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Hedda Gabler
Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen: Life and Career

Introduction
"Twenty years have passed since Henrik Ibsen wrote A Doll's House, thereby almost marking
an epoch in the history of drama. During those years his name has gone abroad through the length
and breadth of two continents, and has provoked more discussion and criticism than that of any
other living man.
He has been upheld as a religious reformer, a social reformer, a Semitic lover of righteousness,
and as a great dramatist. He has been rigorously denounced as a meddlesome intruder, a
defective artist, an incomprehensible mystic, and, in the eloquent words of a certain English
critic, a 'muck-ferreting dog.' Through the perplexities of such diverse criticism, the great genius
of the man is day by day coming out as a hero comes out amid the earthly trials." With these
words, the eighteen-year-old James Joyce began a long article about the Norwegian playwright
whose work had altered the nineteenth-century perception of what drama could accomplish and
had inspired in the fledging Irish writer a recognition of literature's power to describe honestly
and to comment meaningfully on the problems of human nature and modern society.
Early Years
Henrik Ibsen was born on March 20, 1828, to Knud and Marichen (Altenburg) Ibsen,
in Skien, Norway. Skien was a coastal town of some three thousand inhabitants whose chief
industry was the timber trade. Except for his father, who was the proprietor of a general store and
a distiller of schnapps, Ibsen's male paternal ancestors had all been sailors and sea captains. His
older brother died within a month of Henrik's birth, but his parents went on to have four other
children, three sons and a daughter, all of whom would live to adulthood. Thus, Henrik was
effectively the eldest of five children. Norway had been under Danish rule from 1387 to 1814, and
then, after only a few weeks of independence, it had come under the subjugation of Sweden. At
the time of Ibsen's birth, it was a largely rural and primitive land, culturally subject to Denmark,
with virtually no artistic life of its own.
At the time of Henrik's birth, his home life was a happy one: his mother sang and played
piano and his father was a prosperous merchant. But in 1834 the authorities ordered the closing
of his distillery, which led to the selling off of land and livestock, and soon thereafter the family
home and furnishings. Ibsen's father, who never regained his prosperity and who became
embittered and litigious over these events, moved his family, now socially diminished if not
outcast, to a run-down country house. Ibsen's upbringing was lonely and unhappy; his chief
amusements were reading (especially the Bible, although he was never a member of any church),
drawing and painting (in which he took lessons), and magic tricks. From the ages of thirteen to
fifteen, he was enrolled in a small private school, where his favorite subjects were religion and
classical history. OnDecember 27, 1843, after a friend of his father's had found him a position as
an apothecary's assistant, Ibsen sailed to Grimstad, a town of eight hundred inhabitants one
hundred miles to the south. He returned to Skien only once, for a brief visit in 1850, and kept only
occasional contact with his family for the rest of his life.
During the six years that Ibsen spent in Grimstad, he worked hard at the apothecary shop,
and spent what little free time he had in reading, painting, and writing poetry. Here, as in Skien,
plays were often staged by visiting theater companies, and Ibsen no doubt attended some of their
performances. In 1846, at the age of eighteen, he fathered a child by a twenty-eight-year-old
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housemaid in his employer's home. While he was required to contribute financially to his son's
schooling until the boy was eighteen, he had no contact with his child, at that time or later. By the
age of twenty, Ibsen had already become a freethinker in matters of religion and politics, and he
was tremendously excited by the wave of popular revolutionary uprisings that flashed
acrossEurope in 1848, threatening the established order. He wrote poems in which he extolled
the Hungarian freedom fighters and urged his fellow Scandinavians to rise against their
oppressors. At the beginning of 1849, he wrote Catiline, his first play, a blank-verse drama
reminiscent of Shakespeare in style and structure, although Ibsen denied any direct influence.
The historical Catiline is traditionally presented as a conspirator from whose plots Rome was
saved by the actions of Cicero; in Ibsen's treatment, he is a revolutionary and a hero.
Literary Career
In 1850, Ibsen moved to Christiania (nowOslo), Norway's capital, where he prepared for his
university matriculation examinations, and began for the first time in his life to associate regularly
with fellow writers and intellectuals. In that year, his friend Ole Schulerud paid for the publication
of Catiline. The book received an enthusiastic review from a contemporary of Ibsen's, along with
two less favorable but not unencouraging notices from more established critics. The following
year, his second play, The Warrior's Barrow, was produced, but it attracted no more notice
than Catiline had done. In the meantime, having failed his matriculation exams, and thus unable
to fulfill his intention of pursuing medical studies, he wrote dramatic reviews and political
comment while taking classes in literature. In October 1851, at which time Ibsen still had not
qualified for matriculation, the course of his life was changed when he was offered a job by the
classical violinist and theatrical manager Ole Bull.
For the next six years, Ibsen divided his time between Copenhagen, Denmark, the theatrical
center of Scandinavia at that time, and the theater in Bergen, Norway, where he was involved in
every aspect of play production except acting. It was an invaluable apprenticeship, an opportunity
for Ibsen to ground himself in all aspects of his craft, but it was also a frustrating one: the
standards of acting and production were provincial; the plays produced were for the most part
creaky melodramas imported from France, which emphasized intricate plots over character; and
the company was not commercially successful. Early in 1856, Ibsen met a young woman named
Suzannah Thoresen at the literary salon conducted by her stepmother. He and Suzannah were
married on June 18, 1858. Although in Ibsen's dramas women are often presented as domineering
and there are virtually no happy marriages, both his wife and their son Sigurd (born on December
23, 1859) would devote themselves totally to his personal and professional well-being. Ibsen left
the Bergen Theater in 1857 to head the Norwegian Theater in Christiana. This enterprise failed in
1862, and for the next two years he scraped by as best he could, subsisting in part on a small
government grant to collect folklore materials (some of which would find their way into Peer
Gynt, published in 1867). In 1864, he moved his family to Rome, where he would live until 1891,
except for a ten-year period inGermany beginning in 1868.
Ibsen's career as a playwright falls into several distinct periods. For its first two decades, his
predominant mode was verse drama, with plots often derived from classical or Scandinavian
history (Love's Comedy [1862], a satirical treatment of modern marriage, was a significant
exception). His last epic drama drawn from historical subjects was Emperor and Galilean(1873),
which marked a significant turning point in that it was written in prose. Most of these works had
been failures when they were produced. Ibsen's greatest achievements of this period were two
long verse dramas that were published rather than produced for the stage. Brand (1865), which
explored the character of an idealistic but unyielding and ultimately fanatical Lutheran minister,
brought Ibsen not only fame but prosperity as well, in the form of a government grant. Peer Gynt,
which takes its antihero over the earth and through a series of adventures, some of them
supernatural, is not unlike Goethe's Faust in its poetry, its succession of vivid scenes, and its
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moral and philosophical investigations. Although very different in style and nature from the plays
usually associated with his name, it remains one of Ibsen's greatest works.
The Pillars of Society (1877) was the first of eight realistic dramas, set in modern times and
written in naturalistic prose, that would revolutionize European theater and bring Ibsen an
international reputation. A Doll's House (1879), the second of these plays, caused a sensation with
its psychological insight, its persuasive depiction of the complexities of a marriage relationship,
and its clear sympathy for the wife's frustrations and for her shocking resolution of her
situation. Ghosts (1881) caused a scandal with its frank acknowledgment of inherited venereal
disease, and was as much as anything responsible for Ibsen's reputation as an author of "problem
plays," dramas whose principal concern was to illuminate social issues. Thus, in this reductive
view, A Doll's House is about the subjugation of women,Ghosts is about syphilis, An Enemy of the
People (1882) is about idealism vs. municipal corruption, and so on. In fact, what these plays are
really concerned with is the subtle analysis of human character and motivation, and the often
tortuous nature of relationships; their social dimension acts more as an underpinning, a partial
explanation of human behavior and of the problems people create for themselves and others
through a rigid and often hypocritical adherence to outworn traditions and corrupt social norms.
For all that Ibsen crusaded against institutionalized hypocrisy and its attendant cruelties, it is a
mark of the complexity of his moral and psychological vision that in The Wild Duck (1884) he
shows how, in unstable and misguided hands, "truth" can be as destructive as hypocrisy and lies-
-as can the search for personal freedom in a stifling society, as demonstrated in Hedda
Gabler (1890), the last and one of the greatest of these plays.
Last Years and Legacy
After his return to Norway at the height of his fame in 1891, Ibsen turned, in his last four
plays, to a series of moody, symbolic dramas, whose protagonists look back unhappily over their
lives and the choices they have made. Critics have professed to find submerged autobiographical
themes in these works, especially When We Dead Awaken (1899), Ibsen's last play, in which the
sculptor Rubek comes to feel that his single-minded artistic dedication has exacted too great a
price in human terms. In 1900, Ibsen suffered the first of a series of apoplectic strokes that would
affect him both mentally and physically until his death on May 23, 1906, at the age of seventy-
eight. The Norwegian government granted him a state funeral.
It was as a dramatic innovator that Ibsen established his reputation, at a time when drama
largely meant shallow romances, crude farces, and plays of intrigue with complicated and
ludicrous plots. It was as a fierce critic of social norms and stifling hypocrisies that he was
celebrated by his early admirers. But it is as the author of powerful dramas that portray
universal human concerns, as the creator of complex characters who suffer and endure in their
attempts to make sense of their lives, that he transcends merely historical importance and
remains a writer whose best works can move and provoke us as much as they did their original
audiences.

Ibsen As a Dramatist
Although Ibsen’s life of embattled exile and uncompromising artistic dedication profoundly
influenced such like-minded admirers as James Joyce, it has been largely his work—twenty-six
plays written over fifty years—that has affected subsequent drama so decisively as to earn him
the title “father of the modern theatre.”
Ibsen’s paternity has proved far-reaching indeed. Steinberg, twenty one years younger, reacted
violently against him yet was impaled by this rejection toward both outdoing him in the
naturalistic Vein and outflanking him in his later ante realistic style. More positively, Shaw lay
down the premises of his own lifework in The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), and Chekhov,
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who vacillated on Ibsen’s artistic achievement, in a letter affirmed the Norwegian dramatist as
“my favorite author”. The Wild Duck (Vildanden, 1884),with its ironic shifting of illusion and
reality, prefigures Pirandello and the last, great plays of O’Neill.
Until recently, Ibsen’s importance was attributed to the introduction of the “social (or problem)
play” to the nineteenth-century stage. This oversimplified view has yielded increasingly to a
more penetrating understanding of Ibsen’s art. Neither topical propagandizing nor high-gossip
biographizing can explain its enduring relevance. Ibsen was, as he himself claimed, consistently
a poet in his work from beginning to end. He tempered and refined his medium from romantic
lyricism into a strict and subtle economy, which sought, among other goals, to put to a kind of
Socratic test those values that defined the world of the newly dominant middle class. For the
series of plays beginning with Pillars of Society (1877), Ibsen devised a dramatic language that
could record both the immediate psychological tremors and the larger philosophical and mythic
reverberations of the modern age with almost seismographic delicacy and precision.
Before arriving at this new dramatic language, Ibsen first strove in his early saga and folk plays
such as The Burial Mound (1850) and The Viking at Helgeland (1858), to bring together and
transmute the two inadequate traditions available to him. From the high tradition, whose
sovereign model was Shakespeare; he had derived a sense of the inexhaustible possibilities of
poetry in the theatre; but this heritage, as it came down to him through Schiller, Oehlenschlager,
and lesser contemporaries, had degenerated into windy, romantic rhetoric and spectacular but
empty scenic effects. From the low tradition of the popular “well-made” boulevard
entertainments, whose chief practitioner was Scribe, Ibsen learned effective plot construction,
although it took him several apprentice plays to unlearn the mechanical intrigues and trivial
characterizations that went with the scribean formula.
Ibsen was greatly influenced by Hermann Hettner’s book Das Moderne Drama (1852). Hettner
believed that even the historical tragedy must be psychologically oriented: the historical
characters must have motives and reactions that are recognizable to the modern audience. The
commitment to reveal the great tendencies of history through psychological pressures,
combined with insights drawn from probing the conflicts of his own remarkably rich
personality, gives Ibsen’s plays an intensity and depth that have rarely been equaled.
Ibsen’s mood in 1864 was one of outrage over Norway’s neutrality during the Danish-Prussian
War. He considered Norway’s failure to go to the aid of Denmark a moral issue, not a political
one. It was in this spirit of indignation that he composed Brand(1865) a drama of fiercely
austere crusader, an idealist who is willing to sacrifice every thing to achieve what he considers
his God-given purpose in life. The motto of Brand is “all or nothing”; he refuses to compromise
but aims instead directly at his goal, never allowing for human weakness. Though he commits
himself totally to his ideals, he dies unloved and rejected by mankind. Brand is Ibsen’s first
major character to embody the author’s lifelong theme of individual self-realization.
Peer Gynt (prod. 1876), Ibsen’s next play, portrays a man the exact opposite of Brand and is in a
sense a complementary poetic drama. Peer represents all that Brand fought against: the
indecision, the self-deceit, the opportunism the evasive spirit of compromise. The central idea
of Peer Gynt is that man’s purpose in life is to become an authentic self. However, Peer’s
avoidance of commitment is shown to be as potentially tragic as Brand’s blind idealism. Ibsen’s
philosophy, as well as his personal indignation at all forms of compromise and hypocrisy,
reflected his guarded admiration of the work of Kierkegaard, the great Danish existential
philosopher and religious thinker. The influence of Kierkegaard is evident in subsequent plays
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wherein the characters present in miniature an image of the historically conditioned society
responding to its fateful pressures. In its midst, the isolated individual struggles with the crisis
of choice, thereby revealing the hidden recesses of the self as well as the tangled web of his own
past.
In his continuing effort to reconstitute poetic drama, Ibsen ultimately found his solution by
reversing the traditional models. In the classic theatre of Shakespeare and Racine, the stage
setting is spare or nonexistent, and things for the most part have their place in poetry of words.
In the contemporary theatre that Ibsen perfected, the stage setting is prescribed down to the
least significant details, and words give way—partially, but not completely—to a poetry of things:
Hedda Gabler’s pistols successively become her frustration, her thwarted aggressions, her
attachment to her father, her masculine strain, her explosive irrationality, her eventual
destructiveness, and the sinister emblems of an entire functionless, bored, doomed society. Not
merely such key objects as the pistols but the entire mise-en-scene is rendered aphorical. The
furnishings of the stage, the changes of lightning and of costume, the ages, physical
appearances, situations, and interactions of the characters—all are employed as the vocabulary
of a dramatic poem, deceptively cast in prose, that at once plausibly depicts, emotionally
projects, and intellectually probes some aspect of the life and fate of the modern bourgeois
individual. This pervasive transformation of material things into a figuratively meaningful stage
picture that reinforces the subtle verbal exchanges is one of the chief qualities that set Ibsen’s
realistic plays apart from similar works by his more literal-minded predecessors and imitators.
In the great social and psychological plays that Ibsen began writing in the late 1870s, the
playwright questioned many of the axiomatic beliefs of his time. He seemed primarily concerned
about opportunities for the growth of the individual, the development of man’s unique
personality unhampered by the restrictions of society. He was still the man who had
written Brandand Peer Gynt; his philosophy remained “Be yourself.”
A Doll House (1879), Ghosts (1881), The Lady from the Sea (1888), and Hedda Gabler
(1890)examine family life and the relation between man and woman; An Enemy of the
People (1882), and Pillars of Society (1877)explore relation between the individual and society.
These plays are realistic in outward style. For the most part they graphically portray upper and
lower middle-class life in the cities, suburbs and small towns of Ibsen’s time in ways that
strikingly and prophetically illuminate their counterparts today. With penetrating insight, Ibsen
exposed deceptions and corruptions that were, and are, the basis of the modern competitive,
business-oriented society, all the while probing the conflict within the individual between the
desire for happiness and the demands of conscience. Nora, in A Doll House, speaks for many of
his characters when she says, “I have to find who is right, society or I”
The plays of Ibsen’s last years include The Master Builder (1892), Little Eyolf (1894), John
Gabriel Borkman (1896), and finallyWhen We Dead Awaken (1899). This last group is
characterized by an emphasis on symbolic elements that was evident in the early verse plays.
The mountains of Norwayand the power of the sea took on deepening associations of meaning
throughout Ibsen’s lifetime, and he now translated these aspects of nature into poetic symbols.
In addition, these dramas express the mystical side of Ibsen and indicate his intense interest in
the frontiers of experience and in the workings of the unconscious. In them Ibsen returned to
the question that is fundamental to all his work: Of what value is truth and idealism in human
life? He did this by examining the psychological conflict man faces when forced to choose
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between his need for various kinds of personal fulfillment and the concern of his conscience for
the welfare of others.
Catiline (1849). Blank-verse historical drama in three acts. The play sympathetically depicts
Catiline that much maligned figure of Roman antiquity, concentrating on his inner torments.
Bitter and vengeful, rejected by his country and incited by a fallen vestal virgin, Furia, who seeks
his destruction, Catiline leads an ill-fated band of malcontents in an abortive rebellion against
the corrupt and authoritarian Roman Senate. Betrayed and in disgrace, Catiline goes to his
death together with his faithful and adoring wife Aurelia.
The Burial Mound/ The Warriors’s Barrow (1854). One-act dramatic poem that portrays
an incident from the heroic age of Norse conquest. Landing on an island off the coast of Sicily,
Gandalf, a young pagan chieftain who personifies the rough Viking tradition confront the
tempering, Mediterranean influence of Christianity in young, innocent Blanka. Sworn to avenge
his father’s death, Gandalf learns Blank has in fact saved his life, and he subsequently returns
to Norway with her so that her faith may be “transplanted in the north”
Norma or The Loves of Politician (1851). Satiric opera in three brief acts, freely based on
Bellini’s Norma, S. T. O Severus (a Liberal) simultaneously woos Adalgisa (the Government) and
Norma (the Opposition) in a dim forest. His duplicity is discovered, while the parliamentary
chorus of druids remains witlessly unmoved.
St. John’s Night (1853). Three-act prose comedy (with a verse prologue) that has scene and
sanitation reminiscent of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Julian Poulsen and
Johannes Birk, students from christiania, accompany Jorgen Kvist on a visit to a farm of his
aunt Mrs. Berg in Telemark. Johannes is secretly engaged to Mrs. Berg’s daughter Juliane but
finds himself drawn to her stepdaughter Anne, who is believed to be simpleminded. After a
midsummer night’s adventure at a fairy mound in the woods, the lovers change partners, the
self-inflated nationalist Julian pairing off with the flighty, literal-minded Juliane, whereas the
imaginative Johannes with Anne, their engagement, affirm the superior reality of those who see
poetry as truth.
Lady Inger of Ostraat (1855) Five-act historical drama in prose, set in the early sixteenth
century, when Norway was under the oppressive domination of Denmark. The play, dealing
freely with actual historical personages, is a complex maze of intrigue, intercepted letters,
seduction, double-dealing and rebellion. It focuses upon the battle of wits between the patriotic,
politically influential Lady Inger Gyldenlove of Norway and the wily Danish Knight Nils Lykke,
in which fates of both countries hang in the balance.
Caught in a web of plots and schemes, Lady Inger unwittingly orders the death of her own long
lost son and, as a result, becomes at the end a broken and tragic figure.
The Feast at Solhaug (1856) Lyric medieval drama in three acts written partly in a verse
form imitating the meters and style of the old Norwegian heroic ballads. Songs and stories
frequently interrupt the dramatic action. The feast being celebrated is the third wedding
anniversary of the unhappily married Margit, who together with her Sister Signe is infatuate
with their Kinsman Gudmund. Gudmund has been unjustly outlawed and is recently arrived at
Solhaug. Margit schemes to poison her aged husband Bengt, but when he is killed in a drunken
brawl, she decides to enter a convent. Gudmund’s name is cleared, Signe becomes his wife, and
a final song praises heaven’s justice.
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Olaf Liljekrans (1857). Poetic play in three acts set in medieval Norway and based on the
folktale The Grouse in Justedal Betrothedby compact to the vain and shallow. Ingeborg of
Guldvik, the knight Olaf Liljekrans falls deeply in love with the innocent Alfhild, an unworldly
child of nature. His mother Lady Kirsten intrigues to affect the more profitable marriage, but
Olaf, at first weakly acquiescing, eventually asserts his rights and claims Alfhild in marriage.
Ingeborg ends by wedding her actual favorite, the ineffectual page Hemming.
The Vikings at Helgeland (1858). Prose drama in four acts set on an island off the coast
of Norway in the tenth century A.D. The play is drawn from the Icelandic family sagas and deals
with honor and revenge among two mismatched couples: the peace-loving Gunnar and the
valkyrie-spirited Hjordia: the warriors Sigurd and the gentle Dagny. At feast of reconciliation,
Hjordis; goads the men to quarrel, forcing Dagny to reveal that her husband, not Gunnar,
performed the heroic feat that won Hjordis. Sigurd and Hjordis then recognize their hopeless
love; she slays him, hoping they will be united in Valhalla, learning too late he has become a
Christian, and they are separated forever
Love’s Comedy (1862). Three-act verse satire on the middle-class courtships and marriages of
Ibsen’s day. The young bachelor poet Falk, living in the Christiania suburbs, views with mingled
disdain and amused detachment the trivial married lives of those around him. At the
engagement party of his close friend Lind, he delivers a tirade against marriage, denouncing it
as a mausoleum of love, and, together with his own like-minded sweetheart Svanhild, who has
been courted by the wealthy, practical merchant Guldstad, resolves to seek “ the ideal,” when
Guldstad convinces them that their own passion is doomed to the same mediocre date as that of
the others Falk and Svanhild decide to part, accepting that only in memory can their love remain
fresh and beautiful. Falk, the free spirit, joins a chorus of singers departing for the mountains.
Syanhild, however, decides to marry Guldstad and accept the inevitable.
The Pretenders (1864) Prose historical drama in five acts that deals with the struggle between
Haakon Haakonsson and Earl Skule, rival pretenders to the disputed throne of Norway in the
early thirteenth century. When the supremely confident Haakon, under whose hand all things
prosper, is declared King despite Earl Skule’s claim, he marries Margrete, the Earl’s daughter, as
a conciliatory gesture. For a short time the country is at peace. However, informed by the
shrewd political manipulator Bishop Nicholas that legitimacy of Haakon’s right to the throne is
doubtful, Skule proclaims himself King, precipitating a new civil war. Although he is at first
successful, Skule’s vacillation and self-doubt bring about his downfall. His supporters are
decimated by Haakon’s forces, and Skule and his son Peter give themselves up to rebellious mob
and die in quiet resignation.
Brand (1865). Titanic five-act drama, the publication of which established Ibsen’s
Scandinavian reputation. Brand, a fiercely dedicated young minister whose maxim is “all or
nothing” meets three representative types who, he feels, infect the world: a peasant (the faint of
heart), the painter Einar and his betrothed Agnes (the light of heart), and the gypsy girl Gerd
(the wild of heart). Brand’s singular courage and exalted vision are communication to Agnes,
who leaves Einar and goes off with him. Later, the son born to them dies when Brand refuses to
leave his mountain parish for a milder climate. Forced by Brand to give up the last mementos of
the child Agnes also dies.
Brand’s inflexibility is further demonstrated by his refusal to grant his dying mother absolution
unless she renounces every bit of her wealth. He afterward uses his entire inheritance to build a
more spacious church, but when the moment comes to open its doors, he decides that the
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building is yet another form of idolatry. He exhorts his congregation to follow him up into
barren mountains to be closer to God. Though they set off enthusiastically, the hardships of the
journey prove too much for them. When Brand declares that in exchange for the wealth of
mammon all they can expect is a crown of thorns, they turn on hi and stole him. Deserted,
Brand finds release in tears just before being buried under an avalanche released by the crazed
gypsy Gerd. In answer to his life, an enigmatic voice announces, “He is the God of love”
A Doll House (1879) Three-acts psychological and social drama. Nora Helmer is pampered by
her complacent husband Torvald, who treats her as an adorable but scatterbrained child. She is
actually leading a life bordering on desperation. Seven years preciously she had forged her
father’s name in order to obtain a secret loan to finance a trip necessary for Torvald’s health,
since his pride precluded borrowing money. Nora is now pressured by her unscrupulous
creditor, Krogstad, an employee in the bank where her husband has become manager. Krogstad
is about to be dismissed by the unsuspecting Torvaled, and Nora is in imminent danger of being
exposed. When her desperate efforts to forestall the crisis fail, Krogstad sends Torvald a letter
revealing Nora’s forgery. Torvald turns on her viciously, calling her immoral, hypocritical, and
unfit to be the mother of his children. His blind, convention-bound reaction to her selfless
gesture opens Nora’s eyes to her own intolerable position as his wife. Although he later forgives
her, to his astonishment, she walks out on him, their children, and the artificial dollhouse in
which she has been living, determined to seek a life in which her value as a human being can be
realized.
Ghost (1881). Three-act drama dealing with the tragic effects of suppressing disturbing truths.
Mrs. Widow of the admired and respected Captain Alving, has been living alone on her
husband’s estate with her maidRegina, carrying on her husband’s good works in charitable
projects, such as a recently completed orphanage. She is aided in this by the primly proper and
naïve Pastor Manders, whom she once loved and who disapproves of her ‘Free thinking’ ideas.
Her son Oswald, who has been living as an artist in Paris, returns home for the dedication of the
orphanage, which is, however, burned to the ground before the ceremonies.
Returning exhausted from the fire, Oswald reveals to his mother that he is suffering from a
venereal disease, the origin of which he does not understand. When he declares his intention to
marry Regina, Mrs. Alving is forced to reveal what she has previously confessed to pastor
Manders: captain Alving was in reality a dissipates sensualist masquerading under the guise of
gentility, all his reputation and philanthropy were the result of her own industry, and Regina is
actually his illegitimate daughter. Oswald now realizes that his disease is hereditary in origin. He
obtains from his mother her promise to administer a deadly drug to him should he become
insane. When as the play ends, Oswald’s mind disintegrates completely after a seizure, Mrs.
Alving must decide whether to commit euthanasia as she has promised or to let her son go on
living in his helpless, demented condition.
An Enemy of the People (1883). Caustic and high-spirited comedy in five acts in which Ibsen
pays tribute to the courage of the individual conscience in opposition to the conformity of mass
opinion. In a small Norwegian resort that prospers by virtue of its mineral baths, the public
health officer, Dr. Stockmann, discovers that the waters are polluted and have already caused
several illnesses. He determines to have the situation remedied. At first he is aided
enthusiastically by the local newspaper’s editors, but the tide of reform gradually turns when the
doctor’s brother, the mayor, points out the financial hardships that would result from such a
program. Dr. stockman is then branded an enemy of the people’s prosperity. Majority is stoned,
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his daughter dismissed from her teaching position and his friends persecuted. Alone in his stand
for truth and justice, Dr. Stockmann first considers emigration then resolves to found a school
where he can teach his sense of values to young people. Seeing the social hypocrisy into which
the people have been led by the so-called respectable elements in town, he concludes that the
strongest man in the world is the one who stands most alone.
The Wild Duck (1884). Drama in five acts. The Ekdal household, impoverished but reasonably
content, consists of the ineffectual dreamer Hjalmar, a photographer by trade; his practical wife
Gina their adolescent daughter Hedvig and Old Ekdal, Hjalmar’s father, a childlike, bemused ex-
convict who keeps in the attic a menagerie including poultry, rabbits, and a wild duck, the
adored pet of Hedving. Into this ménage comes boyhood friend of Hjalmar, Gregers the
idealistic son of a wealthy businessman named Werle. Gregers is determined to for his father’s
corruption. Moving in with the family, he relentlessly exposes to Hjalmar the deception and
illusions responsible for the Ekdal’s low estate: Old Ekdal was made a scapegoat by Werle and
unjustly sentenced to prison; Gina, once a maid in the Werle household, had in reality been
werle’s mistress; the little family has not been living on Hjalmar’s income as a photographer but
on a stipend from Werle; and finally Hedvig, whom Hjalmar loves dearly, could very possibly be
Werle’s illegitimate daughter. In the mane of truth the once peaceful household is now
fragmented and destroyed. Hjalmar rejects his daughter, who is then counseled by Gregers to
make some sacrificial gesture capable of rewinning her father’s love. He assumes that she will
kill the wild duck, but instead Hedvig kills herself Gregers is left amid the run-ins he has caused
by his idealistic meddling.
Rosmersholm (1886). Drama in four acts set in a great country estate in Norway. When
Rector Kroll, brother of Johannes Rosmer’s late wife Beata, seeks to enlist Johannes’s aid in
opposing the newly insurgent liberal faction in their town, he is appalled to learn that the
aristocratic Rosmer has himself embraced liberal principles and has even left the church,
resigning his position as clergyman. Furious, kroll accuses the master of Rosmer of illicit
relation with the housekeeper Rebecca West, a close friend of Beata and supporter of Rosmer in
his new philosophy. He intimates that his feelings for Rebecca drove Beata to suicide. Soon the
focus of a scandal, Rosmer begins to think that he did in deed cause his wife’s death and shortly
loses all confidence in himself and his goals. To erase his debilitating gait, Rebecca confesses
that it was she who was responsible for his wife’s suicide. Beata had opposed Rebecca’s
ambitious efforts to convert Rosmer to liberal vies. Rebecca then lied to Beata about being
pregnant with Rosmer’s child. It was this that drove Beata to suicide.
After confessing the truth to Rosmer, Rebecca says she has come to love him, no longer
erotically, but spiritually, for his high aspirations have transformed her into a nobler person. To
prove this love, she consents to die in the same manner as Beata. Rosmer’s sense of guilt is
stronger than his will to alive. He joins Rebecca in a suicide pact, and together they plunge into
the same millpond that claimed Beata.
The Lady from the Sea (1888). Set in late summer on a west Norway fjord, this five-act
drama relies principally on subtle character development and a poetically evocative mood.
Ellida, the second wife of Dr. Wangle is restlessly dissatisfied with her marriage because she is
haunted by a love vow she made to a sailor years earlier. Fascinated by the sea, she is still
waiting for the mysterious who swore to come back one day and claim her. When a stranger
suddenly appears, Ellida realizes that the sailor has indeed returned. She is torn between her
husband and the demonic spell of this man, who both terrifies and fascinates her. When Dr.
 10

