This comparative course examines emblematic tragedies from late 19^th-century Norway to early 20^th-century Ireland, whose heroines inscribe the victimization of women by the patriarchal ideologies of the eras in which they were produced. While taking into consideration the increasing opportunities for female self-determination, it insists on the basic ideological principles that determine gender ‘normality’, which remained the same. Its methodological premise is that the male writers of these tragedies chose female figures as a privileged means by which they express their own interrogation of and dissatisfaction with the prevalent paradigm of relations of power in the social sphere. The inevitable victimization of the tragic heroines is brought about by their attempt towards self-emancipation, which is socially forbidden, and especially by the exertion of the right to dispose of themselves sexually in the way they wish.