The pairing and the argument

This exemplar pairs two real works for illustration: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), originally written in English, and Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879), studied in R. Farquharson Sharp’s English translation (1910). Use the pairing and argument as a model of how to work, not as an assessed oral. You must develop that independently from works taught on your course.

The proposed global issue meets the guide’s three requirements:

• It has significance on a wide/large scale.
• It is transnational.
• Its impact is felt in everyday local contexts.

Here, the issue is the use of maternal duty to restrict women’s self-determination. Expectations of this kind operate across societies. They also shape ordinary decisions about care, marriage and personal independence. Rather than surveying women’s lives worldwide, the oral examines the aspects represented in these two works.

The principal field of inquiry is Culture, identity and community, with a connection to Politics, power and justice. Treat these fields as starting points. The specific issue gives the oral its focus, not the field’s broad title.

The central argument is that both writers expose how a mother’s responsibilities can become grounds for denying her an independent identity. Chopin’s narration brings readers close to Edna’s distress. Ibsen stages a confrontation in which Nora challenges Torvald’s definition of her duties, making the conflict audible. Yet both endings complicate any straightforward claim that recognising oppression makes escape achievable.

Choose extracts that make analysis possible

For The Awakening, choose a continuous passage from Chapter 3 that covers Léonce’s claim that Raoul is ill, his criticism of Edna’s maternal attention and its immediate aftermath. Within a compact passage, an apparently practical concern becomes a judgement about Edna’s fitness as a mother.

For A Doll’s House, choose a continuous passage from the final conversation in Act 3. Centre it on Torvald’s insistence that Nora’s primary responsibilities are those of wife and mother, and on her assertion of an identity beyond those roles. Here, the issue becomes a direct dispute: who can define Nora’s obligations?

These directions help you select extracts; they do not reproduce them. Set the exact boundaries using the editions studied in class. Each extract must be continuous, contain no omissions and normally be no more than 40 lines. If line counting is unsuitable, keep the amount of text manageable enough for close analysis. Identify the author and work, naming the translator where relevant. Submit the extracts for approval at least one week before the oral. Take clean copies into the assessment.

Your extracts must open outward, too. Connect Chopin’s Chapter 3 to Adèle Ratignolle’s contrasting model of motherhood and to Edna’s distinction between giving her life and surrendering herself. Bring in the novel’s ending as well. In Ibsen, connect the final argument to Torvald’s earlier treatment of Nora, then consider the concealed loan and his response to its discovery. Each connection should establish a pattern or complication rather than recap the plot.

A balanced ten-minute route

The structure below suggests one arrangement; it is not a prescribed IB sequence. It allows approximately equal attention to both works, moving between local detail and the larger work. The figure shows the order: Introduction → Chopin extract → Chopin whole work → Ibsen extract → Ibsen whole work → Conclusion.

After the ten-minute delivery, the teacher asks questions for five minutes. This is not a Paper 2 essay spoken aloud. Explicit connections can strengthen your argument, but you must sustain analysis of both works in relation to the issue.

A ten-bullet outline

The official outline allows a maximum of ten bullet points. Use them to prompt your thinking, not to conceal a prepared script. Here is a compact version of this plan:

• Issue: maternal duty restricting self-determination; Chopin and Ibsen; shared pressure, different forms.
• Chopin, Chapter 3: illness claim becomes judgement of Edna as mother.
• Domestic authority: Léonce assesses care; narrative discrepancy unsettles his judgement.
• Edna’s distress: movement from outward reproach to inward experience.
• Whole novel: Adèle; life versus self; children and the unresolved ending.
• Ibsen, Act 3: Torvald defines Nora through wifehood and motherhood.
• Dialogue: Nora contests his hierarchy; competing claims to authority.
• Whole play: diminutive address; secret loan; Torvald’s response to discovery.
• Departure: rejection of imposed identity, not proof of uncomplicated freedom.
• Synthesis: maternal obligation becomes control when it excludes independent judgement.