Wangle finally releases her former marriage vows, allowing her full freedom of choice, she
realizes the depth of his love for her and finds the will to reject the stranger and wholeheartedly
accept her marriage.
Hedda Gabler (1891). Four-act drama. Hedda, bored by trivial social amusements, has
married George Tesman a devoted but rather dull scholar whom she does not love. Soon bored
again, she amuses herself by playing with her father’s braced of dueling pistols and flirting with
judge Brake a professional bachelor with flair for domestic triangles. Thea Elvsted, Hedda’s
childhood rival appears on the scene to ask George’s assistance for a serious problem: she has
deserted her husband and his children for her lover, Eilert Loevborg who was once Hedda’s
suitor. Not only has Thea dared to defy conventional society but she also reclaimed Eilert from
alcoholism and inspired him to write a brilliant book that will make him George’s competitor.
Envious of Thea, Hedda reasserts her power over Eilert by sending him off to a drunken party at
Brack’s where he succumbs to his old weakness for liquor and loses his manuscript. George finds
it and entrusts it to Hedda, who vindictively burns it. Eilert is now desperate, and when Hedda
gives him one of her pistols he goes to prostitute’s bedroom and shoots himself. Guessing the
truth about the pistol, Brack intends to blackmail Hedda into becoming his mistress. Thea and
George have agreed to reconstruct Eilert’s manuscript from surviving notes. Caught in her own
trap, Hedda shoots herself.
The Master Builder (1892). Three act drama. Halvard Solness a self-taught architect who
stands at the top of his profession has become aware that he possesses uncanny extrasensory
powers over people and events. Unsettled by these trolls within, he believes himself to be on the
verge of madness brought on by prolonged brooding over the ambiguous origin of his fame. His
first success came after a disastrous fire that caused the death of his two infant sons but
permitted the subdivision of his wife’s estate into lots on which he could build in accordance
with his own ideas. He is tormented by the fear that he willed the fire in order to gain entry onto
his profession. In fact he is afraid that whatever he wills comes to pass and that subsequently he
must pay a terrible price for his wishes.
In Hilda Wangle a bewitching young woman who says she has been under his spell since
childhood Solness senses a final chance for redemption. Fearful that he will be overtaken and
destroyed by the younger generation personified by his talented draftsman Ragnar Brovik,
Solness has always guarded his commissions. Hilda persuades him to prove that he is unafraid
of competition by giving Ranger his chance. Solness meanwhile has completed the building of a
new home for his wife and himself. To free his conscience and reinstate his claim to being the
supreme master builder, Hilda urges him to climb the building’s high tower in order to place the
dedicatory wreath. Against the warning of his wife Solness makes the ascent and falls to his
death.
Little Eyolf (1894). One of Ibsen’s shortest and most sparely plotted works. Back from a
recuperative stay in the mountains where he has had a mystical experience, the frail ineffectual
Alfred Allmers resolves to give up philosophical writing and devote his time to his crippled son
Eyolf. But Eyolf is drowned under mysterious circumstances, and Allmers and his passionate
domineering wife Rita for whom he declares his love has died pass through a series of trials by
crisis from grief to guilt recrimination and intended separation. Allmer’s plan to live with his
deeply devoted half-sister Asta is dashed when he learns from her that they are not in fact
related. When Rita proposes to dedicate her life to helping the poor children of the town Allmers
decides to stay with her joining in her effort to make amends for their past self-centered lives.
 11

John Gabriel Borkman(1896). Drama in four acts resenting the events of a single winter’s
night. John Gabriel Borkman had been imprisoned for misuse of funds from the bank he once
managed. Since his release eight years earlier he has lived as a recluse with his strong-willed
wife Gunhild who hates him for the disgrace he has brought on her. Their son Erhart a student
was raised by Gunhild’s twin sister Ella. Lately he has been studying nearby and regularly
visiting mother who has urged him to rehabilitate the family mane. Ella now arrives and begs to
have Erhart remain with her during the last month of her terminal illness. When she confronts
Borkman with the ghost of their long-dead love affair he admits that at the time he had
sacrificed his feelings for her his all-consuming ambition by giving her up to a man who could
further his career.
The two sisters fight over Erhart who after demanding the right to his own life departs with Mrs.
Fanny Wilton a seductive widow. Borkman momentarily inspired by Ella’s presence leaves his
self-imposed prison to make up his life again. However his emergence into the cold world after
so many years is too much for him refusing to the house of his confinement he walks to a snowy
mountain overlook only to die realizing his abandonment of Ella for power and glory had been
in Vain. The two sisters are reunited over his body.
When We Dead Awaken (1899). Drama in three acts. Arnold Rubek, a sculptor renowned for
his statue “Resurrection Day” and his young wife Maja are staying at a mountain resort where
Maja becomes interested in another guest, the virile bear-hunter Ulfeim. Also at the resort is
Irene von Satow, whom Rubek recognizes as the model for the work that had made him famous.
He learns from her that she had loved him passionately at that time. On his part, however, he
had merely used her to inspire his art. Irene invites him up into the mountains, and this
expedition coincides with a plan made by Maja and Ulfeim.
As they proceed, Rubek confesses to Irene that he has been tortured by the realization that his
rejection of her was a denial of life, for which art has proved a poor substitute. He begs her to
give him another chance, saying that his marriage with Maja has become unbearable. Irene
rejects his plea, telling him that they are both dead and that there is no resurrection in his life.
Urging him on to the heights, Irene leads Rubek upward. They pass the other couple, who are
descending to escape an oncoming storm. Rubek now calls on his lost love to awaken so that
they may live life to the fullest before they go to their graves. Striving toward the sunlit peak,
Rubek and Irene are buried in an avalanche as Maja’s song of freedom rings out from farther
down the mountain.

Ibsen’s Greatness and Limitations

Seldom has a nation paid so heavily as the Scandinavians for the illusory splendor of military
glory. During the Thirty Years’ War, because of especially favorable conditions their military
domination over Germanyseemed to be assured; a century later, ridiculous as was the part they
were condemned to play in war, they had much less real influence on the intellectual life
ofEurope, or indeed any part in it worth mentioning. The storm of the French Revolution, which
gave a new impetus to the literature of all European nations, left the Scandinavian countries
almost untouched.
They surrendered all the more readily to reaction. Scandinavian literature became a fanatic
disciple of romanticism and remained so even when romanticism had fallen into decay
everywhere else in Europe. As late as 1848 the Neue Rheinische Zeitungrightly said that Denmark
imported all of both her literary and her material food from Germany, but that Germany was
progressive and revolutionary compared with Denmark. “Scandinavianism,” the only movement
 12

originating in the Scandinavian countries, was characterized by this revolutionary paper as an

enthusiasm for the brutal, dirty national character of the old Nordic pirates, an enthusiasm for
that depth of feeling that could not express its exuberant thoughts and sentiments in words, but
only in deeds, in brutality towards women, in continual drunkenness and outbreaks of berserk
fury alternating with tearful sentimentality. Cutting as these expressions were, they do not seem
to have been exaggerated; when, twenty years later, the youthful Georg Brandes lectured
at Copenhagen Universityon literary history, adopting the viewpoint of bourgeois enlightenment,
he was universally attacked as a heretic with a bitterness reminiscent of the mediaeval Inquisition,
so bloodthirsty was it, though fortunately impotent.
Until late in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Scandinavian literature was dominated
by the romantic current – flight from the life of the present, constant return to subjects drawn
from long ago, a predilection for writing allegorical fairy tales, and last but not least, a kind of
fantastic mysticism degenerating into an ascetic rejection of the world. With few exceptions, this
literature was bitterly hostile to all modern ideas, and denounced their advance not only as
apostasy from the Christian faith, but as marking the dissolution of all social and moral bonds.
Yet modern ideas could not be repelled when capitalism advanced victoriously into the
Scandinavian countries and mercilessly revolutionized the hoary and venerable structure of
society. The economic revolution brought the intellectual revolution in its wake, and the winds of
spring blew all the fresher after the long winter.
The leadership in the belated awakening of Scandinavian literature fell to Norway, thanks to
the native peasantry and petty bourgeoisie who had for several centuries been the ruling classes
in Norwegian society. The Norwegian peasant had never been a serf, as the Danish and Swedish
had, and the Norwegian petty bourgeois was descended from free peasants; Norway was the only
country which had preserved a democratic constitution after the victory of European reaction
at Waterloo. It must be admitted that this petty bourgeois world, which afforded such extremely
poor opportunities for industrial development on a large scale, for the stock exchange and all other
levers for the concentration of capital, had a mental horizon equally limited – in effect, the horizon
of the peasantry and petty bourgeoisie; but when the modern system of production invaded the
land it infused a strong and healthy element which rapidly advanced from the deep swamps of
romanticism to the heights of modern society and was checked at last only because its path
onwards from these heights was lost in the clouds. Nevertheless a mass proletariat could not, and
cannot, evolve in Norway; for this reason the most revolutionary writer in Norwegian literature
failed to find the key to the deepest problems of his time, so that Henrik Ibsen said: “I am
concerned with asking questions; answers have I none.” But Ibsen’s way of putting his questions
has made him a European writer of the first rank.
Henrik Ibsen was born on the twentieth of March, 1828, at Skien, one of those small Norwegian
coast towns where the salt tang of the sea mingles with the smell of the mountain forests. The
little town was a stronghold of puritanism, and at the same time a model in miniature of modern
commerce, displaying the most glaring social contrasts in the smallest imaginable space.
According to Goethe the child is father of the man, and certain youthful impressions of his native
town stamped themselves on Ibsen’s mind; the most trenchant of his social dramas are set in
places of which Skien was the original.
Ibsen came of a petty bourgeois family, and attended grammar school till the age of sixteen,
when he went to live as a pharmacist’s apprentice in the small town ofGrimstad. Here he lived for
four or five years, preparing for the entrance examinations at Christiania University, where he
intended to study medicine. Before he had reached this goal, however, the February Revolution
of 1848 broke out and stirred the twenty-year-old youth deeply. He wrote fiery poems dedicated
to the revolutionary Hungarians and, in a series of sonnets, appealed to the King of Sweden to
take up arms to aid their Danish brothers against the Germans. It should not be overlooked,
 13

however, that the party inCopenhagen which urged the annexation of Schleswig-Holstein was the
revolutionary party in Denmark, and that Ibsen had nothing to do with the reactionary principles
of Scandinavianism, although he did wish the Danish cause to be supported against the Germans.
His immediate future belonged to the struggle for emancipation through which Norwegian
literature sought to free itself from its complete dependence on Denmark.
Apart from the revolutionary lyrics of his youth, Ibsen had written a revolutionary
tragedy, Catiline, and had it published under a pseudonym. The critics for the most part received
it unfavorably, but Ibsen was not discouraged by this, and remained true to his literary penchant
after passing the entrance examination at Christiania and beginning his studies at the university.
Still his name was almost unknown when in 1852 he was appointed dramatist to the Norwegian
Theatre in Bergen. He kept this post until 1857 and wrote a play every year, whereby he acquired
that sure technique which distinguishes his later masterpieces to such a high degree. Apart from
this Ibsen himself condemned, almost without exception, the plays which he wrote at that time.
Essentially they were still in the style of Danish romanticism, and the attempt to create an
independent Norwegian literature was doomed to failure so long as it continued to distinguish
itself from Danish literature merely by means of slight differences in dialect and other such non-
essentials.
The first to find the right way was Björnson, a fellow student of Ibsen’s, who was dramatist to
the Norwegian Theatre inChristiania. His peasant stories mirrored the life of the Norwegian
people with refreshing truth. In 1857 the two writers exchanged posts and now Ibsen’s genius,
too, flew higher, in plays such as The Pretenders andThe Vikings at Helgeland, which showed his
effeminate contemporaries some figures from Norway’s past, full of vigor and rude greatness.
In Love’s Comedy, however, Ibsen held up a mirror to his contemporaries, showing not their
forefathers’ virtues, but rather their own foolishness. The play struck at the heart of the hypocrisy
of the time, and stirred up a storm of indignation, which even threatened the author’s position,
particularly since the Norwegian Theatre inChristiania went bankrupt in the same year
that Love’s Comedy appeared. Ibsen’s friends were already trying to keep him from starvation by
means of some minor post in the Civil Service when somebody succeeded in procuring him a small
travelling grant from the state. Ibsen went to Rome, where, in the late sixties, he wrote his mystical
dramas Brand and Peer Gynt and began the historical play Emperor and Galilean, not
completed until later.
In these vast works many of Ibsen’s admirers see his most gifted and sublime creations, not to
be compared save with Goethe’s Faust. Yet such an opinion is merely a reflection of the world
fame which Ibsen later won; anyone approaching without prejudice the works which Ibsen wrote
inRome will agree with the skeptical words of Georg Brandes: “Is Brand reaction or revolution? I
cannot tell, there is so much of both in the play. In Brand Ibsen sets up ideals from whose giddy
heights reality seems to disappear in the distance. True, there is revolutionary spirit in those
works, and in Peer Gynt the poet castigates severely enough that reactionary Scandinavianism of
great words and small deeds, of overflowing sentimentality and hard narrow egoism. But he
himself is still in a ferment, out of which no great work of art can crystallize. Ibsen first found the
path which was to bring him undying laurels when, in 1869, he wrote The League of Youth, a
comedy which graphically portrayed the life of contemporary Norway and vigorously attacks its
political careerists, though it was still cast in the somewhat superficial mold of French comedy.
The play made new enemies for Ibsen in Norway and he did not return to his motherland. After
his sojourn of several years in Italy he lived now in Dresden, now in Munich. He acclaimed the
war of 1870 and the Paris Commune with high hopes, soon to be disappointed; in a letter written
from Dresden surrounded by “heavy German phrasemongers and boasters who shout themselves
hoarse with their eternal Watch on the Rhine,” he foresaw, with wonderful clarity, the menacing
future that lay ahead: “In this very victory lies defeat and the sword will turn into a whip.” The
 14

