim, helping the paragraph feel cumulative rather than list-like.
Offred’s narration is crucial to this critique because her ironic consciousness continually undermines Gilead’s official version of itself.
This signals another clear stage in the paragraph’s development, shifting from external rituals to narrative perspective as a source of challenge.
The state’s language is solemn and absolute, but Offred’s perspective exposes its absurdity and hollowness.
This is strong analysis because it identifies a contrast in tone and perspective, showing how narrative irony destabilises the regime’s authority.
Gilead depends on constant repetition, surveillance and performance because its authority is not natural at all; it must be endlessly staged.
This is an effective argumentative technique: it synthesises earlier evidence into a broader claim about how artificial systems sustain themselves.
Read comparatively, both texts suggest that the artificial is not simply fake; it is an instrument of control.
This is an excellent comparative pivot because it moves from separate discussion to an integrated argument about what the two works reveal together.
Nora must act the cheerful, dependent wife; Offred must enact submission through clothing, ritual and speech.
This paired detail brings the two texts into direct dialogue, making the comparison concrete and balanced rather than treating them in isolation.
Atwood’s dystopian fiction magnifies that same logic into a total social system, revealing what happens when performative gender roles are codified by the state.
This is perceptive comparative analysis: it identifies a shared logic between the texts while also explaining the significance of their different formal scales.
Both writers therefore critique the denial of authenticity, yet through contrasting formal modes: Ibsen through stagecraft, symbolism and dramatic irony within the home, Atwood through ritual language, dystopian iconography and narrative irony across an entire regime.
This is a model comparative technique because it compresses similarities and differences into one elegant sentence, using parallel structure to keep the contrast lucid.
Crucially, both works also present artificial systems as unstable.
The adverb works as a clear organising signal, showing that the essay is now extending the comparison into a final shared implication.
Torvald’s authority appears secure until it is confronted by Nora’s self-recognition; Gilead’s pious certainties appear absolute, yet Offred’s narration repeatedly exposes cracks, hypocrisies and fear beneath the surface.
This comparative evidence is precise and selective, drawing on key moments from both works to support the claim that artificial systems are fragile.
Artificiality demands maintenance because it has no organic foundation.
This is a succinct analytical judgement that gets to the conceptual heart of the essay, explaining why both systems require performance and enforcement.
In each case, the exposure of artificiality becomes the beginning of resistance.
This sentence is an effective linking move: it turns comparison into consequence and gives the essay a sense of development toward its conclusion.
Ultimately, the term “artificial” applies to both works because both Ibsen and Atwood are concerned with the structures that manufacture false identities and present them as natural.
This concluding sentence does more than repeat the opening: it synthesises the whole argument into a sharper final insight about structures, identity and naturalisation.