What the plan must support

Four criteria assess the oral, each worth 10 marks: A, Knowledge, understanding and interpretation; B, Analysis and evaluation; C, Focus and organization; D, Language. This plan offers precise references to support interpretation and authorial choices to analyse. It also provides a balanced sequence, with language suited to spoken explanation.

The work must remain yours. A teacher may discuss whether the issue, works and extracts are suitable and give feedback on an outline. They may not rehearse the actual assessed oral with you. Works selected for the oral cannot be reused in other assessment components.

To make your own plan, establish a defensible issue and locate two eligible extracts. Then reduce your argument to ten brief prompts, each connecting evidence and authorial choice to the issue.

How to read this model

This model turns the plan into a connected spoken argument. The literary references are paraphrases, not quotations. Discussions of the extracts assume the selections described in the preceding section. In an actual oral, you must respond precisely to the boundaries and wording of your approved extracts.

The subsection headings show how the argument is organised; don’t read them aloud. Use this as a teaching model, not a script to memorise or take into the assessment. Only the permitted outline and clean extracts may accompany you.

Opening: establish the issue and interpretation

My global issue is the use of maternal duty to restrict women’s self-determination. I am focusing on the point at which responsibility towards children becomes an argument against a woman exercising independent judgement about her own life.

I will explore this through Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening, published in 1899, and Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House, first published in 1879, using R. Farquharson Sharp’s English translation. In both works, husbands treat maternal responsibility as something they have the authority to define. The women’s resistance, though, takes different forms. Chopin’s narration reveals a conflict that Edna initially struggles to articulate. Ibsen’s dialogue lets Nora challenge her husband’s assumptions directly.

My argument is that both works question a model of motherhood that leaves no room for an independent self. Neither presents resistance as simple or free from consequences.

Chopin: analyse the extract

In the Chapter 3 extract, Léonce turns his concern about Raoul into a criticism of Edna. Notice the shift: a particular claim about a child’s health becomes a general judgement about what a mother should be doing. Maternal duty gives Léonce a standard against which to assess his wife.

Chopin unsettles his authority by placing his insistence that Raoul has a fever against Edna’s assessment of the child. His confidence does not prove him right. Without that discrepancy, the exchange might look like a straightforward contrast between a concerned father and an inattentive mother. Instead, the narrative gives us reasons to question how the accusation takes shape.

The responsibilities assigned to the parents are unequal, too. Léonce uses his business activities as grounds for expecting Edna to care for the children. His role authorises demands on her; it does not prompt him to examine how they might share responsibility. The question is not whether children need care. It is how that need becomes a justification for fixing one person’s identity and obligations.

The narrative then turns towards Edna’s distress. There is more to her experience than the accusation against her allows. By giving readers access to her emotional response, Chopin opens a gap between Léonce’s judgement and the person he judges. What he treats as a failure of duty appears, from another perspective, as an experience of confinement.

Edna cannot yet explain her unhappiness fully. That matters. Chopin presents dissatisfaction before Edna has developed a language of resistance: an accepted domestic arrangement becomes painful before she can openly challenge it.

Chopin: connect the extract to the whole novel

Across the novel, the contrast between Edna and Adèle Ratignolle develops this pressure. Adèle’s investment in motherhood makes visible a model of feminine fulfilment that Edna cannot simply adopt. We do not have to dismiss Adèle’s attachments as false to recognise the problem. The contrast exposes the difficulty of making one woman’s chosen identity a requirement for every woman.

Later, Edna distinguishes between sacrifices she could make for her children and the surrender of her self. She gives sharper expression here to what remains inarticulate in Chapter 3. Care is a real obligation, she recognises, but she resists the idea that it should absorb her entire personhood.

Chopin does not turn this recognition into a straightforward story of liberation. When Adèle appeals to Edna to consider her children, maternal responsibility returns to the centre of the conflict. The children remain present in Edna’s thinking as she enters the sea in the final chapter.

We can therefore read the ending as exposing the devastating difficulty of reconciling an independent identity with the roles available to her. It does not establish that her final action resolves the conflict or removes its consequences. Throughout the novel, maternal duty carries emotional weight while remaining vulnerable to use as a form of restriction.