celebrated idols of the day he compared to the Egyptian columns of Memnon which the storm
soon covers with layers of sand. Of the position of the workers in a state where arms ruled, he
declared that they were like larvae which can never become butterflies. Ibsen was at last ripe to
call model capitalist society before his tribunal.
In the sixth decade of the author’s life his masterpieces were written. Especially of these is
Ibsen’s remark to one of his biographers true: “All that I have written is closely wedded to what I
have lived through if not personally experienced. For me the purpose of every new work was to
serve as a process of spiritual liberation and purification. For no man is ever free of responsibility
for the society to which he belongs, or without a share in its guilt.” The essence of these dramas,
considered both objectively and subjectively, is pungently summed up in these words. The writer
stands within a society whose vital functions he can closely observe, even down to the faintest
heart beats – a feat which would be impossible to him if he stood above society, and really knew
how to liberate and purify himself from it.
That is at once Ibsen’s greatness and his limitation. None can excel the realism of the characters
which Ibsen learned to put on the stage. One sees them walk and stand, one hears them talk, as if
they really lived. The dialogue is free from any brilliant artificiality; one might almost call it
commonplace. Such at least is the impression of those who unthinkingly give themselves up to
the enjoyment of these works. Anyone who studies his technique closely will discover the supreme
achievement of his art in this very simplicity; each of those negligent words, apparently dropped
by chance, has been well pondered and is closely woven into the whole texture of the play. But this
masterly technique is always completely merged in his poetic faculty.
Yet while the writer lives in and with the characters he has created, he too is unable to overcome
the barriers hemming them in. He may resent their faults and quarrel with them, but free them
he can not. Herein lies the root of Ibsen’s notorious pessimism. This catchword in itself is as
meaningless as any other; it gains real content and meaning only by reason of its social basis.
Pessimism rears its head in all declining classes, but in each particular case the deciding factor is
above all which class is concerned and how it declines. The pessimism of the German philistine
Schopenhauer is quite different from the pessimism of the petty bourgeois Ibsen; the former
suffers with head bowed; the latter, rebelling, fights; it is this element of struggle which lends to
Ibsen’s masterpieces such a powerful dramatic tension. Yet the struggle is never crowned with
victory; Ibsen proclaims the “new epoch,” but he cannot throw open the gates to it: his criticism
of society as expressed in his plays comes to a dead end.
In as early a work as Pillars of Society, published in 1877, the villain turns from his evil ways:
after committing or attempting every possible infamous deed the profiteering capitalist is
converted to the honorable principle of the petty bourgeoisie – that is, verbally. He proclaims that
“from this day” – that is, from the day on which his frauds are no longer successful – the “new
age” shall begin; that as for the past, “with its pretenses, its hypocrisy and hollowness, its false
respectability and infamous obsequiousness,” it will live on only as a museum piece, displayed for
the instruction of the public. Freedom and truth are the real pillars of society; such is the shallow
truism with which the audience is sent away, just after being thoroughly stirred by a vivid picture
of capitalist corruption. This picture was true enough to life to rouse the hottest anger of “good
society” against the writer, and to dispel all suspicion that with his “happy end” he was moved by
an intention which actually lay far from his thoroughly sincere nature. The psychological fallacy
with which the work ended was rooted in nothing but the author’s lack of clarity with regard to
sociological problems.
This he combated honestly and vigorously enough, as evidenced by his immediately
subsequent plays: A Doll’s House, 1879, andGhosts, 1881. In these plays Ibsen turns his
searchlight upon the comfortable home of the philistine and pillories the falsity of the bourgeois
 15

money marriage. No longer does he veil the harsh truth. While he does not see any way of
salvation, he does see the curse under which bourgeois society lives. While he does not yet
understand the struggle of the oppressed class, he already understands the struggle of the
oppressed sex. Nora is the pampered doll who plays with life and knows little more about it than
a doll, until, brought into sharp conflict with life, she recognizes its crudeness and brutality and
resolutely tears asunder the whole web of lies woven about her with its unnerving softness. Mrs.
Alving did not come to that resolution at the decisive hour in her life; she did not break up her
marriage when she recognized it as no more than a falsehood: “I hadn’t the courage to act
differently, not even for my own sake; I was such a coward.” The atonement she has to make is
terrible, for the ghosts of her youth return; she has to poison her only son to relieve him from the
awful bodily torture inherited from his diseased father. The principal figure of this play is Mrs.
Alving, and not the son on whom the sing of the father are visited. Although in the use of such a
theme there lurks a danger of obscuring the importance of the social factors by overemphasizing
the apparent effects of natural laws, yet Ibsen handles it with originality and in a manner not to
be compared with that of his stale would-be disciples who distort it into a reactionary caricature
and think they are great revolutionaries.
A Doll’s House and Ghosts will probably keep Ibsen’s name alive longest. In An Enemy of the
People, published in 1882, he already declines from their high standard. In this he responds to
the violent outbreaks aroused by his two tragedies: his “enemy of the people” is an honest man
who does not lie or dissimulate and who is afraid of nothing when the cause of truth is at stake,
but who loses his post and for that reason is outlawed by a “compact majority,” so that he consoles
himself with the thought that the strongest man in the world is he who stands alone. Though rich
in trenchant satire, the play is weak in its hero, who, with all his honesty and resoluteness, is after
all a queer fellow, more of a headstrong eccentric than an intellectual fighter for the cause of
humanity, just as, by the principle which he proclaims at the end, he simply condemns himself to
starvation. Yet this figure is also true to life; this narrow honesty, inflamed with anger against the
symptoms of social evil without understanding its real essence, is ever claiming victims in
bourgeois society, yet tragic figures such victims are not. They arouse in us a feeling of
compassion, but it is a compassion accompanied not by terror, but by a touch of amusement and
even contempt.
The solution of the problem contained inAn Enemy of the People verges on unintentional
comedy, in The Wild Duck, 1884, Ibsen created a comedy in the highest sense of the word, the
hero of which, Hjalmar Ekdal, recalls Falstaff and Don Quixote. The fighter who sees that the
world is out of joint, and would set it right with his “claims of the ideal,” is shown as a fool who
causes nothing but misfortune; contrasted with him is the dry cynic with his practical wisdom:
“Rob the average man of his life’s illusion and you rob him of his happiness.” Between them
wavers Hjalmar Ekdal, a poor fellow, no better and no worse than people of his kind usually are,
who feverishly endeavors to live up to the “claims of the ideal” and who always relapses into the
old comfortable “life’s illusion” which has become second nature to him. It was wrong to see a
milder mood in this tendency of Ibsen’s; immediately afterwards he returned to strict tragedy. In
1886 he publishedRosmersholm, in which the weak man who cannot and will not fight, together
with his daemonic wife who tries in vain to drag him with her up steep paths, seeks and finds
death.
Ibsen took an ever gloomier view of his world the more it was overshadowed by the evils
accompanying the irresistible deluge of capitalism, and the more surely the burden of his years
robbed him of the hope of ever seeing a new dawn break. In his sixtieth year Ibsen’s militant
pessimism changed to a visionary pessimism. The time came when the fat money bags, through
their literary hacks, used to say that Ibsen was getting madder and madder, incapable as they were
 16

of perceiving the appalling stench of corruption which rose from a perishing society to the
thousand fine senses of a great writer.
The work of Ibsen’s old age includes as many plays as the period of his masterpieces, and the
line between the two cannot be drawn with any strict exactitude. Mystical elements already play
a part inRosmersholm; while in The Lady from the Sea and Hedda Gabler, dramatic psychology
is not yet entirely overshadowed by the dark sway of a dark fate. Ibsen becomes really enigmatic
with The Master Builder. Nevertheless, so far as any line can be drawn, it lies
between Rosmersholm and The Lady from the Sea. From this drama onwards the writer’s
thoughts and language become ever more mysterious; The Master Builder,Little Eyolf, John
Gabriel Borkman and When We Dead Awaken are dramatic riddles which everyone can solve as
he pleases, only no one can ever claim to have found the right solution.
In his “Dramatic Epilogue,” as Ibsen himself calls his last play, When We Dead Awaken, he
makes the hero, an artist, angrily complain that “the whole world” always goes into raptures over
what is unintentional in his work, and so it is not worthwhile to exert himself for “the mob.” It is
easy enough to recognize in this a complaint of the author himself, and who can deny that
unreasonably bulky commentaries have been written on the work of his old age? Yet the tragic
poet himself succumbs to a tragic fate if he thinks that he awakes only to see that he has never
lived. Ibsen has lived and will live, but only in those of his creations which are modelled after the
image of life, by the hand of genius. Since social development has grown past his understanding,
since he has ascribed to incomprehensible powers, of whose moods man is the toy, the effects of
an economic process which he does not and cannot understand, since then he has lost touch with
real life and not all the traces of genius plentifully displayed in his later works will assure them of
immortality.
Ibsen is no thinker, but a poet. It seems to be in pain, with urgency and sorrow that he creates
the dramas in which he speaks in abstruse words of the downfall of a world from whose curse he
cannot free himself, and this explains his impatience with the “rapture” with which his latest plays
were received. But apart from this he had no grounds for writing a bitter epilogue to his creative
work, which has ranked him with the greatest authors of his century, and has also contributed so
much towards the awakening of a love for drama in the modern working class.
It is to his honor that the aged poet is not weakened by the success which lesser poets would
gleefully enjoy. What youth denied him age has given him in plenty. For the last ten years Ibsen
has been living in Christianiadecked with medals and loaded with riches, the most celebrated
poet of his nation, in the splendor of European fame. To keep a Promethean steadfastness
though fanned by the breezes of the flattery of one’s contemporaries, is the mark of true genius.

Ibsen and Feminism

Ibsen a Feminist or Socialist:
The question of Ibsen’s relationship to feminism, whether one is referring specifically to the
turn-of-the-century women’s movement or more generally to feminism as an ideology, has been
a vexed one.
The view supporting Ibsen as feminist can be seen to lie along a spectrum of attitudes with Ibsen
as quasi-socialist at one end and Ibsen as humanist at the other. Proponents of the first stance
might point to an amateur performance of A Doll’s House in 1886 in a Bloomsbury drawing
room in which all the participants were not only associated with the feminist cause but had
achieved or would achieve prominence in the British socialist movement. Looking at Ibsen’s
advocates in terms of political groups, one may safely claim that his strongest supporters were
found in socialist circles.
 17

Ibsen and Women Cause:

Ibsen himself often linked the women’s cause to other areas in need of reform, arguing for
example that ‘all the unprivileged’ (including women) should form a strong progressive party to
fight for the improvement of women’s position and of education. Similarly, in a frequently
quoted speech made to the working men of Trondheim in 1885, Ibsen stated:
The transformation of social conditions which is now being undertaken in the rest
of Europeis very largely concerned with the future status of the workers and of
women. That is what I am hoping and waiting for, that is what I shall work for, all I
can.
The question of Ibsen’s relationship to socialism is illuminated by the fact that, in the nineteenth
century, socialism and feminism were familiar bedfellows. The most prominent socialist
thinkers of the day, male and female, saw that true sexual equality necessitates fundamental
changes in the structure of society; it is no accident that progressive attitudes toward women in
Scandinavia have been bound up with overall liberal trends.
Ibsen: The Humanist
At the other end of the spectrum, those arguing that Ibsen’s concerns were not narrowly
feminist or political but broadly human invariably cite the speech he made at a banquet given in
his honor by the Norwegian Women’s Rights League on 26May 1898:
I am nor a member of the Women’s Rights League. Whatever I have written has
been without any conscious thought of making propaganda. I have been more poet
and less social philosopher than people generally seem inclined to believe. I thank
you for the toast, but must disclaim the honor of having consciously worked for the
women’s rights movement. I am not even quite clear as to just what this women’s
rights movement really is. To me it has seemed a problem of humanity in general.
This statement is perhaps best understood, however, against the background of Ibsen’s
frequently voiced disinclination to belong to parties or societies of any kind. In general, it seems
unproductive to regard these three ‘causes’—the socialist cause, the women’s cause, and the
human cause—as mutually exclusive for Ibsen. His concern with the state of the human soul cuts
across class and gender lines. Yet this is not to say that he did not at times concentrate his
attention on the condition of women as women.
Ibsen views about Women cause
His speech to the Norwegian Women’s Rights League notwithstanding, the younger Ibsen made
a number of claims which would indeed qualify him for the position of ‘social philosopher’. In
notes made for A Doll’s House in 1878, he writes that:
A woman cannot be herself in contemporary society, it is an exclusively male
society with laws drafted by men, and with counsel and judges who judge feminine
conduct from the male point of view.
Bearing out this sentiment, in a speech delivered the following year to the Scandinavian Society
in Rome Ibsen urged that the post of librarian be filled by a woman and that the female
members of the Society be granted the right to vote in meetings. Even more politically charged
was his support in 1884 of a petition in favor of separate property rights for married women; in
 18

explaining why women and not men should be consulted about the married women’s property
bill, Ibsen commented that ‘to consult men in such a matter is like asking wolves if they desire
better protection for the sheep.
Ibsen’s Family and Feminism Movement
A crucial element of Ibsen’s relationship to feminism is the role played by actual feminists in his
life and work. Their influence began within his own family, with his wife Suzannah Thoresen
Ibsen and her stepmother and former governess Magdalene Thoresen. Magdalene Thoresen,
Danish writer of novels and dramas, translator of the French plays the young Ibsen staged at the
Norwegian National Theatre in Bergen, and ‘probably the first “New Woman” he had ever met’,
was a key role model for Suzannah, an independent-minded woman whose favourite author was
George Sand—Suzannah left her mark on Ibsen’s conception of such strong-willed heroines as
Hjordis of The Vikings at Helgehtid (1858), Svanhild of Love’s Comedy(1862), and Nora of A
Doll’s House.
Camilla Collett and Ibsen
But perhaps even more important in affecting Ibsen’s attitudes toward women was Camilla
Collett, who is usually regarded as Norway’s first and most significant feminist. Her realist
novel The District Governor’s Daughters (1854-5), which attacks the institution of marriage
because of its neglect of women’s feelings and its concomitant destruction of love, finds echoes
in Love’s Comedy. During the 1870s Ibsen had extended and impassioned conversations with
Collett about issues such as marriage and women’s role in society. His great esteem for her is
evident in a letter written in anticipation of her seventieth birthday in 1883, in which he predicts
that the Norway of the future will bear traces of her ‘intellectual pioneer-work’, and later he
writes her of her long-standing influence on his writings.
A Doll’s House and Feminism
No introduction to the topic of Ibsen and feminism would be complete without mention of his
reception. Whether or not one chooses to regard his work itself as feminist, there is no denying
that much of it—above all A Doll’s House—was enthusiastically welcomed by feminist thinkers in
Norway and throughout Europe. In closing the door on her husband and children, Nora opened
the way to the turn-of-the-century women’s movement. To mention only a few examples of the
play’s impact, Gina Krog, a leading Norwegian feminist in the 1880s and first editor of the
feminist journal Nyltende, called the drama and its likely reformative effects a miracle. Amalie
Skram, Norway’s foremost naturalist writer and the first Norwegian author to treat female
sexuality, praised the play dramatically and psychologically and saw it as a warning of what
would happen when women in general woke up to the injustices that had been committed
against them.
James Joyce appreciation of Ibsen
Given Ibsen’s sensitivity to feminist issues, it comes as no surprise that he has often been
praised for his creation of female characters. James Joyce’s evaluation of 1900 is representative:
Ibsen’s knowledge of humanity is no where more obvious than in his portrayal of
women. He amazes one by his painful introspection; he seems to know them better
than they know themselves. Indeed, if one may say so of an eminently virile man,
there is a curious admixture of the woman in his nature.
 19

Although the majority of Ibsen’s protagonists are male, some of his most memorable and well-
known characters are female, such as Nora Helmer, Helene Alving, Rebecca West, and Hedda
Gabler; Elizabeth Robins speaks for all turn-of-the-century actresses in claiming that ‘no
dramatist has ever meant so much to the women of the stage as Henrik Ibsen’, The power of his
female roles has continued to attract top-calibre performers down to our own day, as is evident
in the homage paid him by Julie Harris, Jane Fonda, Liv Ullmann, Glenda Jackson, Susannah
York and others.
Emancipated Wmen and Motherhood
Female characters are of course featured most prominently in depictions of the emancipated
woman and motherhood. These two issues are of central concern in illuminating Ibsen’s
relationship to feminism. Regarding the first, Ibsen was widely credited with virtually inventing
the emancipated woman in the last Act of A Doll’s House. Because Nora’s self-realization occurs
so late in the play, however, I will focus here on four other figures who may to varying degrees
be seen as emancipated women: Lona Hessel of Pillars of Society,Petra Stockmann of An
Enemy of the People,Rebecca West of Rosmers-holm (1886), and Hilde Wangel of The Master
Builder (1892.).
These characters are distinguished by their rejection of a strict division between conventional
masculine and feminine behavior, by their disdain for public opinion, and by their freedom from
the hypocrisy that often accompanies maintenance of the status quo. Their emancipated status
is reflected in their appearance, language and behavior. In the first Act of Pillars of Societywe
learn from the townswomen’s gossip that Lona Hessel, stepsister of Bernick’s wife Betty, had
scandalized the town before her departure to America to join Betty’s younger brother Johan by
cutting her hair short and wearing men’s boots; returning now from America, she is initially
taken for a member of the circus because she carries a bag over her shoulder by the handle of
her umbrella and waves at the gawking townspeople. Similarly, Hilde Wangel appears in
Halvard Solness’s office dressed in walking clothes with her skirt hitched up, complete with
rucksack, plaid, and alpenstock and ‘slightly tanned by the sun’ ,flaunting her disregard for
traditional standards of feminine attire and beauty. The un-conventionality of both characters is
further evident in their speech, which is dotted with colloquialisms; topics traditionally regarded
as unmentionable for young middle-class women, and swear words.
Rebellious attitude of Female characters
The aggressive and forthright behavior of these female characters is shaped by their lack of
concern for what people think. InPillars of Society the townswomen disclose that, prior to her
trip to America, Lona had slapped Bernick in the face when he announced his engagement to
Betty; her scandalous behaviour continued abroad, they report, where she sang in saloons for
pay, gave public lectures, and published ‘a quite outrageous book’. Upon returning home she
shocks observers by washing her face at the pump in the middle of the marketplace. Rebecca
West defies public opinion by continuing to live as a single woman beneath one roof with
Rosmer following his wife Beata’s death; as Rebecca says to Rosmer, ‘Oh, why must we worry
about what others think? We know, you and I, that we have no reason to feel guilty’.
Concomitantly, in contrast to the traditional female of the day, she seems wholly lacking in
maternal inclinations, observing to the housekeeper that Rosmer is better off childless, since he
is not the kind of man who can ‘put up with a lot of crying children’. When Mrs Solness warns
the older Hilde of The Master Builder that people might stare at her if she ventures into town in
her unconventional garb, she responds that that would be fun.
 20

Higher Education of Female characters

A further trait indicative of the emancipated character of these women figures is their high level
of education. Lona’s authorship of a book speaks for itself; Petra Stockmann, a full-time teacher
who first appears on stage with a pile of exercise books under her arm, expresses unalloyed
liking for her work. Rebecca, largely educated at home by her (foster) father Dr West, reads
radical newspapers in an effort to keep abreast of new developments and shares books and ideas
with Rosmer. Significantly, it is she who takes the initiative in attempting to support the
impoverished revolutionary writer Ulrik Brendel by asking the radical journalist Peter
Mortensgaard to come to his aid. Reportedly inspired by Ibsen’s stepmother-in-law Magdalene
Thoresen, the character of Rebecca West was hailed by feminists. Gina Krog heard the ‘gospel of
the future’ proclaimed in Kosmersholm: ‘Ibsen’s belief in women, in the women of his country,
has never been expressed so proudly as here.’
Liberated Tendencies
In keeping with their liberated tendencies, these figures typically serve tounmask the lies which
shadow the lives of other characters. Petra, a free-thinking young woman who refuses to
translate a story because it defends conventional Christian beliefs, is repelled by the hypocrisy of
a school system which requires her to teach things she does not believe in and declares that she
would prefer to start a school herself if she had the means. She wholly supports her father’s plan
to expose the pollution infecting the municipal baths, like him subordinating the individual well-
being of their family to a commitment to truth, principle and the general welfare. In a similar
vein, Lona Hessel favourably compares the air of the American prairies to the shroud-like smell
of moral linen she encounters back home and, when Rorlund questions her as to her intention
regarding their society, expressly announces her mission: ‘I want to let in some fresh air, my
dear pastor’. The primary target of her campaign is Bernick, whom she finally exhorts to confess
the multiple deceptions on which his business, his marriage and his reputation are founded.
Aasta Hansteen’s influence on Ibsen Feminist views
Like that of Rebecca West, the conception of Lona Hessel was inspired by an actual feminist
contemporary of Ibsen’s, Aasta Hansteen. A portrait painter by profession and an outspoken
suffragette who often wore men’s boots and carried a whip when she spoke in public, Hansteen
achieved her greatest notoriety in 1874 by supporting the cause of a Swedish baroness who
claimed to have been seduced and abandoned by a Norwegian medical student. In presenting
the baroness’s cause as an issue concerning all women and in arguing for the expulsion of the
student in articles, speeches and demonstrations, Hansteen succeeded in ostracizing herself.
Ibsen was sympathetic to Hansteen and disturbed by her fate at the hands of the press and
public. Her influence on Pillars of Society is perhaps most obvious in Lona’s remarks to Bernick
about the treatment of women, both his own and that of society at large. When Bernick
complains that his wife Betty has never been any of the things he needed, Lona counters:
‘Because you never shared your interests with her. Because you’ve never been open or frank with
her in any of your dealings. Because you let her go on suffering under the shame you
unburdened on her family’. Lona generalizes this observation in her famous comment to Bernick
near the play’s end: ‘this society of yours is like a lot of old bachelors: you never see the women’.
 21

New Women and Ibsen

These four female characters share many properties with the New Woman, a literary type which
flourished above all in Victorian fiction of the 1890s. The New Woman typically values self-
fulfillment and independence rather than the stereotypically feminine ideal of self-sacrifice;
believes in legal and sexual equality; often remains single because of the difficulty of combining
such equality with marriage; is more open about her sexuality than the ‘Old Woman’; is well-
educated and reads a great deal; has a job; is athletic or otherwise physically vigorous and,
accordingly, prefers comfortable clothes (sometimes male attire) to traditional female garb. Yet
while Ibsen’s emancipated women characters were influential for the conception of the New
Woman, they cannot be wholly identified with this type. A recognition of the qualifications to
their emancipation is important for an understanding of Ibsen’s position vis-a-visfeminism.
Women’s Cause: A Close Look
Taking a close look at the figures discussed above, we see that all four are ultimately defined in
terms of male characters. Lona Hessel’s ‘character and strength of mind and independence’
notwithstanding, she tells Bernick that she has returned from her new life in America because of
her feelings for him, in order to help him re-establish himself on honest ground. Furthermore,
referring to her role as ‘foster-mother’ to her younger stepbrother Johan in America, she
observes: ‘Heaven knows, it’s about the only thing I have achieved in this world. But it gives me
a sort of right to exist’. ThroughoutAn Enemy of the People Petra Stockmann’s views are shaped
by those of her father, an influence underlined by the drama’s final word: the curtain falls as
Petra grasps Thomas Stockmann’s hands and exclaims, ‘Father!’
Even Rebecca West, so enthusiastically championed by contemporary feminists, reveals herself
to be decidedly oriented around men. When Rosmer’s brother-in-law Kroll observes (referring
to her remaining with Rosmer): ‘You know ... there’s something rather splendid about that - a
woman giving up the best years of her young life, sacrificing them for the sake of others,’
Rebecca responds: ‘Oh, what else would I have had to live for?’. Her visions of ennobling
humanity are focused on Rosmer, the object of her love, rather than on herself; when Rosmer
asks her towards the end of the play how she thinks things will be for her now, she replies that it
is not important. Kroll’s comment that what she calls her emancipation is only an abstraction,
that it never ‘got into [her] blood’, may be an accurate one; it is in any event supported by her
confession that when she reached twenty-five she began subtracting a year from her admitted
age, since she felt she was ‘getting a bit too old’ to be unmarried.
A Stereotypical Feminine
Rebecca West is also stereotypically feminine in her seductiveness, her tendency to use her wiles
and great attractiveness to manipulate others. Kroll, saying ‘Who is there you couldn’t bewitch ...
if you tried?’, accuses her of having used his former infatuation with her to gain entree to
Rosmersholm; Brendel calls her ‘my enchanting little mermaid’ in warning Rosmer not to build
on her in carrying out his goals. As Kroll points out, Rebecca had succeeded in captivating the
unstable Beata as well, and her removal of Beata through psychic murder - prompting Beata’s
suicide by leading her to believe that Rebecca was pregnant by Rosmer and that a childless wife
was in the way - hardly resembles feminist solidarity.
 22

Femme Fatale
Directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of Beata, Rosmer and of course herself, Rebecca
has as much in common with another literary type that flourished at the turn of the century as
she does with the New Woman, the femme fatale. Her high degree of sensuality, characterized
by as early an observer as Salome as a ‘wildness that resembles a beast of prey at rest and which
hungers for spoil’, further associates her with this type. Like the conventionalfemme fatale, she
is incapable of moderating her passion, but rather either allows it to lead her to irrational acts
such as the psychic murder of Beata or represses it completely.
Ibsen’s Mother Figures
Insofar as the female ability to bear children is the most crucial ramification of the physiological
difference between women and men, the issue of motherhood has been central to every feminist
movement or programme. As Julia Kristeva writes, it is not woman as such who is oppressed in
patriarchal society, but the mother. A focused look at Ibsen’s mother figures discloses a similar
message: maternity is viewed most positively by those who are not biological mothers, whereas
his actual or prospective mothers either deny their pregnancy, abandon their children, give them
away to be cared for elsewhere, raise them in an atmosphere of deception, or neglect them. The
victimization these un-motherly mothers inflict results from their own victimization by a
powerful social norm equating anatomy with destiny; in Ibsen’s notes to A Doll’s House he
conjectures that a mother in modern society is like ‘certain insects who go away and die when
she has done her duty in the propagation of the race’. Hence Ibsen bears witness to a larger
nineteenth-century historical strategy which Michel Foucault has termed ‘hysterization’, or the
process of defining women in terms of female sexuality, the result of which was to bind them to
their reproductive function.
Conclusion
Supporting the belief that a women’s mind and body are hers to control as she wishes,
Ibsen’s oeuvre allies him with feminist thinkers not only of his era but of our own day as well.

