As a child progresses through the various stages of life, he may crawl over knots in knitted carpet, gallop around plastic structures of a schoolyard and intertwine among a mass of people, each of whom follows a different path to arrive at polar opposite destinations, but unless a sense of value, instilled by the security of a parent, overflows from the mouth of this be developing, the journey to find oneself among a crowd of individuals will prove to be an arduous and extensive undertaking, perhaps one that will last a lifetime. Kate Chopin, in The Awakening, and Henrik Ibsen, in A Doll's House, understood the significance of the parental figure in the development of the young person's self-esteem, even in the Victorian era, highlighting this fact with a void 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 their relationships with their husbands, children, society as a whole and, their final choice of abandonment. Employing realism, freeing the work from all elements of fantasy and overtly extravagant so that the audience can recognize themselves in various situations, Chopin and Ibsen allow events to be “explained” (Roberts 1664) as their works progressed, to reveal events preceding the arc of the work; they cast shadows on the events of the literary present, exposing the cause of the problem: the absence of the mother in the lives of the protagonists. In the case of Edna Pontellier, her father's "authority" (Chopin 77), "aiming well and strongly" (77), facilitated her mother's dispatch to the grave, while Nora Helmer's mother is not mentioned during the play '... in the center of the paper... others say of her beauty, because she does not have this revelation within herself since her father seems to have forgotten to inform her. Similarly, Nora, although the decision was not a good one, needed Anne's confirmation that her children "[would] not forget their mother" (Ibsen 30) if she left, due to her inability to come to this conclusion on your own; both seek the approval of others and discover that it only comes from within, each abandoning their own oppressive forces which all derive from the institutions of their own society. In the epilogues 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 contempt of others, despite the consequences that this decision entails, as well as the repetition of the motherless child.