Ibsen: analyse the extract

In the final conversation of A Doll’s House, Ibsen turns a related conflict into an explicit confrontation. Torvald defines Nora’s duties through her position as wife and mother. He presents those roles as an answer to her wish to leave, as though naming them should end the discussion.

Nora challenges the hierarchy behind his claim. Rather than accept that her domestic roles define her completely, she asserts her identity as a person. They are disagreeing about more than whether she should remain in the house. At stake is who has the authority to decide what she is and what she owes.

Dramatic dialogue makes the contest immediate. Torvald’s assertions receive answers; the audience does not hear his definition as an uncontested truth. Nora’s replies interrupt the authority he assumes. Her ability to put forward a competing account of herself is itself part of the change taking place onstage.

Here, her position differs from Edna’s in the Chopin extract. Readers encounter Edna’s distress through narration before she can fully explain it. Nora can now state her disagreement to the husband who seeks to define her. Through dialogue, Ibsen brings the competing positions into direct confrontation.

Yet Nora’s assertion does not settle every question about her responsibilities. Her rejection of Torvald’s authority can be persuasive without making the implications of leaving her children disappear. That tension makes the issue more demanding than a simple opposition between duty and freedom.

Ibsen: connect the extract to the whole play

Earlier in the play, Torvald’s diminutive forms of address help establish a relationship in which he treats Nora as someone to be managed. Because they sound affectionate, the imbalance is easy to overlook. The final exchange exposes the authority already at work within that apparently loving domestic language.

The concealed loan further complicates Torvald’s assumptions. Nora has taken consequential action to protect him, yet she must hide it within their marriage. Ibsen gives her practical initiative while showing that the household’s accepted account of her has no room for it.

When the loan is revealed, Torvald’s reaction places reputation and judgement at the centre of their confrontation. He is subsequently willing to restore the marriage. That willingness, however, does not answer Nora’s recognition that she has not been treated as an equal participant in it.

Her departure gives physical expression to the disagreement developed through dialogue. Where Edna’s final movement takes her into the sea, Nora’s exit directs attention towards an unwritten future beyond the household. That future remains uncertain. Ibsen dramatises a break with an imposed identity, not proof that independence will be secure or painless.

Conclusion: bring the perspectives together

Both works distinguish caring for children from accepting that motherhood cancels a woman’s independent judgement. Through narrative access, Chopin reveals the distress and developing self-awareness beneath an accusation of maternal failure. Ibsen makes a woman’s challenge to domestic authority visible and audible through confrontation and exit.

The different endings rule out a single reassuring conclusion. Edna’s fate exposes the destructive pressure of the conflict; Nora’s departure leaves its future consequences open. Together, the works suggest that maternal duty becomes restrictive when others use it to deny a woman the right to define herself.

What makes this an analytical script

The argument repeatedly moves through Evidence → Authorial choice → Effect → Global issue. The figure below shows that movement. A detail does not remain an isolated observation, nor is the global issue simply repeated as a label.

Take the discrepancy about Raoul’s health. It supplies the evidence. Chopin’s management of perspective is the authorial choice, and its effect is to unsettle Léonce’s apparent authority. The link to the global issue lies in how maternal judgement can enforce a contested division of responsibility. Each stage explains the next.

The model also separates interpretation from certainty. It does not equate a narrator’s presentation with a character’s judgement or assume that a character’s decision provides a complete solution to the issue. These qualifications make the evaluation more precise, not less committed.

Continue the argument in the questions

The five-minute discussion lets the teacher probe your understanding and develop claims that need fuller support. Treat it as a continuation of your analysis, not a return to memorised material.

If asked to support your interpretation of Léonce’s authority, go back to the precise sequence of the approved passage. Explain the discrepancy between the parents’ assessments. A question about Nora’s responsibilities calls for a different distinction: questioning Torvald’s power to define her is not the same as claiming that leaving has no consequences. In a developed answer, evidence supports an explanation of the choice, which then refines the interpretation.

To make your own script speakable, turn each outline prompt into a connected explanation, then reduce it to brief notes again. Keep the reasoning and textual precision. Let the exact wording remain flexible.