Hedda Gabler: The Historical and Social Context

Hedda Gabler is not an easy character to get to know. At first reading she seems a bitter
personality portrayed in an old-fashioned script set in an out-outmoded and foreign society.
How could a woman in 102-year-old play possibly be understandable or relevant to the late-
twentieth-century student? However, upon further examination, Hedda Gabler's fictional reality
not only offers us the opportunity to observe the art and social concerns of Ibsen's day, but
extends to us a paradigm by which we may compare and evaluate the principles of our day.

In approaching this play, it is important to recall that Hedda was written as a theatrical work
in the realm of contemporary realism, not as a historical curio. While the differences of culture
and period now put a certain distance between ourselves and the subject, Ibsen was most
emphatic that his characters were representative of actual human beings. Although in his two
previous works, Rosmersholm and The Lady From the Sea, Ibsen had begun exploring the
human psyche in more symbolic, mystical terms,Hedda marked a return to the theatrical style
which we term "realism," a method of playwriting in which the internal motivations of the
personalities in the play are explored within a specific social context. Other hallmarks of the
realistic style include the avoidance of devices such as soliloquies in favor of more natural
 23

exposition, causally related scenes leading logically to a denouement, and the creation of
individual behavior directly attibutable to the heredity or environment of the character. All
external stage details were authentic to the specific and current environment; all costumes,
dialogue, and settings were carefully chosen to reveal the characters' more critical psychological
impulses. Though his dialogue may appear to modern readers as somewhat awkward and even
coy, part of Ibsen's genius was the ability to use conventional surroundings and conversation to
express sentiments and circumstances that were considered unspeakable to the audience of the
time. The original spectators would have been involved in the social, political, and scientific
climate of the moment and thus able to grasp many of the implications of Hedda's relationship to
the prevailing world view. The filter of the present may prevent us from realizing that Ibsen was
attacking his own social milieu head-on.
Ibsen's views were recognizably part of the cutting edge of his time. He was well-traveled and
read, and acquainted with the social movements of the period‹his reading included the daily,
detailed perusal of a number of newspapers‹even as he was up-to-date on theatrical
advancements. Although he himself expressly denied being "a feminist," such scholars as Elinor
Fuchs and Joan Templeton have convincingly shown that he was at the very least sympathetic to
the beginnings of the women's movement, and was even actively involved in the push to redefine
the role of women in society. Certainly the creator of such seminal feminist archetypes as Lona
Hessell, Nora Helmer, Helena Alving and Ellida Wangel could not have been blind to the
implications of the plays in which they appeared.
Norway was not so remote that it was unaffected by the feminist debate of the Victorian age.
While in 1871 Denmark led the Scandinavian countries in initiating an organization for improving
women's status, by the 1880s Norway had established a woman's rights movement of its own.
Growing economic pressures made it increasingly difficult for the middle-class family to provide
for unmarried daughters in the home, but both prejudice and legislation barred women from
either meaningful education or dignified employment. Some change was soon forthcoming;
women were admitted to theUniversity of Christiania (Oslo) in 1882, and 1884 saw the founding
of Norsk Kvinnesaksforening (Norwegian Women's Movement Association), a pioneering
liberation coalition that remains active to this day. That same year Ibsen himself presented a
petition to the government demanding that married women be granted the right to earnings and
property.
Victorian attitudes were slower to change. While the lower class woman had for sometime been
allowed to work in the factories, concessions had never been made in the home. Men did not assist
with domestic responsibilities, leaving the women their "natural" duties in keeping the house and
raising the children. This order of affairs had support in the nineteenth century Darwinian
sciences‹medical and social experts alike taught that cultural, physiological, and psychological
differences between genders were caused by evolutionary forces. The belief was that "women's
individual evolution was arrested earlier than men's to permit the conservation of their energies
for reproduction" (Lewis, Labor 2). Women were considered biologically more intuitive, self-
sacrificing, and tender then men, and thus naturally disposed to choose marriage and
motherhood‹any other choice was considered tragic. Even the arts of the day perpetuated this
"ideology of domesticity":
The "angel in the house," sexually passive and refined, whose responsibility it was to oversee
the provision of a sanctuary of well-ordered comfort and peace, became the literary ideal for
middle-class women. In all classes of society, hearth and home acquired the significance of
religious symbolism.
Steven Mintz explains in A Prison of Expectations that a woman was expected to maintain a
"walled garden" of a home, a place where her husband could find refuge and be purified from his
 24

encounters with the harsh realities of his ruthless business world, and a place where the innocence
of her children could be protected. A wife was thought able to maintain this refuge because of her
special virtues of femininity..."Women, by their very natures, were intended to purify the sphere
of family and home" (Boswell 33).
The special feminine traits attributed to women and extolled in literature included a capacity
for cheerful docility, sentiment, delicacy of thought, goodness, unselfishness, joy in serving others,
and tact, all springing from a woman's instinctive moral superiority (Boswell 21). Part of the
feminine moral superiority was the self-sacrifice of her own sexuality..."indeed, the idolized wife
of the period was portrayed as asexual, void of desire herself and loved for her virtue, not her
flesh" (Boswell 23). Her only passions were to be love of children and home and domestic duties.
In order for a woman to preserve this "moral superiority," she had to be kept in her place, away
from the manly affairs of economics and politics. In his book Victorian People and Ideas, Richard
Altick concludes:
Putting aside woman's lack of sexual passion, which... was universally accepted as a biological
fact because to assume otherwise was indecent, there was the wider implication that woman was
inferior to man in all ways except the unique one that counted most (to man): her femininity. Her
place was in the home, on a veritable pedestal if one could be afforded, and emphatically not in
the world of affairs.
The realm of womanly affairs, both literary and social, included motherhood. A mother was
accountable for the health, manners, and morals of her children (Agress 34). She was to be
conscientious in training her daughters to assume future angelic duties. In addition to passing
along the complex body taboos designed to defend purity from earthly animal passions, the
middle-to-upper- class mother was to drill her girls in the niceties of the intricate feminine social
duties that marked her place in the pecking order of bourgeois society. An unfortunate error in
either discipline could destroy the young woman's reputation, and bar her from the polite circles
that were her only outlets. Mothers were not as responsible for the daughters' intellectual
education:
Schooling was often seen as of secondary importance to the influence of the home in the
education of middle-class girls....The more prosperous families might send their daughters to
expensive and select boarding schools for a while; the less wealthy were more likely to patronize
small homely "academies" which aimed to foster those same ideals of bourgeois that were
nurtured in the middle-class home. An examination of the curriculum (both formal and informal)
of the majority of girls' boarding schools of the period will show that social values and objectives
took precedence over academic goals: girls were educated with their marriage prospects and the
ideal of the "cultivated homemaker" in mind. (Dyhouse 37)
Keeping in mind the ultimate goal of a "good marriage," both parents and schools tended to
strongly discourage bookishness, vocational aspirations, and other unfeminine behavior
(Dyhouse 37). Instead, young women of all classes "expected to look after their families and hoped
above all for a 'good' husband; that is, a good provider" (Lewis 11). Such would be the education
that Hedda and Thea received both in society and at the school where they were classmates.
Viewed in the context of Ibsen's era, Hedda becomes the embodiment of the identity crisis
facing the middle-class woman during that transitional time. If women were to modify the
accepted, limiting codes of behavior, what rules would the "new woman" follow? Hedda herself is
unable to solve the dilemma, and in belonging to both the old and the new, is torn apart.
Raised by a privileged father in the unlanded Norwegian upper-class, Hedda is seasoned in
freedoms more typical of males of the period, including experience with rough horsemanship and
 25

guns. Her guns, however, are not tools but mementos and dangerous toys. She has been granted
masculine leisure and tastes, but not corresponding responsibilities or a useful education. She can
never be the son that the Victorian General would have wanted.
Neither can she be her mother's daughter. Significantly, Hedda's mother is completely absent
from the narrative, whether destroyed by the loss of the old values, the coming of the new, or
merely by childbirth‹the reason is unknown. The system designed to transmit traditional values
has broken down. There is no one to teach Hedda the specifics of the feminine codes in behavior
or etiquette. The only inheritance which may have come from her mother is a shabby old piano, a
possession she both values and disdains. She will not discard it, but neither will she put it on
public display as she will the pistols and the portrait of her father.
Hedda seems reluctant to face either the passing of the old ways or the changes she faces in
marrying Tesman. She dislikes the smell of the decaying potpourri, and spends her time
reminiscing and re-enacting portions of her past relationship with Lövborg. Having out of
necessity achieved her destiny of a respectable marriage, she sees no hope for the future of that
union. Sighing over September, she seems to have somehow missed her own summer: "Hedda is
not unripe, but rather is like an all-too-early decayed Autumn, as she returns to the narrow
perspectives of a child and its playful self-seeking" (Salomé 131).
Certainly she does not look forward to the birth of the child whose presence in her womb
propels her inevitably towards a future of either death in childbed, or life as a mother (which, in
her childhood situation, also meant absence or death). She has no alternative. By temperament
and upbringing she is as unsuited for Thea's work as she is for Diana's. As a female, she can only
covet parasite Judge Brack's male prerogatives. While she professes a desire to control destiny
and make some real difference in a life, she sees no value in wife and motherhood, so vicariously
participates in the romance of Lövborg's dissipations. Endowed with a taste for the trappings of
wealth (such as servants and expensive clothes), and ambitious to make her mark in social circles,
she lacks both the social training and the inherited money to advance beyond her bourgeois
desires. She clings to the fading glories of her fame as the dashing Miss Gabler and seethes in
impotent jealousy.
Discontented as she is, Hedda's suicide is still unexpected. One explanation of the violent act
can be discovered in the Ibsen's own pattern of playwriting, shaped in part by the world that
shaped the playwright. As Charles Lyons explains in Hedda Gabler: Gender, Role, and World,
The dramatic character, Hedda, is not determined merely by the social restrictions imposed
upon the female at the end of the nineteenth century as that world is represented by the social
dynamics of the play; the character is also configured by the social dynamics of Ibsen's basic sexual
paradigm, a sexual paradigm that voices the male-dominated sexual ideology of Ibsen's moment
in history mediated through the idiosyncrasies of his own psyche.
Conscious as he was of the changing world around him, Ibsen could not help be influenced by
the literary constructs that in part framed his developing intellect. Hedda, as well as Thea, may be
seen as children of those literary constructions. According to the prevailing literature, if a woman
was unable to succeed as an angel, she must be dealt with as a monster. And Ibsen not only
attacked such a notion, in some ways, he can be seen as perpetuating it.
"Angelic" was indeed the term of the day, as reflected and reinforced by Coventry Patmore's
immensely successful poem "Angel in the House." Published in 1854, this poem "describes the
bliss that comes from marrying the pure, self-sacrificing Victorian maiden...and describes the
bride-to-be in 'other worldly' terms":
 26

A rapture of submission lifts

Her life into celestial rest...
And round her happy footsteps blow
The authentic airs of Paradise. (Boswell 22)
Patmore was by no means alone in comparing the Victorian wife and mother with angels.
Poems, books, and plays of the day used the term and description freely, depicting heroines that
"codified the womanly ideal...[as they] conform to the idealized stereotype of self-effacing, self-
sacrificing 'helpmeets'" (Boswell 22). And, in opposition to these heroines, were "wicked step-
mothers," or other monster women‹the independent and unfeminine characters who suggest, as
Thackeray implied in Vanity Fair, that "every angel in the house...'proper, agreeable, and
decorous,' 'coaxing and cajoling' hapless men‹is really, perhaps a monster, 'diabolically hideous
and slimy.'" (Gilbert and Gubar 29). Victorian "angels in the house," were expected not only to
have power to run the house but the power to use their suppressed sexuality to give birth, which
denotes power over the male. As Gilbert and Gubar explain, the angel of life is also an angel of
death‹she may deny life or give death. The angel may be a much repressed demon who wants out.
In Hedda Gabler, wife Hedda becomes just such a death-giving fiend. Masculinized out of her
angelhood, she turns her powers to malevolent manipulation, pitching family members against
each other, dominating her friends, burning the fruits of Lövborg's labors before driving him to
emasculate himself, and finally murdering her own child. Unlike most of Ibsen's heroines, she
makes no real self-discovery and achieves no growth. Like the wicked queen of "Snow White"
fame, she destroys herself in the mad pursuit of malignant "beauty." Her suicide accomplishes
nothing. Is Thea, therefore, the real heroine of the play? She is the one with the courage to ignore
respectability, to change her life and leave her passionless marriage in pursuit of the man she
loves. It would seem that Thea is as deserving the death sentence as surely as Hedda. Thea's
abandonment of her role as step-mother can be construed as a drive to actually fulfill her destiny
as the snow-white angel. It is her purity that has reformed Lövborg, it is her presence that has so
inspired him to write his masterpiece; the book is acknowledged as Lövborg's and Thea's sexless
"Brain child." Thea, of course, did none of the actual writing, as the ingrained belief of the
Medieval, Romantic, and Victorian eras was in the actual "sonship" of the written text. According
to that belief, an author literally fathered, with his female muse, a posterity of "brain children."
The power to create was thus exclusively male, and women attempting to write were considered
presumptuous, freakish, unnatural, and subject to various health problems (Gilbert and Gubar 6-
8).
Thea accomplished her angelic potential while actually in the Elvsted home, surviving in a dual
marriage as she kept house and raised one man's children while supporting another man with her
love and inspiration. When that double-husband divided, and Thea was forced to divide her
devotions and chose to leave the home, disaster ensued. She could neither keep Lövborg from
falling back into evil ways, nor protect their literary child. In fact, Lövborg blamed her distrust of
him for driving him back to drink. Thea could only redeem herself by offering to sacrifice herself
in resurrecting Lövborg's book. The play seems to suggest that she will additionally serve Tesman
as a far superior replacement for Hedda. Once Hedda is destroyed, and Thea suitably paired
Tesman, literary moral order will once again be restored.
Hedda Gabler is not only a fascinating play in itself, but it also serves as a reminder of a blind
spot in our own day. Here at BYU, at the center of a community of people who sometimes
succumb to the tendency to confuse Victorian cultural values with the teachings of the Restored
Gospel, it can be helpful to recall the unhappy results of expecting women to conform to a social
code that blames women for the failures of men, and expects young women to define themselves
and their abilities solely within the parameters of patrocentric marriage.
 27

Hedda Gabler: Introduction

Ibsen has long been regarded as a special critic of Norwegian society in the 1870’s and 1880’s
and hence as somewhat exclusively of his own time. However, he never was primarily a social
critic; he was primarily dramatic craftsman and moralist. And his mature plays are still virtually
unique in the firmness of their dramaturgy and of their moral conviction. With Strindberg and
Chekhov he is one of the founders of the modern drama.

Hedda Gabler, the fruit of forty years of theatrical experience, represents his craftsmanship at
its most assured. It is an almost perfectly artistic play—concentrated, coherent, symmetrical;
and its structure is an almost perfect reflection of the nature of its leading character.
Central Motive of the Play
The central motive in the play is Hedda’s desire to mold a human destiny. She conceives this
destiny as a triumph of the Dionysian spirit, for she would know vicariously an abandon that she
cannot know in her own person; and she selects a man as her deputy because, having rejected
her own womanhood, she identifies herself with the dominant male role. The play rises naturally
to crisis when she sends Loevborg out, so she imagines, to an evening of exultant revel. But the
collapse of her venture is inherent in the spirit in which she conceived it. What she calls her
“craving for life” is not a natural appetite; her will to dominate men incorporates also her will to
destroy them; she has inevitably selected a weakling to do her living for her. When the third-act
curtain rises on the gray weariness of the morning after the play has turned as inevitably toward
her catastrophe as before this it turned toward her illusory triumph. Her own character is a fate
as unrelenting as any Delphic Oracle could have pronounced. Hence the Spare and classic
structure of the play.
If Hedda Gabler is like the classic drama in its deft ordering of plot it resembles it too in its
multitude of ironies. But as its plot is spun not by divine agency but by human character, so also
its ironies are derived not from a metaphysical perspective but from an ethical one.
A Black Comedy
Enough of these ironies tend toward comedy to lighten the whole with a genuine if something
grim humor. There is, for example; Aunt Julia’s utterly devoted, utterly damning admiration for
a nephew whom “no one can beat” at “collecting and arranging things.” There is Tesman’s own
perfectly daft accession of wonder when Hedda burn the manuscript (“I wonder; now, whether
this sort of thing is usual in young wives? Eh?”). There is the descent from Hedda’s breathless
memory of “something beautiful, something fascinating, something daring “to the bathos of the
thing remembered: the prurient girl hiding behind an illustrated paper and listening to her
young man talk about sex.
As these instances make clear, however, the disparities that such irony calls attention to are
ethically revealing as well as something amusing. Ibsen often invites a double perspective of this
sort when he is most deeply earnest. When he want to emphasize the difference between a
superficial social view of people and a profoundly ethical view, he so orders his play that
characters who are in sharp ethical contrast are placed in ironies juxtaposition.
 28

Hedda Gabler and Her World

Hedda herself is high fashion. She has style and wit, and a kind of verve. But from a moral
perspective, the attributes for which she is so generally admired are inconsequential. To contrast
with her, Ibsen introduces good people and right actions through the back and side doors, so to
speak, in humble and almost ridiculous guise. Loving-kindness enters in the person of a
garrulous maiden aunt bearing an old pair of embroidered morning slippers.
Rectitude glimmers, goes out, and then glimmers again in her dull and pedantic nephew. But the
most exact foil to Hedda is the fragile young woman from the provinces. “Dressed not quite in
the latest fashion,” who reveals little by little the fullness of womanly courage and passion.
Through these lesser characters, Ibsen would show us that human goodness characteristically
reveals itself in those whom complacency would overlook and pride disdain.

Hedda Gabler: Short Summary

The play begins on the morning following the return of Hedda and George from their
honeymoon, a six-month tour of Europe. We learn from a conversation between Tesman’s Aunt
Julia and the maid, Bertha, that Hedda cut a formidable figure in local society. The daughter of a
general, she was often seen out “galloping” on horseback, smartly dressed in a “long black riding
outfit—with a feather in her hat.” Both Aunt Julia and the maid are somewhat amazed that such
a beautiful and glamorous creature would wind up married to a quiet, scholarly soul like George.

