As a child progresses through the different stages of life, he or she may crawl out of knots from a knitted rug, gallop around the plastic structures of a schoolyard and weave through a mass of people, each taking a different route to arrive at destinations worlds apart, but unless a feeling of worth, instilled by the assurance of a parent, spills out of the mouth of this developing being, the journey to finding oneself in the midst of a crowd of individuals will prove to be an arduous and long task, possibly extending over the whole a life. Kate Chopin, in The Awakening, and Henrik Ibsen, in A Doll's House, understood the importance of a parental figure in the development of a young person's self-esteem, even in the Victorian era, emphasizing this made with a gap in the parental seat. of the lives of their protagonists, respectively Edna Pontellier and Nora Helmer. The vacant maternal role and the weak paternal relationship influence the sense of self-esteem of each of the protagonists, which is projected through the relationships with their husbands, their children, society as a whole and their ultimate choice of abandonment. Using realism, ridding the work of all fantastic and openly extravagant elements allowing the public to recognize themselves in various situations, Chopin and Ibsen allow events to “unfold” (Roberts 1664) as their stories progress. works, to reveal events prior to the duration of the work; they cast shadows over the events of the literary present, revealing the cause of the problem: the absence of the mother in the lives of the protagonists. In the case of Edna Pontellier, the "authority" of her father (Chopin 77), "putting [his] foot well and strong" (77), facilitated her mother's expedition to the grave, while the Nora Helmer's mother glosses over the play. '...... middle of paper ...... arc from others to tell her about her beauty, as she does not have this revelation in her since her father apparently forgot to inform her about it. Likewise, Nora, even though the decision lacked common sense, needed confirmation from Anne that her children "would not forget their mother" (Ibsen 30) if she left, due to her inability to arrive alone at this conclusion; both seek approval from others and discover that it only comes from within, each abandoning their forces of oppression which all come from the institutions of their society. In the denouements of both works, the protagonist realizes that his entire life has been guided and charted by others rather than himself and makes the decision to move forward, without the superfluous contributions and disdain of others, despite the ramifications that such a decision entails, such as the repetition of the motherless child.