"" Ibsen uses dialogue to characterize Torvald's fixation.
Marquez uses Colonel Aureliano Buendia much like Torvald, but his obsession is with war, sex, and making toy fish from gold. His entire existence is summarized on page 113 of One Hundred Years Of Solitude where Marquez states, "Colonel Aureliano Buendia organized thirty-two armed uprisings and he lost them all. He had seventeen male children by seventeen different women."" His failure as a military leader characterizes him as compulsive and apathetic towards human life other than his own. He doesn't seem to regard women with much respect, but instead uses them for sexual pleasure to escape from the reality of his militaristic failures. Marquez uses ambiguity by stating that the Colonel had seventeen male children. This means one of two things. The first is he had seventeen children that were all males. The second is that he only cared about his male children and may have had female children. This reveals the societal disregard for women during the pre-modern era. The Colonel's role as a military leader and his sexual prowess embodies the physical aspect of masculinity presented by Marquez. The author goes on to say "until old age he made his living from the little gold fishes that he manufactured in his workshop in Macondo- which characterizes the Colonel as obsessive and solitary.
The success of the social order presented to the reader in One Hundred Years of Solitude and A Doll House is not dependant on the male characters, despite their outward show of authority. Colonel Buendia's war ended in the same place it started, and what good is Torvald's money if it can't be spent? The male preoccupation with physical, monetary, and governmental power diminishes their true usefulness in society; their fazade hides the role of the women in the development of modern society.
A Doll House's Nora Helmer is a stock character of the mid-ninteenth century, when first compared to Torvald.