When Tesman enters, we understand their puzzlement. A “youngish-looking man of thirty-

three, medium sized, with an open, round, cheerful face,” Tesman proves to be a thoroughly
bookish and naive young man. He returns from his honeymoon with a “suitcase stuffed full of
notes” which he collected “rummaging through archives.” Having recently attained his doctoral
degree, he is now at work on a book about “the domestic handicrafts of Brabant in the Middle
Ages.” When Aunt Julia asks winkingly whether her nephew has any “expectations” following
his wedding trip, he responds, “I have every expectation in the world of becoming a professor
shortly.”
When Hedda enters, looking pale and wearing a loose-fitting gown, she seems utterly detached
from her husband and her new life. After demanding that the curtains be drawn so as to block
out the sunlight, she treats Tesman mockingly, and plays a cruel joke on Aunt Julia, pretending
to believe the old lady’s new hat belongs to the maid. If George is oblivious to the meaning of
Aunt Julia’s question about “expectations,” Hedda is positively hostile to the subject. When
Tesman notes—without grasping the implication of his comment—that she has “filled out” on
their trip, Hedda snaps, “Oh, do be quiet—!” And when George persists, Hedda declares
“brusquely,” “I’m exactly as I was when I left.” Between the bookish Tesman, who is too naive
even to imagine his wife’s pregnancy, and the frosty Hedda, who vehemently repudiates the
idea, Ibsen creates a mordant picture of an emotionally sterile marriage deeply inhospitable to
new life. Left alone for a moment on stage, Hedda “moves about the room, raising her arms and
clenching her fists as if in a frenzy.” Clearly, like the young Ibsen, she feels imprisoned by her
home and family.
The next arrival is an outsider, Thea Elvsted, an old school-mate of Hedda’s. She comes bearing
news of the return to town of Eilert Loevborg, a man who has been living in the country, serving
 29

as tutor to Thea’s stepchildren. Loevborg, we learn, is a brilliant intellectual with a disreputable

past. His weakness for drink and other sordid diversions has led to his social downfall, and his
life at the Elvsteds’ has been a kind of penitential exile. While there he has reformed his habits,
and has written a brilliant book about “the course of civilization in all its stages” which has been
just published. To celebrate this event, Eilert has come back to the city, and Thea, worried that
he might return to his old habits, has followed to keep an eye on him. She comes to the Tesman
house knowing that George and Eilert were old friends, and hoping that Tesman will help her
keep Eilert on the straight and narrow.
Hedda seems powerfully affected by the news of Eilert’s presence, and she instructs Tesman to
write a letter immediately inviting Loevborg to visit. When she and Thea are left alone on stage,
Hedda soon elicits from her old school-fellow a confession that Thea is in fact Loevborg’s lover,
and that she has abandoned home and husband to follow him to the city. Hedda further learns
that Thea has been Loevborg’s inspiration for the new book:
Mrs. Elvsted: Whenever he wrote anything, we’d always work on it together.
Hedda: Like two true companions.
Mrs. Elvsted: Companions! You know, Hedda—that’s what he said too!
The more Hedda learns about the relationship between Thea and Loevborg, the more enthralled
she becomes, and we soon perceive that her interest goes well beyond friendly concern. When
Thea declares that between her and Eilert there is the “shadow” of a woman who “carried loaded
weapons” and who threatened him with a pistol, Hedda declares “with cold constraint,” “That’s
nonsense! Nobody behaves that way around here.” We will soon see, however, that one person
in particular behaves precisely like that.
The final new arrival in the first act is Judge Brack, who comes to invite Tesman to a stag party
he is giving that evening. He also informs George and Hedda that Loevborg is likely to be a rival
candidate for the professorship on which Tesman has been counting. With George’s anticipated
income in jeopardy the family will need to cut back on some of the extravagant spending they
were planning—specifically, Hedda will need to forgo the riding horse she was expecting to
acquire. The act ends with a disappointed Hedda declaring, “Well at least I have one thing left to
amuse myself with. . . . My pistols, George.”
Act Two begins later that day, with Judge Brack’s return for a private conversation with Hedda.
As he arrives, she is loading a revolver, and upon seeing him approach the house, she points the
pistol in his general direction and fires. A shocked Brack demands to know why Hedda is
“playing such games.” Her response is revealing: “Well, what in heaven’s name do you want me
to do with myself?”
As Brack’s visit proceeds, we learn that he and Hedda have been fairly intimate friends for some
time, and we begin to see that Brack has designs on Hedda that are far from honorable. He is
interested, he says, in establishing a “triangular arrangement” with Hedda, meaning that he
wants to take advantage of George’s gullibility to become his wife’s lover. Hedda rejects the idea,
not because she is morally repelled by it, but because, as she suggests, she is frightened at the
possibility of scandal.
Brack asserts that Hedda is unhappy because she has “never experienced anything that’s really
stirred” her, and that perhaps some truly “solemn . . . new responsibility” is on the way—yet
 30

another allusion to Hedda’s impending motherhood. As in the first act, Hedda’s response to the
merest suggestion of childbearing is vehement and agitated: “I have no talent for such things ... I
won’t have responsibilities.... I often think I have talent for only one thing in life.... Boring
myself to death.”
Tesman’s arrival, dressed for Brack’s party, puts an end to this intimate encounter. Tesman is
expecting a visit from Loevborg in response to his earlier invitation, and within moments the
rehabilitated and newly successful author arrives, bearing the manuscript of yet another book he
has written, this one a set of bold speculations about the future. He informs Tesman that he will
not be his rival for the professorship, and he then offers to spend the evening reading to George
from his new work. Unfortunately for this plan, Tesman must attend the Judge’s party. Brack
then invites Loevborg to join the soiree, but the author declines, presumably wishing to avoid
the temptation to drink that goes with such an event. As Tesman and Brack withdraw for a glass
of punch, Loevborg sits with Hedda, ostensibly to look at photographs from her honeymoon trip,
but really to resume a relationship that had been cut short by his earlier fall from grace.
In that former relationship, Loevborg and Hedda would sit just as they are doing at present,
pretending to look at magazines, but actually discussing Loevborg’s escapades at the
establishment of Mademoiselle Diana, a local prostitute. Hedda asked Loevborg “devious”
questions about his adventures, and he answered, apparently in explicit detail, thus satisfying
her intense desire for “some glimpse of a world that . . . . she’s forbidden to know anything
about.” In other words, Hedda experiences vicariously through Loevborg the delights of illicit
sex. Eventually, we learn, an aroused Loevborg begged to consummate their relationship in the
flesh, but Hedda refused, threatening him with her pistols. And when he now asks why she
didn’t shoot him, she responds, “I’m much too afraid of scandal.”
Following these revelations, Thea Elvsted arrives to spend the evening with Hedda and
Loevborg. Drawing an implicit comparison with the “devious” Hedda, Loevborg asserts that he
and Thea “really are true companions. . . . We can talk things out together without any
reservations.” Hedda is piqued by this affront, and decides to challenge Thea’s influence over
Loevborg. She tempts him to drink the alcoholic punch that Tesman offers. When he stoutly
refuses, Hedda turns to Thea and stages an embarrassing and destructive scene:
Hedda: Firm as a rock....Didn’t I tell you that when you came here so distraught this
morning—
Loevborg: (surprised) Distraught? ... So deathly afraid? For my sake?...So that’s how
completely you trusted me...(takes one of the glasses of punch....) Your health,
Thea.
Thus, Hedda demonstrates her continuing control of Loevborg, convincing him further that he
should attend Judge Brack’s party, there to read from his powerful new book. As the second act
ends, Loevborg has promised to return to Hedda and Thea byten o’clock. Hedda is elated at the
idea of having regained her influence over her old admirer, and she seems once again to be
living vicariously through his reckless spirit. She imagines his return to her later in the evening
as a kind of Dionysiac triumph: “ten o’clock—Eilert Loevborg comes with vine leaves in his hair.”
The third act begins early the following morning with Hedda and Thea asleep on the living room
furniture, still waiting for a Loevborg who has never returned. Thea awakes with a start, realizes
her lover has not returned, and is distraught. Hedda convinces the exhausted Thea to go to sleep
 31

in her bedroom, and Thea exits. Then Tesman arrives and tells the story of Loevborg’s
disastrous evening. After reading from the manuscript of his brilliant new book, and then
becoming drunk at Brack’s party, Loevborg set out, apparently for home, with Tesman following
to insure his safety. On route, the precious manuscript fell out of Loevborg’s pocket without its
author’s noticing; Tesman picked it up, and has now brought it back to his own house for
safekeeping. Before he has the opportunity to return it to Loevborg, however, Tesman receives
word that his Aunt Rina—Julia’s ailing sister—is dying. He leaves to be with her, handing the
manuscript to Hedda.
Judge Brack then arrives and gives Hedda further details of the evening’s orgy. Far from
returning home after Brack’s party, the drunken Loevborg paid a visit to Mademoiselle Diana’s
brothel, where he engaged in a brawl after accusing his hosts of robbing him. The police were
summoned to the scene, Loevborg attacked one of the officers, and he was arrested. Now, says
Brack, Loevborg’s disgrace means that he must be turned away from all the respectable houses
in town, including, of course, Hedda’s. Thus does Brack profit from the downfall of a potential
sexual rival.
Immediately after the Judge’s departure, Loevborg arrives, followed shortly by Thea. Loevborg
announces that his squalid conduct has erased his faith in himself and prompted him to destroy
his manuscript; further, he informs Thea that their relationship must also now come to an end.
Devastated, Thea says, “for the rest of my life it will seem to me as if you’d killed a little child. . . .
my child. . . .” Hearing all this, Hedda chooses nevertheless to withhold from Loevborg the fact
that his manuscript is safe with her. Instead, she lets him believe that he has irretrievably lost it.
When Thea leaves heartbroken, Loevborg confesses that in fact he did not destroy the
manuscript, but lost it during his drunken spree, an act that burdens him with unbearable guilt.
He feels his life is now utterly without hope, and he must commit suicide. Hedda urges him to
do so “beautifully,” and to assist him she gives him one of her father’s pistols. When Loevborg
leaves, presumably to kill himself with General Gabler’s gun, Hedda pulls his manuscript out of
its hiding place and thrusts it into the fire, declaring, “Now I’m burning your child, Thea ... Your
child and Eilert Loevborg’s.”
At the beginning of Act Four, George returns from his aunt’s deathwatch. He tells Hedda that he
is anxious to restore the manuscript to Loevborg, and she reveals that she has burned it,
convincing her husband that she did the deed out of a loving desire to undo his intellectual rival.
She also chooses this moment to inform Tesman that she is pregnant, seeming to suggest that
her destruction of the book is linked to her delicate condition. George is both horrified at his
friend’s loss and delighted at this unexpected show of affection from his previously distant wife.
Thea then arrives to report that she has heard news of Loevborg’s being hospitalized. This is
confirmed moments later by Judge Brack, who adds the news that Loevborg has in fact shot
himself. Hedda’s response surprises everyone: “At last, something truly done ... There’s beauty
in all this ... Eilert Loevborg’s settled accounts with himself. He’s had the courage to do what—
what had to be done.”
The guilty Tesman suggests that he could spend time with Thea reproducing the lost manuscript
from the notes she has kept, thus creating a kind of final tribute to Loevborg. The two move off
together, leaving Brack and Hedda alone. Hedda continues in her ecstatic mood, saying
Loevborg’s act is a “liberation” for her, that she finds a kind of fulfillment in his “courage to live
life after his own mind ... “ As with his tales of wild sexual escapades, Loevborg’s daring behavior
 32

continues to furnish Hedda with vicarious joy, in this case a sense of moral transcendence over
the banality of her life that she lacks the courage to pursue herself.
Brack moves swiftly to undermine Hedda’s “beautiful illusion.” The truth about Loevborg is that
after leaving Hedda’s that morning he returned to Mademoiselle Diana’s, where he demanded
the return of his “lost child.” While he was there, yet another physical struggle occurred, in the
course of which Loevborg was somehow shot with his own pistol, not in the head or in the
heart—as Hedda imagines—but in his intestines. Thus the “beautiful” act that she commissioned
him to commit turns out instead to be “ridiculous and vile.” What she imagined as a poetic
sacrament of self-affirmation turns out to be nothing but a sordid death in a whorehouse—an
event by which, because of her vicarious presence, she has herself been sullied.
Worse still for Hedda is the power Brack now has to blackmail her. He has recognized the pistol
used by Loevborg as belonging to Hedda. If he informs the police of this fact, Hedda will be
faced with what she dreads most in life: scandal. She will be summoned to court, placed on the
very same witness stand as the prostitute Diana, forced to explain how Loevborg acquired her
gun, and confronted with the choice between perjury and the revelation of her darkest secrets.
Brack is now in the position to extort from Hedda what he had hinted at in the second act: her
cooperation in the sexual triangle he longs for. Hedda, realizing that she is a helpless pawn in
Brack’s sordid sexual designs, cries out, “I’m in your power. Tied to your will and desire. Not
free. Not free . . . !” In the space of a few minutes Hedda has moved from her feeling of vicarious
liberation by Loevborg’s “beautiful” suicide to the realization that she is imprisoned by the
scheming Brack. This 180 degree change from one state of affairs to its opposite is called a
“reversal,” an element of play structure that creates a particularly powerful sense of dramatic
development.
For Hedda this condition of entrapment, of utter spiritual bondage, is intolerable. She rushes
into an adjoining alcove, separated by a curtain from the main room, and begins to play a wild
tune on the piano. Tesman admonishes her, reminding her that the presence of death, both Aunt
Rina’s and Loevborg’s, must be observed with respectful silence. “From now on,” Hedda
responds, “I’ll be quiet.” Moments later, we hear the sound of a pistol shot. Brack and Tesman
pull back the curtain to reveal Hedda, dead from a bullet in her head. She has carried out the
beautiful act botched by Loevborg. “But good God,” says Judge Brack in the famous curtain line,
“people don’t do such things!”.

Hedda Gabler Character List

Hedda Gabler
Hedda Gabler, one of the most notorious anti-heroes of the theater, is the daughter of the
esteemed General Gabler, and was born into a legacy of aristocracy. Though she lived a
pampered life, Hedda's time as a single girl "ran out", and she married George Tesman, a
man she clearly no longer loves - if, indeed, she ever did. Now Hedda is driven to find a
purpose in her life as she increasingly finds the world closing in on her: the norms of
society dictate who she should marry, that she must be a mother, and that she must stay at
home and be an exemplary scholar's wife. As the play unfolds, her obsession with freedom
and free will leads her to manipulate those around her, and ultimately to her own death.
 33

George Tesman
Hedda's husband, George Tesman, is an obsessive scholar who spends most of his six-
month honeymoon with his books, rather than with his wife. He loves Hedda, but he is not a
particularly inspired man, content to regurgitate old research rather than follow his own
ideas, and always looking for the approval of those around him. While Hedda seeks
freedom from the norms, Tesman wants nothing more than to abide by them.
Aunt Julia
Tesman's Aunt Julia (also referred to as Aunt Julie), raised George after his parents died.
She was happy that her Tesman married Hedda but was concerned that he could not
support her, and mortgaged her annuities to help his finances. When her companion Aunt
Rina dies, Aunt Julia implies that she may move in with the Tesmans - an idea that Hedda
seems repulsed by. Throughout the play, Aunt Julia's relationship with Hedda is frosty.
Judge Brack
Judge Brack is a friend of Tesman and Hedda's who reveals his love for the new Mrs.
Tesman. He is often the purveyor of new information in the play, is a manipulator on a par
with Hedda herself.
Eilert Lovborg
Lovborg is Tesman's greatest academic rival. He is an inspired and wild scholar, whereas
Tesman is rote and dull. He vanished from the town two years ago and fell into
drunkenness and disrepute, but has now returned, hoping to publish his new book and
recover his old relationships with Hedda and Mrs. Elvsted.
Thea Elvsted
Mrs. Elvsted is meek where Hedda is strong, and acquiescent where Hedda is defiant. She is
in love with Eilert Lovborg, and is terrified that his return to town will cause him to relapse
into alcoholism. She comes to Hedda for help even though she is suspicious of the new Mrs.
Tesman (when they were in school together, it seems, Hedda was cruel to her).
Berta
Berta is the Tesmans' housemaid, and used to be Aunt Julia's servant. Hedda is quite rude
to Berta, which exacerbates her feelings of being out-of-place in this new household.
Aunt Rina
Aunt Rina is Tesman's other aunt, and is never seen in the play. She is in poor health and
close to death's door.

Hedda Gabler: Major Characters

HEDDA GABLER
Introduction
Hedda Gabler: General Gabler’s daughter, she is tied to societal norms and dares not risk a fight
with society and do something as unconventional as marrying a dissipated rake like Loevborg,
even though she is fascinated by him. Instead she marries Tesman, who represents stolidity and
respectability.
A life of conformity without faith leads her to boredom and emotional sterility. She is cruel and
mean to Aunt Julia and Mrs. Elvsted and contracts an underhanded alliance with Brack. When
Loevborg comes back into her life she tries to liberate him but fails, and in a fit of jealousy, she
 34

burns his manuscripts. She also gives him one of her pistols to commit suicide, begging him to
“do it beautifully.” However, when she comes to know that he did not shoot himself in the
temple, but was killed in a scuffle and shot in the bowels. She is disillusioned finding that she is
completely in Brack’s power and fearing a scandal; she finally has the courage to shoot herself in
the temple.
Hedda Gabler: A Neurotic Character
In 1950s, Joseph Wood Krutch thought that Hedda Gabler was an evil woman. However, more
recent critics explain her behavior in terms of the restrictive social conditions of nineteenth
century Norway.
This view is well presented by Caroline Mayerson:
...Hedda is a woman, not a monster; neurotic, but not psychotic. Thus she may be
held accountable for her behavior. But she is spiritually sterile. Her yearning for
self-realization through exercise of her natural endowments is in conflict with her
enslavement to a narrow standard of conduct.
Unfortunately, Hedda never does understand the reality of her situation, nor does her death
“prove” anything. Mayerson goes on to explain that Hedda:
...dies to escape a sordid situation that is largely of her own making; she will not
face reality nor assume responsibility for the consequences of her acts. The pistols,
having descended to a coward and a cheat, bring only death without honor.
We realize how cowardly Hedda is by her contrast to Thea, who is a brave woman and is willing
to be cast out by respectable society in order to follow the man she loves and the dictates of her
conscience.
A Dishonest Character
Hedda often tells two characters two very different things. For example, she tellsTesman that he
ought to go write EilertLoevborg a long letter but then immediately reveals to Mrs. Elvsted that
she only did this to get rid of him. When talking to Judge Brack, Hedda says that she really does
not care for the house Tesman has bought for her, yet she lets Tesman go on believing that the
house is precious to her, even while it is a great financial burden for him. These examples not
only illustrate Hedda’s tendency toward untruthfulness but also that she enjoys having people in
her power. She likes Tesman to think that he is pleasing her, and she likes the fact that he goes
to great lengths to do so. Such demonstrations prove her power over him. She controls him in
other ways as well: after Tesman has learned that he might not get the position at the university,
he says that he will not be able to buy Hedda everything that she wants. She quickly asks if this
means she will not be able to have a pony. That is, she quickly invents an even bigger expense, so
that Tesman can deny her that, feel as if he has controlled her, and, thus, having felt he has put
her in her place, proceed to give her everything else she wants. Such verbal interactions in this
play are never trivial; because plays contain only dialogue, one must be very careful to notice the
ways in which characters are manipulating one another with words.
Hedda Gabler or Hedda Tesman
We begin by noting that both the main character and the play named after her are called “Hedda
Gabler,” even though, as a married woman, she ought to be known as “Hedda Tesman.” For a
 35

woman to take her husband’s name at the time of marriage implies many changes in her life,
including the acceptance of a new identity, a partial surrender of her former self to the demands
of a shared existence. Hedda, however, seems fundamentally untouchable in her innermost
being—utterly resistant to the power of marriage to alter its participants. Eilert Loevborg senses
this when he meets Hedda for the first time after her wedding and, during their initial few
moments alone together, repeats the name “Hedda Gabler” four times. He cannot come to terms
with the idea that “for the rest of my life I have to teach myself not to say Hedda Gabler.”
Hedda’s permanent identity as “Hedda Gabler” is directly connected to her father’s exalted
social rank. As a general, he would have occupied a position of great distinction, quasi-
aristocratic in nature, both in the town and in Norway at large. His daughter would have shared
this stature, and would thus have stood apart from—and well above—all but a few of the other
young women of her generation. Hedda’s distance from others, her aloofness, her spiritual
pride, the indelibility of her identity as a Gabler, all derive from this social eminence.
Hedda: An Attractive Women
She is distinguished not only by her pedigree, but also by her looks and behavior. We have
already seen how her beauty impresses Aunt Julia and Berta, and how her dashing appearance
on horseback creates a profound impression among the lesser townsfolk. Had such a person
been a man—well-born, high-spirited, intelligent, attractive—he would certainly have pursued
an active and challenging career. As a late-Victorian woman, that possibility is closed to Hedda;
it is only through the men in her life, at second hand, that she can achieve that kind of
fulfillment. We see in her frustrated hopes for her husband’s success how she longs to
participate in a life of action and achievement, if only vicariously:
Hedda: There’s every chance that, in time, he could still make a name for himself.
Brack: I thought you believed, like everyone else, that he was going to be quite famous
some day.
Hedda: (wearily). Yes, so I did.
A Non-Conventional Character
Hedda cannot—like some women of her time—simply defy the convention of female domesticity
to pursue her own desires, precisely because she is Hedda Gabler—the daughter of a general,
and thus committed to uphold the social codes that simultaneously elevate and constrain her.
Thus, to be the General’s daughter is a two-edged sword for Hedda: it confers on her the
spiritual pride and self-regard that set her apart from the common herd; but it also requires her
absolute conformity to the rules of propriety that she finds so stifling. And Ibsen makes it quite
clear that for Hedda utter conformity is the price she is willing to pay—however grudgingly—for
her social eminence.
Fear of Scandal
It is this bargain that accounts for Hedda’s overwhelming fear of scandal—a quality which she
and others note frequently in the course of the play. To suffer scandal is to experience social
disgrace as a result of behavior that violates the code of respectable conduct. To be the object of
scandal would mean that Hedda could no longer occupy the exalted position that goes with
being a general’s daughter; it would mean in some sense that she was separated from her
 36

identity as a Gabler—without which she fears she may be nothing. And yet, Hedda is powerfully
driven by desires and ambitions that could destroy her reputation.
Her solution to this conflict between scandalous yearning and the need for absolute propriety is
to live out her forbidden longings indirectly, through the experience of others— principally
Eilert Loevborg. We saw how she did this before her marriage, when Eilert would visit her at her
father’s house and, behind the General’s back, describe his sexual adventures; and we also saw
how she drew the line—with her father’s pistols—at Eilert’s attempt to go beyond description
and, scandalously, make real love to her. Then she married Tesman, and quickly discovered that
her hope for excitement through his fame and power were not to be satisfied. She returns from
her honeymoon oppressed by the knowledge that she must spend the rest of her life trapped in a
boring marriage with a mediocre and conventional man—a spiritual affront for the proud-
hearted daughter of a general. Worse still, her fear of scandal prohibits any open rebellion
against this entrapment, as we learn from her sexual fencing-match with Judge Brack. Unable
either to defy convention or to embrace it in good faith, she becomes that wretched creature who
tells the Judge that she is capable of only one thing: boring herself to death.
Loevborg’s Return
Loevborg’s return gives Hedda one more chance to rise up against her empty existence without
risking personal exposure. If she can wrest control of Loevborg from Thea, she will have
recaptured a soul-mate—and pawn—in her shadow-life of whispered obscenity and
transgression by proxy. And when Loevborg is wrecked by his scandalous conduct at
Mademoiselle Diana’s, Hedda sees in his intended suicide an opportunity to appropriate for
herself his grand, romantic gesture of social defiance and contempt.
Frightening Aspects of Her Character
Out of her frustrated desires for a full life of her own grow those impulses to deny and destroy
the lives of others that are the most frightening aspects of her character. She repeatedly refuses
to acknowledge that she is pregnant, because motherhood would be one more intolerable
obligation binding her to marriage and Tesman. She is cold and cruel toward Aunt Julia, an
unwanted relative acquired because of that marriage; and she flatly refuses to visit the dying
Aunt Rina, likewise because of her contempt for Tesman’s family. Toward Loevborg her conduct
is a strange combination of passion and exploitation. Although sexually stirred by him, she
refuses his advances, choosing instead to satisfy herself by manipulating his weaknesses: she
contrives his return to drink, she sends him off to Brack’s party, she withholds the information
that his manuscript is safe, she puts the fatal pistol in his hand, and she burns his book—all to
advance her desires for vicarious rebellion and transcendence. She loves what she can do
through Loevborg, not Loevborg himself.
Conclusion
Finally, when she realizes that Brack has become her master, she is forced to do something in
her own person to escape her misery. Her choice of suicide rather than rebellion or flight is the
only logical option for this character, her final act of self-concealment: she dies leaving utter
bafflement behind her, a stranger to Brack and Tesman who will never understand what she has
done. Death confers on her ultimate immunity from exposure and scandal and absolute freedom
from the control of husbands and would-be lovers.
 37

THEA ELVSTED
Introduction
Mrs. Thea Elvsted - Hedda’s schoolmate; she marries the District Magistrate Elvsted, but is
unhappy. Eilert Loevborg is hired as a tutor to her stepchildren. She reforms him and also helps
him write his book and follows him to Christiania to keep an eye on him thus daring to break all
social conventions. When he tells her that he has torn the manuscript, she accuses him of killing
their “child.” After his death, she begins to collaborate with Tesman to reconstruct his book from
the notes she has so providentially saved.
Thea Elvsted: A Striking Contrast with Hedda
Thea’s character is a striking contrast with Hedda, both morally and physically. In describing
Hedda, Ibsen notes that her hair is “an attractive medium brown, but not particularly
abundant.” Thea, on the other hand, has “hair (that) is remarkably light . . . and unusually
abundant and wavy.” In fact, Thea’s “abundant” hair has long been a source of resentment to
Hedda who describes her to Tesman as the “one with the irritating hair. . . . An old flame of
yours, I’ve heard.”
Hair is for both men and women a potent index of sexual appeal and energy. As the 1960s
demonstrated, long hair vividly communicates social defiance and bold eroticism. Hedda, with
her skimpy locks, exhibits neither; Thea, with her abundant tresses, seems to radiate both.
In fact, we learn that Thea is the opposite of Hedda in almost every important way. Thea openly
abandons her husband and stepchildren to follow Loevborg to town, a scandalous act which
prompts Hedda to ask, characteristically, “what do you think people will say about you.” To
which Thea responds, also characteristically, “God knows they’ll say what they please. . . .I only
did what I had to do.” Hedda, by contrast, chooses to live miserably in her marriage because she
fears the scandal that would arise should she abandon it.
Conclusion
Nowhere is the difference between the two so clear as in their relationships with Loevborg. As
we have seen, Hedda thrives on Loevborg’s depravities: whoring, drunkenness, suicide. Thea, by
contrast, encourages his creative tendencies, begetting with him the books about civilization,
past and future, that almost save him from his vices. As the play ends, Thea and her “old flame”
George are patching together Loevborg’s lost book out of the surviving notes. Under Thea’s
benign influence even Tesman’s meager talents—which Hedda only sneers at throughout the
play—are turned to creative ends.
GEORGE TESMAN
Introduction
Hedda married Tesman because her father’s death had left her without money to support her
extravagant way of living, because she had a scared intuition about approaching age and
loneliness (Ibsen unobtrusively works in the detail near the beginning of the play that it is
September, and that the leaves are golden and withered), and because, unlike her other
admirers, he asked her. We need to be told these things, because Bertha’s surprise at this match
is, on the face of it, very much justified. Tesman is portrayed by Ibsen in a way that is perilously
close to caricature: he is an unimaginative pedant, who has spent his honeymoon rooting in
 38

archives for his research on the domestic industries of Brabant in the Middle Ages, who prefers
filing and indexing notes to creative thought, and the summit of his ambition is the possibility of
a professorship. He is very reluctant to let go the sheltering petticoats of his adoring Auntie Juju
and Bertha.
Tesman: An Inappropriate Husband
As we have seen, George is scholarly and naive, a newlywed who spends most of his honeymoon
burrowing through dusty archives in search of information about medieval handicrafts. Ibsen
gives him a peculiar habit of speech: Tesman attaches a grunting, interrogatory syllable to the
ends of his sentences—”uh?”—As if to demonstrate that he is not a polished social performer,
but rather a hesitant and unworldly academic—exactly the wrong sort of husband for the
ambitious Hedda. Spoiled by his doting aunts, he is nevertheless fundamentally decent—
genuinely concerned by Loevborg’s reckless conduct at Brack’s party, eager to rescue his friend’s
lost manuscript, guilty at his wife’s destruction of the book, and innocently delighted by her false
declaration of love—and by the discovery of his impending fatherhood.
Tesman’s Attitude
Unlike Hedda, George has no sense of his own superiority. He is from a much more modest
social background, and quite delighted at his good fortune in life. He is pleased to have earned
his degree, eager to begin his job as a professor, happy with his new house, and above all quite
delighted at having acquired a distinguished beauty for his wife. He likes the world as it is. Far
from chafing under its restrictions, he finds in his conventional universe he and arena quite
spacious enough for his modest abilities.
Hedda’s Aggressive Attitude and Tesman
Hedda feels herself hemmed in on every side, the very baby she is carrying a threat to her
independences (throughout the play she angrily rejects any innuendoes, however well meant,
about the patter of tiny feet), and her reaction to her new and constricted situation takes two
main avenues. One is a kind of silent scream of torment and desperation. When she is alone on
stage for the first time, the direction reads:’ Tesman is heard sending his love to Aunt Rena and
thanking Miss Tesman: for his slippers. Meanwhile Hedda walk up and down the room, her
arms and clenching her fists as though in desperation.’
The other response to the stifling atmosphere of Tesman domesticity is fierce aggression, an
assertion of her sense of caste superiority, which produces the wonderful dramatic moment
when she deliberately and cruelly ‘mistakes’ Aunt Tesman’s new hat, bought in her honor, for
the servant’s old one-another excellent illustration of Ibsen’s power to reveal psychological
tensions and pressures of the most intense kind from brilliant artistic manipulation of ‘trivial’
details.
JUDGE BRACK
Introduction
Judge Brack - a gentleman who belongs to Hedda’s old set. After she is married he finagles
himself into her life by setting up a triangular friendship. He recognizes the pistol that killed
Loevborg is hers and proceeds to blackmail her, knowing Hedda’s deep- seated fear of scandal.
He is satisfied that she is completely within his power but does not realize that she has the
courage to take her own life.
 39

Hedda’s emotional sterility is counter parted by judge Brack’s lack of compassion. Unlike
Hedda, Brack has a profession and is free to amuse himself without overstepping the masculine
social conventions. This parallel between them illustrates the double standards of society which
denies rights of self-expression to women.
The emptiness of Brack’s emotional life is underscored by his attributes of vulgarity and lechery.
Willing to first compromise Hedda’s respectability as a married woman, he has no
compunctions about using blackmail as a weapon guaranteeing his selfish ends. Like Hedda,
Brack wishes to substitute’s power over someone for love which he is unable to give.
A Typical Nineteenth Century Man
Brack, the suave bureaucrat, is representative of the typical nineteenth century man who can
amuse himself without drawing censure from society. This highlights the double standards
prevailing in society. He is, like Hedda, incapable of giving love and substitutes it by wishing to
have power over someone.
A Cynical Character
Like Tesman, Brack is also comfortable in his world, but not out of innocent acceptance.
Instead, Brack is the canny and cynical insider, the one who enjoys the status quo because he
knows how to exploit it for his own benefit. His favorite pastime is to take advantage of bored
wives eager to commit indiscretions behind the backs of their inattentive husbands. And he
benefits from the fact that both the deceiver and the deceived, eager to avoid exposure and
embarrassment, will cause him no trouble. He believes that Hedda Gabler will be only too happy
to join in this game of respectable adultery, not realizing that the General’s haughty daughter
feels both superior to and terrified of such intrigues.
When he discovers that Loevborg has been shot with Hedda’s pistol, he uses his insider’s
knowledge of police procedure and judicial proceedings to intimidate Hedda into sexual
compliance. So little does this provincial Don Juan understand General Gabler’s daughter,
however, that when she commits suicide rather than submit to him he is completely stunned,
pronouncing the famous line, “People don’t do such things.” In his sordid world, of course, they
don’t. But in Hedda’s universe of frustrated romantic longing, such a gesture is inevitable.
Conclusion
We should also note Brack’s social position: as a Judge, he ought to be a model of rectitude and
honesty. Instead, he is a sexual trespasser in his friends’ houses, and a thoroughgoing hypocrite.
In creating this figure, Ibsen expresses his contempt for the dishonesty of the respectable
establishment.
EILERT LOEVBORG
Introduction
Eilert Loevborg - a dissipated Bohemian, who has a spark of genius in him but a penchant
towards drinking and other immoral behavior. He had once fallen in love with Hedda, but she
drove him away with her father’s pistols. After being dismissed from the University, he is hired
as a tutor to District Magistrate Elvsted’s children. Here, he meets their stepmother Thea
Elvsted who influences him enough to reform him. She even writes his book, which he dictates
to her. Hedda has always romanticized him and thinks of him as a man with “vine-leaves in his
hair.” He renounces life after losing his manuscript.
 40

The Nature of Relationship Between Hedda and Loevborg

Even in the first act, we have been made aware in oblique ways that Hedda’s concealed
aspiration, her demands on life and happiness, are somehow focused on Eilert Loevborg,
creative scholar and reformed drunkard.
Before her father’s death, Hedda has had an intense if rather strange relationship with
Loevborg. We are given an insight into the nature of the relationship retrospectively, in the
conversation between the two in the second Act, as they pretend to look over the photographs
taken during Hedda’s honeymoon trip. Clearly, Loevborg was interested sexually in Hedda; but
for her it was the style and romantic secrecy of their relationship that appealed, rather than any
erotic possibilities in it: indeed she broke off the relationship when it threatened to develop in
physical terms. Loevborg’ s confession to her of his affaire and drinking and general dissipation
did more than flatter a young girl’s vanity. As she says to him: ‘do you find it so incredible that a
young girl, given the chance in secret, should want to be allowed a glimpse into a forbidden
world of whose existence she is supposed to be ignorant?’ this is less an indication of voyeuristic
impulses on her part than an indication that Loevborg and his life represent for her a contrast to
the stifling constrictions of society, particularly as these affected a woman of that time. Loevborg
stands in Hedda’s mind for somebody who just does not care about the conventions of society,
and her timid husband and her admirer, Judge Brack, who for all his surface raciness is
presented as a thorough going bourgeois at hearts.
Hedda’s Romanticism and Loevborg
Loevborg, then, for Hedda more a symbolic type than a potential sexual partner, draws forth
from her that powerful aspiration towards individual freedom, which is latent in all of Ibsen’
s major characters. She projects on him the buried poetry of her being. This is Hedda who sees
Eilert Loevborg ‘with a crown of vine leaves in his hair, burning and unashamed’, bringing into
the depressing circumstances of narrow Norwegian life a breath of Grecian expansiveness, a
hint—as her images make clear—of dionysiac or bacchic energies. This illusion is shattered when
she discovers that the vine-leaved dionysiac of her imagining has in fact spent the night of his
re-entry into her life in a thoroughly common-place and provincial way getting drunk, visiting
the local brothel, and finally scuffling with the police. But the thwarted romanticism of Hedda’s
vision is not destroyed: Loevborg can ‘redeem’ himself by proving himself capable of the
‘beautiful’ death. The aesthetic and romantic satisfaction she finds in the contemplation of such
a death is expressed very directly in an exchange with Judge Brack in Act 4:
Hedda: Oh, judge! This act of Eilert Loevborg’s –doesn’t it give one a sense of release!
Brack: Release, Mrs Hedda? Well, it’s a release for him, of course-
Hedda: Oh, I don’t mean him – I mean me! The release of knowing that someone can do
something really brave! Something beautiful!… Oh, I know what you’re going to
say. You’re a bourgeois at heart; too…I only know that Eilert Loevborg has had
the courage to live according to his principle. And now, at last he’s done
something big! Something beautiful! To have courage and the will to rise from the
feast of life so early!
This illusion, too, is shattered: she learns that Loevborg has shot himself, in obscure
circumstances – possibly even accidentally—in the brothel, and not ‘beautifully’ through the
temple, but in the genitals. She is appalled – ‘why does everything I touch become mean and
 41

ludicrous? It’s like a curse!’ – and, almost inevitably, attempts to expunge this sordid, semi-
ludicrous tarnish over her image of the beautiful death by shooting herself.
In seeing, or wanting to see, Eilert Loevborg as a Dionysiac flouter of timid conventions, and as
a tragic actor capable of the grand gesture (the beautiful suicide), Hedda is quite clearly living
vicariously through him. Elizabeth Robins, the actress who was prominent in introducing
Ibsen’s work to theLondon stage, put this well in speaking of Hedda’s ‘strong need to put some
meaning into her life, even at the cost of borrowing it, or stealing the meaning out of someone’s
else’s’. Hedda thus does not see Loevborg as a person in his own right, and this explains her
destructive and – by any standards – intolerable interference in, and manipulation of, his life.
Rather, to her, he is simply an extension of herself, a romantic and symbolic alter ego.
Why does Hedda’s desire for self-realization and self-fulfillment take this deflected, projected,
vicarious form? The answer to this question takes us to the heart of Ibsen’s vision. It is because
of the powerful operation, in Hedda herself, of the force of the very conventionality she
professes to despise, because of the power over her of ‘the social’ which seems always in Ibsen’s
work to be antagonistic to the individual’s development. Hedda is torn internally be the conflict
between the demands of the self for assertion and fulfillment, and the demands of the ‘societal
self’, as it were, that the rules be obeyed. Hence she projects on Loevborg an image of romantic
freedom by which she attempts to ‘live’, being too timid to try to live out that freedom in her own
life.
Loevborg and Hedda’s Conventionality
Timidity is not a quality which would at first sight associate with Hedda. But in fact, Hedda only
appears unconventional because of the external conventionality of the people who surround her,
the Tesman family. Her fear and dislike of scandal, her orthodoxy in social terms, is dramatized
at many points in the play, nowhere more deftly and ironically than in her exchange with Thea
in Act 1. Thea, under some pressure, reveals to Hedda that she will never go back to her
husband:
Hedda: You mean you’ve left your home for good?
Thea: Yes. I didn’t see what else I could do.
Hedda: But to do it so openly!
Thea: Oh, it’s no use trying to keep a thing like that secret.
Hedda: But what do you think people will say?
Thea: They Can say what the like. I had to do it.
The irony here is obvious: Hedda despises Thea for her meekness, and is jealous and
contemptuous of Thea moral regeneration of Loevborg (for it is with Thea’s help that Loevborg
has stopped drinking and written his impressive book); yet it is the timid Thea, whom Hedda
had terrorized with her arrogant self-assurance when they were both schoolgirls, who is capable
of an act of genuine courage, flouting the conventions of propriety and social decorum in a way
which shocks the apparently more emancipated Hedda ‘But what do you think people will say?’
The same inhibition has shaped her relationship with Loevborg. Still unmarried, she was
curious about his erotic adventures, but unwilling to offer him love herself. In Act 2, he
 42

reproaches her for having broken with him. She replies that she didn’t want the friendship to
develop into ‘something else’:
Hedda: Shame on you, Eilert Loevborg! How could you abuse the trust of your dearest
friend?
Loevborg: (clenches his fists) Oh, why didn’t you do it?
Hedda: I was afraid. Of the scandal.
Loevborg: Yes, Hedda. You’re coward at heart.
Hedda: A dreadful coward.
This brings out very well Hedda’s deflection of her desire for experience into living vicariously
through the experience of another. She can only take her rejection of the mean and constricting
social pressure so far, because these pressures are so deeply ingrained in her own self that she is,
as Loevborg says, a coward when it comes to the moment of decision. Hedda is in fact totally
deadlocked, and the deadlock is produced not just by her individuality encountering
smothering, outside, social pressures, but by the inner conflict between aspiration and the
weight of convention, by the impasse in her soul. When Loevborg disappoints her – as he was
bound to, give the amount of romantic capital she had invested in him and given her discovery
that one cannot live through another person – it is too late for her to try to begin to live life
purposefully for herself and by herself. And since Loevborg hasn’t even been able to kill himself
‘beautifully’, the only act left open to Hedda is to kill herself, ‘beautifully’. Ibsen wants us to see
her suicide as inevitable as anything in Greek tragedy – it is where the deadlock in her spirit has
been pointing her since the opening of ht play, towards finding in death the fulfillment she has
been unable to find in life.

Is Eilert Loevborg a Hero?

This is an important question because many of the characters in the drama seem nothing more
than pawns controlled by Hedda, while Eilert seems to have a grain of independence due to
Hedda’s respect for him. Hedda herself cannot of course be anything but an anti-hero. She self-
destructs and does not grow. Eilert, on the other hand, is presented as an intelligent, brave man.
We know he is intelligent because of his revered books, and we know that he is brave because he
has given up drinking, reformed himself, and earned back a good reputation. Why does he bend
to Hedda’s suggestion that he seems insecure; why does he begin to drink again? Perhaps he
feels that he must uphold his reputation. Perhaps he is angry at those who doubt him. Either
way, the most important thing to note is that Hedda has a romanticized idea of him. She
repeatedly tells Mrs. Elvsted that he will have vine leaves in his hair, when in reality he simply
becomes very drunk. All the same, he can be thought of as a brave, intelligent hero who
nonetheless falls victim to Hedda’s manipulations.
A Dionysius for Hedda
Loevborg is several times associated by Hedda with Dionysius, the Greek god of wine and the
patron of tragedy. She imagines him appearing at Brack’s party, and later at her own house, with
“vine leaves in his hair”—the god’s invariable headgear. The image of Loevborg, dressed in his
somber Victorian evening clothes and sporting a crown of leaves, is incongruous if not
 43

downright absurd. But this incongruity is appropriate to a character who, like Hedda, is torn
between a desire both to accommodate and to defy the social world.
Conclusion
Loevborg’s rebellion, moreover, is often absurdly low-minded. He describes his and Hedda’s
unfulfilled yearning as a “thirst for life,” but in his case this often seems merely like a thirst for
liquor and prostitutes. Perhaps Ibsen is suggesting that, in a suffocating environment like
the Norway of his day, spiritual revolt finds no outlet except in self-indulgence and vice. In any
case, this drawing-room Dionysius is most authentically alive, not in the ecstasy of his evening
escapades, but in the disciplined pursuit of his work. He becomes most fruitfully himself
through his relationship with Thea, a “true companionship” that may stand for Ibsen’s vision of
the ideal marriage: a bond sustained by honesty and shared spiritual goals rather than by social
constraint. It is in this healthy “marriage” that Loevborg thrives, and it is through the tangled,
deceitful, clandestine labyrinth of his sterile “affair” with Hedda that he perishes.
MISS JULIANA TESMAN
Introduction
Miss Juliana Tesman - Tesman’s aunt, also known as Aunt Julia, she is a sixty-five-year-old
spinster who has devoted her life to Tesman, her invalid sister Rina and other invalids. She puts
up with Hedda’s insults so long as she can give her news of her pregnancy and thus perpetuate
the Tesman name.
Miss Juliana Tesman and other Characters
Miss Juliana Tesman serves to highlight the difficulties of Tesman‘s marriage. When she arrives,
she immediately begins to hint at the possibility of babies, but the audience soon realizes that
babies are the least of Tesman’s worries. Miss Juliana Tesman represents Tesman’s innocent
past, and the extent to which her expectations differ from the realities of his marriage illustrates
the extent to which he has had to forego happiness for the sake of prestige. Tesman does not
realize that Hedda does not love him, and he does not seem to perceive many of his marriage’s
problems. In fact, he seems to be only interested in pleasing Hedda. But when Miss Juliana
Tesman buys a special hat to please Hedda only to have Hedda scoff at it, we see how wide apart
Tesman and Hedda’s backgrounds are. Knowing how fond he is of his slippers, it makes Miss
Juliana Tesman happy to bring them to her nephew; Hedda, on the other hand, is entirely
unconcerned with this source of her husband’s delight. These contrasting behaviors suggest that
Miss Juliana Tesman truly loves Tesman and that Hedda does not. The figure of Miss Juliana
Tesman is consistently used to illustrate the degree of dysfunction in Tesman’s marriage.

Hedda Gabler: Major Themes

Individual vs. Group
Hedda is preoccupied with self-determination - the idea that she can dictate the course of her
own life, no matter how much societal pressure may try to move her along a different course.
And yet, as the play moves on, we see just how much a victim Hedda is of the “group”: she
married a man she didn’t love simply because her “time ran out”; will have children simply
 44

because she is supposed to; and ultimately destroys herself because she fears being thrust into
the spotlight of a public scandal.
What Hedda discovers is that an individual has no power in the face of a group unless they can
manipulate that group - something that she continually fails to do.
Self Liberation vs. Self Renunciation
Hedda believes that the power to determine when and how one dies is the ultimate freedom, and
is perhaps the only real control that an individual has in life. At first, she attempts to prove this
vicariously by encouraging Loevborg to have a “beautiful death” - she gives him one of her
pistols, essentially pulling all the strings that might make him veer towards suicide. However,
when Loevborg dies from an unintended shot to the groin, Hedda realizes that the beautiful
death is still a fantasy - and she can only bring it to life for herself. When she does, Brack
exclaims, in the last, highly charged line of the play, “No one does that!”
Anti-Tragedy vs. Tragedy
While Hedda Gabler has the structure of a classical tragedy, and perhaps the trappings of it,
there is also the argument that Hedda is the anti-tragedy. As Caroline W. Mayerson writes,
“Hedda is incapable of making the distinction between an exhibitionistic gesture which inflates
the ego, and the tragic death, in which the ego is sublimated in order that the values of life may
be extended and reborn. Her inability to perceive the difference between melodrama and
tragedy accounts for the disparity between Hedda’s presumptive view of her own suicide and our
evaluation of its significance.” In other words, while Hedda declares that it is a beautiful death
that she seeks, and a beautiful death that offers the individual liberation from the mundane
trivialities of society, upon her own death, we see only the futility of it, the smallness of it.
Ultimately, Hedda’s death seems to have served no purpose except as a selfish proclamation of
principles pushed too far.
Sex vs. Sterility
The “notorious” female character in dramatic works of literature is frequently a firebrand, fully
in control of her sexuality and conscious of her power over men. Hedda, however, seems terribly
afraid of her own sexuality - she nearly kills Loevborg when he gets too close to her, rebuffs
Brack’s suggestion that she would jump out of her marriage to Tesman, even though she seems
to have little interest in her new husband, and ultimately shows little concern for her own soon-
to-be-born child. Indeed, as the play goes on, we wonder how Hedda ever got pregnant at all -
she’s as mystified by her condition as the audience, and refuses to even discuss or acknowledge
it. This one possibility of fecundity - of proving her worth as a “woman” - is decisively ignored
and thus implicitly refused.
Wild Nature vs. Tamed Assimilation
One of the more compelling themes in Hedda Gabler involves how an individual is groomed to
cope with the stifling pressures of society, and whether they maintain the trappings of their
“wild” self or succumb completely to a community’s norms. Hedda is obviously torn between the
two (see “Individual vs. Group”), but right before shooting herself, she plays a “wild piano
piece”, as if to claim her soul before burying it. Meanwhile, Tesman is at odds with Loevborg:
the former can only regurgitate other people’s tried-and-tested ideas, while the latter is an
untamed genius who simply writes down his thoughts and theories and finds them met with
 45

acclaim. Tesman, however, is too afraid to ever indulge his own original thoughts, and so
dedicates his life to reconstructing Loevborg’s ideas and taking credit for them.

“Old Woman” vs. “New Woman”

At the time Ibsen wrote Hedda Gabler, the term “New Woman” had emerged to describe
“women who were pushing against the limits which society imposed on women.” While the New
Woman sought self-determination and freedom, as well as equality with males and a true
understanding of female sexuality, the Old Woman believed in self-sacrifice, a woman’s duty to
her husband, and sexuality only in terms of childbearing. Hedda is a model case of a “New
Woman” who ultimately finds no satisfaction in liberation. This is not to say that Ibsen by any
stretch of the imagination intends Hedda Gabler as a critique of the New Woman; to the
contrary, he is offering a critique of the resistance against it.
Motivation vs. Boredom
One of the great questions of Hedda Gabler is whether Hedda’s actions are inspired by genuine
principles, or whether she is motivated entirely by boredom. If we examine the above theme of
Old Woman vs. New Woman, it is possible to interpret her character as a New Woman shoved
into Old Woman trappings, and who thus naturally gravitates towards pushing limits, pulling
strings, and manipulating others in the hopes of freeing herself. She is a New Woman, then,
looking for her place in life. However, Hedda continuously finds that her efforts only leave her
even more bored. At one point, she even tells Tesman that her only talent in life is “boring
herself to death” - an eerie prophecy of the events to come.

Symbolism in Hedda Gabler

The Function of Symbols
Criticism of the “naturalistic” plays of Ibsen has been so largely directed toward establishing his
stature as psychologist and social iconoclast that his characteristic use of functional imagery in
Hedda Gabler has been for the most part neglected. Of course such statements as Gosse’s that
“there is “no species of symbol” in the play have not stood uncorrected”.
But Jeannette Lee’s interpretation of Hedda (committed, by her own admission, to the gentian
policy of going round about) as “a pistol, deadly, simple, passionless and straight,” is confusing,
and Miss Lee’s allegorical exegesis, in which the soul of the poet (the manuscript) is destroyed
through the combined effort of animality (Madame Diana) and cold intellect (Hedda), despite
the efforts of love (Thea) may be regarded as an oversimplification of the ironic world-view to
which Ibsen’s total achievement bears witness. Auguste Ehrhard more convincingly interpreted
Loevborg’s book as the future, which Hedda, the demon of destruction, attempts to impede and
destroy, but Ehrhard’s discussion omits consideration of other important symbols. In short,
while these studies have indicated another perspective from which Ibsen’s artistry may be
profitably examined, their effect is to provoke reinvestigation, of rather than to explain
satisfactorily, the meaning and function of the symbols.
 46

The Relationship of Symbols with Theme

During the course of the play, Ibsen places considerable emphasis upon Thea’s hair, upon the
manuscript as her “child,” and upon General Gabler’s pistols, and his treatment of these items
suggests that he intended them to have symbolic significance. We shall be concerned in this
essay with determining this significance and its effect upon the total meaning of the play. Our
analysis of the three symbols in their relationship to the theme, the characters, and the action
will be based upon several broad assumptions, which reflect views of Ibsen’s concepts and
methods implied or expressed by a number of previous commentators: 1) In Hedda Gabler Ibsen
examines the possibility of attaining freedom and fulfillment in modern society. 2) Hedda is a
woman not a monster neurotic but not psychotic thus she may be held accountable for her
behavior. But she is spiritually sterile. Her yearning for self-realization through exercise of her
natural endowments is in conflict, is complicated by her incomplete understanding of what
freedom and fulfillment mean and how they may be achieved. She fails to realize that one must
earn his inheritance in order to possess it and she romanticizes the destructive and sensational
aspects of Dionysiac ecstasy without perceiving that its true end is regeneration through
sublimation of the ego in a larger unity. 3) Ibsen, as an experienced artist, was aware of the
impact of minutiaeand the need for integrating these with the general impression to be
projected therefore we may regard his description his stage direction and his properties, no less
than his dialogue, as means where by intention and significance are conveyed.
Symbolic Significance of Hedda and Thea
While all the other characters in Hedda Gabler are implicitly compared to Hedda and serve, in
one way or another, to throw light upon her personality, Thea Elvsted is the one with whom she
is most obviously contrasted. Furthermore, their contest for the control of Loevborg is the most
prominent external conflict in the play. The sterility-fertility antithesis from which central action
proceeds is chiefly realized through the opposition of these tows. Hedda is pregnant, and Thea is
physically barren. But in emotionally repudiating her unborn child, Hedda rejects what Ibsen
considered woman’s opportunity to advance the march of progress. The many other symptoms
of her psychic sterility need little enlargement. Unwilling to give or even share herself, she
maintains her independence at the price of complete frustration. Ibsen uses Thea, on the other
hand to indicate a way freedom, which Hedda never apprehends. Through her ability to extend
herself in comradeship with Loevborg, Thea not only brings about the rebirth of his creative
powers, butt merges her own best self with his to produced a prophecy of the future conceivably
of the Third Kingdom in which Ibsen believed that the Ideals of the past would coalesce in a new
and more perfect unity. Having lost herself to find her self she almost instinctively breaks with
the mores of her culture in order to ensure continuance of function. Despite her palpitating
femininity, she is the most truly emancipated person in the play. And it is she who wins at least a
limited victory in the end. Although Loevborg has failed her, her fecundity is indefatigable: as
Hedda kills herself, Thea is busily preparing to recreate her child with Tesman, thereby at once
enabling him to realize his own little talents, and weakening even further the tenuous bond
which ties him to Hedda.
Manuscript
The contrast outlined above is reinforced by the procreative imagery of the play. The manuscript
is Loevborg’s and Thea’s “child,” the idea of progress born of a union between individuals who
have freed themselves from the preconceptions of their environment. This manuscript the sterile
Hedda throws into the fire at the climax of her vindictive passion. Her impulse to annihilate by
 47

burning is directed both onward Thea’s “child” and toward Thea’s hair and calls attention to the
relationship between them. Even without other indications that Ibsen was using hair as a
symbol of fertility; such an inference might be made from the words which accompany the
destruction of the manuscript:
Now I am burning your child, Thea! Burning it, curly-clock! Your child and Eilert
Loevborg’s. I am burning- I am burning your child.
Thea’s Hair
There is, however, considerable evidence, both before and after this scene, that Thea’s hair is a
sign of that potency which Hedda envies even while she ridicules and bullies its possessor.
Ibsen, of course, had ample precedent for employing hair as a symbol of fertility. Perhaps the
best support for the argument that he made a literary adaptation of this well-known, ancient
idea in Hedda Gabler is a summary of the instances in which the hair is mentioned.
Although Ibsen’s unobtrusive description of the hair of each of these women at her initial
entrance may seem at the time only a casual stroke in the sketch, it assumes importance in
retrospect. Hedda’s hair is “not particularly abundant,” whereas Thea’s is “unusually abundant
and wavy.” Hedda’s strongest impression of Thea is of that abundance:
She recalls her as “the girl with irritating hair that she was always showing off.” Moreover Thea
fearfully recollects Hedda’s school-girl reaction to it: “… when we met on the stairs you used
always to pull my hair … Yes, and once you said you would burn it off my head.” When Thea and
Loevborg first meet in the play, Hedda seats herself, significantly, between them; the brief
exchange of questions and answers, which ensues, is notable for its overtones: “Is not she (Thea)
lovely to look at?” Loevborg asks. Hedda, lightly “Only to look at?” Loevborg asks. Hedda, lightly
stroking Thea’s hair, answers, “Yes. For we two—she and I—we two are real comrades.” Later,
when the women are alone, Hedda, now fully informed of the extent to which Thea has realized
her generative powers, laments her own meager endowment and renews her threat in its
adolescent terms:
Oh, If you could only understand how poor I am, and fate has made you so rich!
(Clasps her passionately in her arms) I think I must burn your hair off after all.
Hedda’s violent gesture and Thea’s almost hysterical reaction (“Let me go! I am afraid of you,
Hedda!”) Indicate the dangerous seriousness of words which otherwise might be mistaken for a
joke; the threat prepares us for the burning of the manuscript, which follows in Act III. In the
last tense scene of the play Hedda twice handles Thea’s hair. The reader’s imagination readily
contracts the expressions and gestures whereby an actress could show Hedda’s true attitude
toward the hair which Ibsen directs her to ruffle “gently: and to pass her hands “softly through.”
The first gesture follows immediately upon an important action—Hedda has just removed the
pistol to the inner room. The second accompanies dialogue which for the last time emphasizes
Hedda’s association of the hair with Thea’s fertility and which brings home to Hedda her own
predicament:
Hedda: (Passes her hands softly through Mrs. Elvsted’s hair). Doesn’t it seem strange to
you, Thea? Here you are sitting with Tesman—just as you used to sit with Eilert
Loevborg?
Mrs. Elvsted: Ah, if I could only inspire your husband in the same way!
 48

Hedda: Oh, that will come too—in time.

Tesman: Yes, do you know, Hedda—I really think I begin to feel something of the sort. But
won’t you go to sit with Brack again?
Hedda: Is there nothing I can do to help you two?
Tesman: No, nothing in the world.
These scenes in which the hair plays a part not only call attention to Hedda’s limitations but
show her reaction to her partial apprehension of them. In adapting a primitive symbol, Ibsen
slightly altered its conventional meaning, substituting physical for physical potency. Its
primitivistic associations nevertheless pervade the fundamental relationships between the two
women. The weapons Hedda uses against Thea are her hands and fire. The shock of the
climactic scene results chiefly from seeing the savage emerge from behind her veneer of
sophistication—the Hedda who feeds the manuscript to the flames is a naked woman engaged in
a barbaric act. In contrast, the Hedda who handles her father’s pistols is self-consciously cloaked
in illusions of her hereditary participation in a chivalric tradition.
Pistols
The pistols, like many other symbols used by Ibsen, quite obviously are not merely symbols, but
have important plot function as well. Moreover, their symbolic significance cannot be reduced to
a simple formula, but must be thought of in the light of the complex of associations which they
carry as Hedda’s legacy from General Gabler. Through Hedda’s attitude toward and uses of the
pistols, Ibsen constantly reminds us that Hedda “is to be regarded rather as her father’s
daughter than as her husband’s wife.” Clearly the pistols are linked with certain values in her
background which Hedda cherishes. Complete definition of these values is difficult without a
more thorough knowledge of Ibsen’s conception of a Norwegian general than the play or
contemporary comment on it allows. Perhaps, as Brandes said, nineteenth century audiences
recognized that Hedda’s pretensions to dignity and grandeur as a general’s daughter were falsely
based, “that a Norwegian general is a cavalry officer, who as a rule, has never smelt powder, and
whose pistols are innocent of bloodshed.” Such a realization, however, by no means nullifies the
theoretical attributes and privileges of generalship to which Hedda aspires. Possibly Ibsen
intended us to understand that Hedda is a member of a second generation of “ham actors” who
betray their proud tradition by their melodramatic posturings. But it is this tradition. However
ignoble its carrier, to which the pistols and Hedda (in her own mind) belong, and it is, after all,
the general only as glimpsed through his daughter’s ambitions and conceptions of worth that is
of real importance in the play. These conceptions, as embodied in Hedda’s romantic ideal of
manhood, may be synthesized form the action and dialogue. The aristocrat possesses, above all,
courage and self-control. He expressed himself through direct and independent action, living to
capacity and scorning security and public opinion. Danger only piques his appetite, and death
with honor is the victory to be plucked from defeat. But the recklessness of this Hotspur is
tempered by a disciplined will, by means of which he “beautifully” orders both his own actions
and those of others on whom his power is imposed. Such a one uses his pistols with deliberation,
with calculated aim. He shoots straight—to defend his life or his honor, and to maintain his
authority. Pistols, however, have an intrinsic glamour. Of the several possible accoutrements of
a general, his pistols are those least likely to evoke thoughts of chivalric principles and most
likely to recall the menace of the power vested in him. And such power, as Hedda Gabler shows
us, delivered into the hands of a confused and irresponsible egotist, brings only meaningless
destruction to all who come within its range.
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Manipulation of the Pistols

The manipulation of the pistols throughout the play is a mockery of their traditional role. Except
at target practice, Hedda Does not even shoot straight until her suicide. Her potential danger is
recognized by both men whom she threatens, but both understand (Brack, immediately;
Loevborg, in Act II) that her threat is a theatrical gesture, and that she has no real intention of
acting directly, in defiance of the convention which bid her “go roundabout” Her crass
dishonesty in her sexual encounters is highlighted by this gun play. She uses the pistols to be
sure, to ward off or warn off encroachments upon her “honor” This honor, however, is rooted in
social expedience rather than in a moral code. Having in-directly encouraged Loevborg by a
succession of intimate tete-a-tetes, she poses as an outraged maiden when he makes amorous
advances, thereby, as she later hints, thwarting her own emotional needs. Subsequently she sells
her body to Tesman as cynically as (and far less honestly than) Madame Diana sells hers, then
deliberately participates in the form, if not the substance, of marital infidelity with Brack in
order to relieve her boredom. Both Hedda and Brack become aware of the cold ruthlessness of
the other and the consequent danger to the loser if his delicate equilibrium of their relationship
should be disturbed. But until the end Brack is so complacently convinced that Hedda is his
female counterpart that he has no fear she will do more than shoot over his head; even as she
lies dead, he can hardly believe that she has resorted to direct action —” People don’t do such
things.”
Death of Loevborg
The part the pistols play in Loevborg’s death makes a central contribution to our understanding
of the degree to which the ideals they represent are distorted by the clouded perspective from
which Hedda views them. She has no real comprehension of, nor interest in, the vital creative
powers Thea helps Loevborg to realize. Instead, she glorifies his weaknesses, mistaking bravado
for courage, the indulgence of physical appetites for god-like participation in “the banquet of
life,” a flight from reality for a heroic quest for totality of experience. Even more important is the
fact that as she inhibits her own instinctive urge for fulfillment; she romanticizes its converse.
Thus, having instigated his ruin, she incites Loevborg to commit suicide with her pistol. This
radical denial of the will to live she arbitrarily invests with the heroism and beauty one
associates with a sacrificial death; Hedda is incapable of making the distinction between an
exhibitionistic gesture that inflates the ego, and the tragic death, in which the ego is sublimated
in order that the values of life may be extended and reborn.
Conclusion
It would appear, then, that the symbols while they do not carry the whole thematic burden of
Hedda Gabler, illuminate the meaning of the characters and the action with which they are
associated. As Eric Bentley has suggested, the characters, like those in the other plays of Ibsen’s
last period, are the living dead who dwell in a waste-land that resembles T.S Eliot’s. And, like
Eliot later, Ibsen emphasized the aridity of the present by contrasting it with the heroic past.
Indeed, Hedda Gabler may be thought of as a mock-tragedy, a sardonically contrived travesty of
tragic action, which Ibsen shows us is no longer possible in the world is sick with a disease less
curable than that of Oedipus’ Thebes or Hamlet’sDenmark. For its hereditary leaders are
shrunken in stature, maimed and paralyzed by their enslavement to the ideals of the dominant
middle-class. With the other hollow men, they despise but nonetheless worship the false gods of
respectability and security, paying only lip-service to their ancestral principles. Such geniuses as
this society produces are, when left to themselves, too weak to do more than batter their own
 50

heads against constricting barriers. They dissipate their talents and so fail in their mission as
prophets and disseminators of western culture; its interpretation is left to the unimaginative
pedant, picking over the dry bones of the past. Women, the natural seminal vesicles of that
culture, the mothers of the future, are those most cruelly inhibited by the sterilizing atmosphere
of their environment. At one extreme is Aunt Julia, the genteel spinster, over-compensating for
her starved emotions with obsessive self-dedication. At the other is Diana, the harlot. Even
Thea, the progenitive spirit, the girl with the abundant hair, is a frail and colorless repository for
the seeds of generation. Her break with convention when it threatens her maternity is shown to
be the one mode of escape from the fate that overtakes the others. But Ibsen gives her triumph,
too, a ludicrous twist. Hardly having begun the mourning song for her Adonis, she brings forth
her embryonic offspring form her pocket and proceeds to mold it into shape with the aid of a
Tesman—an echo of the classic death and rebirth, to be sure, but one not likely to produce the
glorious Third kingdom of which Ibsen dreamed. And appropriately bolding the center of the
stage throughout is Hedda, in whom the shadows of the past still struggle in a losing battle with
the sterile specter of the present. Her pistols are engraved with insignia which the others
understand not at all and which she only dimly comprehends. Her colossal egotism, her lack of
self-knowledge, her cowardice, render her search for fulfillment but a succession of futile
blunders which culminate in the supreme futility of death. Like peer Gynt, she is fit only for the
ladle of the button-molder; she fails to realize a capacity either for great good or for great evil.
Her mirror-image wears the mask of tragedy, but Ibsen makes certain that we see the horns and
pointed ears of the satyr protruding from behind it.

Hedda Gabler: Plot (Structure)

In Hedda Gabler, there is no character of importance pitted against Hedda as an effective
counterpoise. Tesman the dull pedant, Loevborg, the debased Dionysus figure, and Brack, the
suave diplomat all bring to light some aspect of Hedda that aids in her eventual self-destruction.
The two minor women in the play act as correctives to Hedda’s unappealing selfish personality.
The whole play pivots upon Hedda and every speech in the play is directed towards the main
purpose, the revelation of Hedda’s character. As the center of the play is not a problem but a
personality there is less emphasis on the story and its links of cause and effect. The play
develops in an episodic manner.
Act 1 gives a full picture of the Tesman household and illuminates all the main problems. Act II
introduces the rivals, Loevborg and Brack, and Hedda’s first attempt to play with destiny and
thwart Mrs. Elvsted. Act III is given up to the story of the manuscript and ends with Hedda’s
triumph. Act IV springs the trap and undoes the triumph, forcing Hedda to accept her own
counsel and use the second pistol.
Act I
Returned from honeymoon, Tesman has just been awarded a doctorate and is now known as Dr.
Tesman. He is stuffy and scholarly and does not understand the questions Aunt Julia asks about
a baby. He had married on the strength of being awarded a professorship in the university.
However, his appointment is in jeopardy because, as Judge Brack informs him, his rival Eilert
Loevborg is also competing for the post. Hedda is very cold, formal and rude with Aunt Julia,
but she behaves in a very warm and cordial manner with Mrs. Elvsted because she wants to
extract information from her. She gets to know that Mrs. Elvsted has taken the bold and daring
 51

step of leaving her husband and has followed Loevborg to town. She is afraid that with the
success of his new book and money in his pockets, Loevborg will again revert to his dissipated
ways. Therefore, she asks Tesman to invite him to his house so that he will not fall in the wrong
company.

Act II
In Act II, a series of encounters occur with men in Hedda’s life. Brack, an old friend, attempts to
contract a “triangular friendship” with Hedda. It is through her interactions with him that the
audience finds out that Hedda married in order to be secure, emotionally, financially, and
socially. The audience also discovers that Hedda can be vicious as when she commented on the
rude behavior of the maid for leaving her hat on a chair, knowing that it was Aunt Julia’s. In this
scene, Hedda’s pistols come to the forefront as symbols of protection. She points them at Brack,
foreshadowing his later attempt to seduce and extort her. Loevborg is also introduced in this act.
He is now a reformed character and has left his days of dissipation behind him. He and Hedda
had been close friends, but when the friendship threatened to develop into something more
serious she broke it off, for she dreaded a scandal and was not ready for a sexual relationship.
She sees Loevborg only in an idealized fashion and the newly reformed Loevborg does not
conform to her romantic view of him. Therefore, she attempts to reclaim his former self by
goading him to drink. When Hedda sees that Mrs. Elvsted’s influence over Loevborg is
considerable, she sets out to destroy it. She also betrays the secret Mrs. Elvsted had confided in
her in order to break the trust between Loevborg and her. This results in Loevborg’s defiant
action of drinking and attending Brack’s bachelor party. Hedda feels that she has liberated
Loevborg and that, like Dionysus, he will return with “vine-leaves in his hair”.
Act III
In Act III, Hedda’s destructiveness continues and her attempts to refashion Loevborg fail as his
behavior is not noble but debased. Loevborg does not return that night to escort Mrs. Elvsted
home. Tesman returns early next morning with the manuscript that Loevborg lost because he
was drunk. He acknowledges that it is the most remarkable book that has ever been written and
has every intention of returning it but Hedda prevents him from doing so and he goes rushing to
his dying Aunt Rina’s bedside. Brack enters and gives her the sordid details of if Loevborg’s
escapades the previous night. He had gone to Mademoiselle Diana’s soiree and accused her of
robbing the manuscript. There was a scuffle and Loevborg was arrested.
Loevborg is driven to despair by the loss of his manuscript and tells Mrs. Elvsted to return to her
husband for “Henceforward I shall do no work.” He lies to her about his manuscript and tells
her that he tore it. Mrs. Elvsted accuses him of killing their “child.” When left alone, he confesses
to Hedda that he has brought “the child” to a house of ill fame and lost it there. Hedda wants to
attempt once more to influence Loevborg as Mrs. Elvsted has. Instead of returning his
manuscript, she provides him with a pistol and tells him to “do it beautifully.” She wants his
suicide to remain a romantic memory for her as well as be a vicarious means for her to feel like
she has acted in a noble way. After he has left, Hedda burns the manuscript in a fit of jealousy
because it has been the “child” of the supposedly reformed Loevborg and the trivial mouse- like
Mrs. Elvsted.
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Act IV
In Act IV, a defiant Hedda informs Tesman that she has burnt the manuscript. Tesman, in
consternation, tells her that it amounts to unlawful appropriation of lost property. Hedda
manages to convince him that she has done the right thing by pretending that she could not bear
the idea of his being upstaged by Loevborg. She also tells him that she is pregnant. Tesman is
overjoyed by this unexpected display of Hedda’s love for him and agrees to remain silent.
Loevborg’s death is then announced, much to Hedda’s delight and Mrs. Elvsted’s dismay.
Tesman is also stunned by this news and is shocked by what Hedda has done. He bemoans the
loss of the manuscript.
Mrs. Elvsted realizes that she has the notes with her and she and Tesman sit together to put the
notes in some semblance of order. Hedda finds out from Brack that Loevborg’s death was
neither an act of courage nor was it beautiful for he was shot in the bowels in Mademoiselle
Diana’s boudoir. He also tells her that the pistol could be traced to her. Brack wants to enter into
a liaison with Hedda now that he has power over her. He plays on her deep-seated fears of
scandal and warns her that she might be implicated in Loevborg’s death. Hedda feels that
everything she touches turns “ludicrous and mean.” Not wanting to submit to Brack and
disgusted by Loevborg’s ignoble death, she shoots herself in the temple, at last summoning the
courage to act as an agent of her life.
Conclusion
The ending of the play is shocking as it does not allow the other characters to respond to her
death except to reveal their shock. One does not think that with her death Hedda has received
her just deserts, or that she is a victim. However, from Brack’s final announcement that “One
doesn’t do that kind of thing,” the audience can see that Hedda Gabler was a misunderstood
character and an anomaly within a society that attempted to define what she could and could
not do.

Women in Hedda Gabler

Modern criticism of Hedda Gabler rests on the idea that a male dominated society repressed
and limited Hedda’s brilliance.

Ibsen studied the repressed conditions of women in many of his plays; however his own view of
women was limited by his “celebration of their primary role as the nurturing mothers whose
mission is to educate the young.” No wonder there is no solution for Hedda but suicide. She
clearly would never make a good mother, and there was nothing else for such a woman to do
unless she could nurture a man’s genius, as Thea did. Nurturing genius, however, was clearly
not Hedda’s gift. General Gabler’s pistols were, finally, the only option for his daughter.
Hedda Gabler is set about thirty years earlier than when it was written. Clurman writes that:
It was a period, Ibsen once remarked, when women were not allowed to play any
role apart from marriage and motherhood. The “protection” they enjoyed
separated them from the realities of life. Hedda shuns everything painful and ugly;
she cannot tolerate the sight of sickness or death. She is already pregnant when the
 53

play opens, but mention of it is abhorrent to her....Small wonder then that she
admits that all she is good for is boring herself to death.
And yet Thea breaks out of this sheltered life. Hedda is a victim, but she is also a coward.
Both George Tesman and Eilert Loevborg develop their identities through their professions.
They compete for fame and position through training, effort and intellect. Hedda, however, has
no profession, nor does she care about anything. She has no interest in what Eilert writes, only
in his potential fame and glamour, and in his rivalry with her husband. She can only compete
with Thea for control of a man, not to develop a personal identity. Worse, Hedda’s control is
destructive, while Thea’s is healing and creative. Hedda married George Tesman to establish a
social life as the wife of a professor; she wanted to control Eilert Loevborg destructively to rival
Thea’s constructive control as the inspiring force behind his genius.
Hedda’s only stable identity is as General Gabler’s daughter. She has no life of her own, no
projects of her own. Although she envies Eilert Loevborg’s freedom and wildness, she shows no
interest at all in the content of his writing, nor is she willing to risk scandal personally. She
cooperates, in short, with the extremely limited role offered by her social condition.
Both the play and Hedda herself are limited to what can be said and done around a lady.
As Lyons points out, The world beyond Hedda’s house includes:
...drunkenness, prostitution, financial reckless-ness...the exploitation of women,
and the threat of poverty....(Loevborg)...dies from an accidental gunshot wound in
an apartment that functions, at least temporarily, as a brothel....
The respectable Judge Brack is obviously familiar with Mademoiselle Danielle, the prostitute in
whose rooms Eilert died. Further, Brack tries to use his knowledge that Eilert used Hedda’s
revolver to blackmail Hedda into having an adulterous affair with him. Brack has evidently
enjoyed a series of such adulterous relationships with other respectable women. Even the
respectable, scandal-fearing Hedda, is clearly fascinated by hearing about the disreputable
goings-on at Mademoiselle Danielle’s.
Hedda’s fascination with the forbidden male world of freedom and excess draws her to both
Loevborg and Brack, and finally leads to her destruction. Her gender, class, and loathing of
everything ugly limit what she is able or willing to hear about the outside world. Events are
reported to the house, but only in terms acceptable to Hedda. Such restraint is imposed by
society, as well as by Hedda’s wishes.
Her lack of knowledge of the outside world probably is a major factor in her romantic
idealization of Loevborg’s wildness and lack of self-control. She has never seen him drunk or in
sordid surroundings; she only heard his stories about his escapades and imagines him carousing
as a Dionysian god with vine-leaves in his hair instead of as a stumbling drunk frequenting
brothels. Hedda does not even understand the concept of Dionysios correctly. She just is aware
of the carousing and freedom of the god, not of his creative inspiration and potential for creating
social cohesion.
Her questioning of Loevborg years earlier showed her desire for information about this
forbidden male world. But, ultimately, Hedda is determined not to break the taboos of her
society and when she felt she had to choose between Loevborg and following the rules, she chose
the rules and a loveless marriage to Tesman.
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Ultimately, Hedda never does understand the creative genius which Thea is able to nurture in
Eilert Loevborg. Hedda romanticizes his weaknesses, confusing his lack of self-control with god-
like courage. She idealizes his death as noble instead of a sordid accident, and when she is
trapped by Brack’s blackmail, she chooses the coward’s way out—suicide—to escape from a
situation largely of her own making.
To conclude, we can say that Hedda is a creature of the nineteenth century, and that her
romantic ignorance of what matters and what is real would not occur today. However, it would
be foolish to deny that there are plenty of people, now and always, who dislike the petty
limitations of real life and take refuge in their fantasies, confusing rebellion with creativity, self-
indulgence with freedom and destruction with fulfillment.

Hedda Gabler: A Black Farce

Hedda, the main character in the play, feels an autumnal chill in her soul as she looks out at the
yellow, withered leaves in her garden. It is ‘already September, and the darkness of winter is
now disturbingly close. Hedda is married to a promising but boring academic called Jorgen
Tesman. The man whose company she most enjoys, Judge Brack, is a polished but ruthless
pragmatist who brilliantly manipulates social conventions to his own advantage. Eilert Loevborg
is a former admirer of Hedda. He is a gifted but unstable genius, given to heavy drinking, who
has since been tamed by Thea Elvsted, a woman who was at school with Hedda. These are the
major characters, all linked either socially or through bonds of friendship, who act out Ibsen’s
tragic-comedy.

A Combination of Tragedy and Comedy

At times the action is closer to black farce than tragedy. In his preliminary notes for the play,
Ibsen anticipates this mood in a brief description he gives of Hedda’s state of mind: ‘Life for
Hedda resolves itself as a farce that isn’t “worth seeing through to the end”, And this farcical
quality that she sees in life colors everything said and done in the play, reducing even the most
poetic ideals to a mockery of themselves. During the action serious things are transacted, and
eventually both Loevborg and Hedda die. The potential wasted in these two deaths is, clearly
tragic in substance. But the manner of their deaths and the reaction their deaths produce in
others are essentially comic.
Predominant Comic Tone
The predominantly comic tone of the play is reinforced by a simple linear structure. In contrast
to Ghost, Where characters probe each other and their past in order lo lay bare their real
motives. Hedda Gabler moves swiftly forward in time in a linear manner and with only the
briefest of glimpses into the past. Even the dialogue is compressed and taut, as in all comic
writing. There are virtually no speeches longer than three or four lines, and there are frequent
passages of almost pure comic repartee. Structural, each act builds to a climactic situation to
which Hedda then reacts.
At the end of Act 1 Hedda finds herself faced by the threat of social regression implicit in
Tesman’s possible failure to obtain a professorial appointment: this would at a stroke take away
the one thing that made her marriage to Tesman feasible in the first place. Hedda reacts to this
prospect by reaching for her father’s pistols. At the end of Act 2, Hedda‘s successful intervention
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in Loevborg’s relationship with Thea, culminating in the ‘reformed’ Loevborg’s departure for
Brack’s bacchic feast, fills Hedda with such elation that she feels like burning off Thea’s hair.
At the end of Act 3, Loevborg takes his leave of Hedda, broken in spirit, having lost the
manuscript of his new book, and socially in disgrace after his drunken and disorderly behavior
following Brack’s party. He accepts the gift Hedda presses on him of one of General Gabler’s
pistols, leaving her with the feeling that he will die nobly and beautifully like a true aristocrat.
Hedda reacts to this situation by venting her most destructive feelings on the relationship
Loevborg and Thea had established. She burns Thea’s ‘child’, the manuscript of the book
Loevborg wrote under Thea’s calming influence. By the end of Act 4, Hedda realizes that Thea
and her own husband Tesman will exclude her from any participation in the work of piecing
together Loevborg’s manuscript. Hedda also realizes that Brack, fully aware that it was she who
gave Loevborg his suicide weapon, now has her in his power. Feeling trapped and rejected at one
and the same time, she shoots herself in a gesture of almost petulant defiance. Throughout the
play, the seriousness of the things she does is in some measure offset by the incongruity of her
various responses. She reacts rather like an angry child to the various problems confronting her.
Finally even her suicide is a childish gesture in which she thumbs her defiance at a world she
neither understands nor likes.
During the first three acts of the play, Hedda exercises a decisive influence over the way the
stage space is structured and used. She decides where to place the furniture and also where the
different characters will sit. In Act 2, for instance, she cleverly directs Brack and Tesman to use
her upstage room for punch and cigars so that she can use the drawing-room for her encounter
with Loevborg. In all three acts she bullies Thea into sitting or standing in positions where she
can dominate her. In Act 4, however, this changes drastically. As the consequences of her
actions become known—the destruction of Eilert’s manuscript and his subsequent death—she
loses her previously dominant status. While the others literally pick up the shattered pieces of
what she has destroyed, she finds herself treated like the irresponsible child she has become.
Stage Directions for Hedda
Visually, she is politely but firmly ousted from every corner of the stage. First, Tesman and Thea
invade her private room upstage to start piecing together Eilert’s notes. Next, they take over her
escritoire because the light is not good enough in the little room. When Hedda moves to her
corner by the stove downstage, and sits on one of the stools. Brack stands over her menacingly,
quietly making oblique sexual threats. Even when she retreats to her room again and draws the
curtains to shut the others out, she cannot do as she wants. She attempts to play the piano but is
immediately told to be quiet. There is literally no space left for her. Very carefully, Ibsen has
prepared us in visual terms for the inevitable shot that finally rings out.
Social Conventions and Hedda
The problem around which the play is structured is similar to that of Ghosts. Hedda has allowed
herself to become trapped in a pointless conventional marriage. Like Mrs Alving, she finds it is
not so easy to escape, having once taken such a decisive step. Hedda’s reasons were partly-
financial, partly social and psychological. Brought up as if she were a general’s son by her father,
she has acquired the arrogance and aspirations of the men of her class, without any hope of
fulfilling them as a far from wealthy woman in a male-dominated society. She has no
professional skills and cannot hope to remain a debutante for ever. It therefore seemed to her
that marriage was the only avenue open to her. She avoided the ruthless men of her own class,
such as Judge Brack, and instead chose a docile academic as her husband, a man she could
easily manage but who would serve his purpose by offering her some social status and prestige.
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Unfortunately, things do not work out quite as Hedda planned. Life with Jorgen Tesman
threatens to be boring and socially disadvantageous. The gulf between her hopes and the actual
marriage in which she is imprisoned is brought home to her when the Tesmans are visited in Act
2 by Eilert Loevborg. Hedda was once in love with Loevborg but was too cowardly, too afraid of
scandal, to admit it. The sight of Loevborg in her own drawing room brings alive a painful image
of what life might have been for her. Some of the bacchic intoxication implicit in that image is
summed up in a vision she articulates of Loevborg with vine leaves in his hair. For her he
represents spontaneity and creative genius: a life shared with him would have been very
different from the future she faces as the wife of Jorgen Tesman.
Spider Web for Hedda and Loevborg
Together on stage, under the watchful eyes of Judge Brack, Loevborg and Hedda exude a
suppressed sexuality that is potentially explosive. Both of them are now trapped: Hedda in her
doll’s house marriage and Loevborg in his relationship with Thea. Unlike Mrs Alving, Hedda
makes no attempt to understand how and why she is trapped. Instead she lashes out in sheer
frustration, venting her spite on Loevborg, for what might have been, and on Thea, for daring to
ensnare her man.
By the end of the play, Hedda has burnt the manuscript of Loevborg’s new book, has driven her
former hero to commit suicide, sees her husband responding warmly to Thea Elvsted and finds
herself in the hands of Judge Brack who knows enough about her deeds to blackmail her into
sleeping with him. Hedda’s doll’s house has turned into an emotional chamber of horrors.
Cold Atmosphere of the Play
Hedda Gabler is a cool, almost icy play. Even the laughter it provokes in production is at times
sardonic. Like Ghosts, It is written to be deliberately provocative. It offers no tragic catharsis.
What it leaves an audience with is a feeling of waste. There is potential and idealism in Hedda,
but no outlet for it in contemporary society. (As Ibsen himself commented in his preliminary
notes: ‘With Hedda, there is poetry deep down’.) Brought up to be ashamed of her own sex,
deeply imbued with a fear of scandal, Hedda cannot find a viable means of expressing her desire
for personal freedom and fulfillment. Her real longing, as Eilert rightly suspected, was for a life
in which there could be authenticity, truth and genuine reciprocity, in which there could be
intellectual, emotional and sexual fulfillment without subterfuge and shame. Given the
repressive values of her upbringing and social environment, such a life seems to her an
impossible dream. Instead she chooses a conventional solution, allowing herself to be
imprisoned in the kind of shallow marriage of convenience that was typical of the age. The result
is a disaster for all concerned.
Conclusion
All that remains at the end of the play is the comic incongruity of Brack’s and Tesman’s response
to her suicide:
Tesman: (shouts at Brack) She shot herself! Shot herself in the head! Just think!
Brack: (half paralyzed in the armchair) But, good God! People don’t do such things!
Their shocked response summed up an age when women were expected to conform to the
written and unwritten rules of a patriarchal society. By underlining the precise social factors
contributing to Hedda’s distressing psychological state, Ibsen made it clear that what happened
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to Hedda was neither inevitable nor pre-ordained. Nor was she simply an abnormal personality,
as some contemporary critics assumed. Her actions are perfectly intelligible, even if emotionally
immature and destructive, responses to the extreme pressures confronting her in the ruthless,
male-dominated world in which she lives. Underneath the laughter in this tragic-comedy, Ibsen
spelled out with almost icy clarity the price to be paid, in terms of human misery and suffering,
for living in Hedda’s world. Through the use of laughter, its appeal was to the mind as well as to
the heart. It was written, as was Ghost, with the conscious aim of challenging its audiences to
reassess the value structures underpinning their society.

Feminism, Motherhood and Hedda Gabler

Victimization by Motherhood
Few portrayals of victimization by motherhood, or more accurately imminent motherhood, are
as memorable and yet as subtle as that in Hedda Gabler (1890). While it is nowhere expressly
stated that Hedda is pregnant, the play abounds in intimations of her condition; as Janet
Suzman claims, and Hedda’s pregnancy draws together every strand of the play. Yet Hedda is
nearly the only main character who does not refer to her expectations; in response to the
allusions to the possibility of pregnancy made by her husband Tesman, his aunt Juliane Tesman,
and Judge Brack, she changes the subject or reacts with irritation or even anger. She supplies
the reason herself; when Brack mentions the prospect of ‘a sacred and ... exacting responsibility,
she angrily retorts, ‘I’ve no aptitude for any such thing ‘.

Nineteenth Century Women and Hedda’s Masculine Approach

For the maternal calling of the conventional nineteenth-century woman is thwarted in Hedda by
tendencies that were at the time viewed as masculine. The influence of her motherless, father-
dominated upbringing is everywhere evident: in her taste for horses and pistols; in her eager
anticipation of a contest between Tesman and Loevborg for the available university professor-
ship; even in General Gabler’s portrait, which is described in the opening stage directions,
before we meet any of the actual characters, as occupying a prominent place in the Tesman’s’
drawing room. Explaining the play’s title, Ibsen wrote: ‘I intended to indicate thereby that as a
personality she is to be regarded rather as her father’s daughter than as her husband’s wife’. As
Elizabeth Hardwick points out, Hedda’s husband is ‘much more of a girl than she is’, since while
she was brought up by a general, he was raised by two maiden aunts.
Hedda’s society provides few outlets for her masculine ambitions, however. Her comment to
Brack - ‘I just stand here and shoot into the blue’- is loaded in multiple respects. In the face of
her own aimlessness, she seeks masculine experience vicariously, pressing Loevborg to confess
his debaucheries to her as her only insight into a world ‘that she isn’t supposed to know
anything about’, conjecturing that she could make it her life’s goal to encourage Tesman to go
into politics.
Clash of Femininity with Masculinity
As in A Doll’s House, the clash between Hedda’s unfeminine inclinations and the step she takes
down the feminine path of marriage and, inevitably, pregnancy results in hysteria. Her gestures
are as telling as her words: drawing the curtains, seeking fresh air, walking nervously around the
room, raising her arms, clenching her fists, drumming her fingers, physically abusing Thea
Elvsted. And as in the case of Nora, her hysteria finds release in music, in the ‘wild dance tune’
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she plays on the piano. Yet unlike Nora, Hedda is still too much the victim of traditional
thinking to move from hysteria to feminism. Trapped by Brack between two conventional
attitudes—her fear of scandal and her abhorrence of adultery—she fulfils the prediction she had
made upon Tesman’s joyous response to the news of her pregnancy: ‘Oh, it’ll kill me ... it’ll kill
me, all this!

Miss Tesman and Hedda Gabler

Significantly, the character who is most positive about Hedda’s expectations is one who has
never experienced biological motherhood. Certain that Hedda must have become pregnant
during the couple’s six-month honeymoon, Miss Tesman presses for a revelation, hinting to
Tesman that a use might be found for the empty rooms in the house and to Hedda that there will
soon be sewing to do. As an unmarried, childless woman, she has taken on one foster-child after
another; having raised Tesman, who gratefully acknowledges to his ‘Auntie Julle’ that ‘You’ve
always been both father and mother to me’, she has recently filled her life by nursing her ailing
sister Rina, and after Rina’s death she plans to replace her with another invalid. The contrast to
Hedda, who regards such care as a ‘burden’, is evident.
In Hedda Gabler, maternal indifference is counterbalanced here by the love and devotion of an
(assumed) female relative whose feelings are all the more heartfelt because they are chosen
rather than biologically imposed.
Ibsen’s Awareness of Motherhood
Ibsen’s awareness of the difficulties of motherhood on the one hand and of the overwhelming
power of the myth of maternity as the proper calling for women on the other hand is expressed
by several memorable instances in the major prose plays in which women who have either lost
their children or never had any remain trapped in maternal thinking toward metaphorical
offspring. Although the tragic secret at the heart of The Master Builder is the Solnesses’ loss of
their infant twins as the indirect result of a fire that had destroyed their home years before,
Aline Solness reveals that she in fact grieves not for the babies but for her nine dolls lost in the
blaze, which she had carried under her heart ‘like little unborn children’. In the cases of Thea
Elvsted in Hedda Gabler and Irene de Satow in When We Dead Awaken (1899), childless
women develop a rhetoric of maternity to describe their roles in the production of works of art.
Just as Thea refers to the book she helped Loevborg write as their child, Irene says of Rubek’s
masterpiece sculpture for which she sat as model, ‘Our child lives on after me. In honour and
glory’. Yet the true nature of the two women’s contributions is revealed by Thea’s despairing
question on learning that Loevborg has no further use for her - ‘What am I to do with my life,
then?’ —and Irene’s admission to Rubek that once he no longer needed her as his model, she
died inside. Their role is more accurately that of midwife or muse than metaphorical mother; if
they were genuine artists, it goes without saying that they could go on to create further works
alone. The rhetoric of artistic maternity shows Thea and Irene to fall between the two stools, as
it were, of the nineteenth-century division of labor which assigned artistic creativity to men and
childbearing to women. Although Thea and Irene have failed to participate in either area, the
myth of maternity as women’s destiny is so powerful that they appropriate its language in
compensatory fashion to describe their artistic midwifery.
Motherhood’s Essentiality
This consideration sheds new light on Ibsen’s claim late in life that it is the women who are to
solve the social problem. As mothers they are to do it. And only as such can they do it. Whereas
this statement is often interpreted to mean that Ibsen viewed motherhood as the proper calling
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for women, he may in fact be suggesting that it is the only vocation truly open to them. The
many female figures in his plays demonstrate the enormous and often detrimental influence of
the notion that maternity is woman’s duty: women who have motherhood imposed on them
against their will, mothers unsuited to motherhood, childless women for whom the maternal
model is so strong that they take on foster or metaphorical children.

Ibsen’s views on Best Motherhood

Ibsen’s implication that the best mother is the one who assumes this calling not because of
biological determinism, as was so often the case in his day, but out of free choice, finds its most
wholehearted endorsement in The Lady from the Sea. In a kind of counterpoint to A Doll’s
House,where Nora must create her own freedom by leaving behind the domestic environment
which has confined her, Dr Wangel grants his wife Ellida the freedom to choose between joining
the mysterious seafaring stranger to whom she has been so powerfully attracted and remaining
with Wangel and his children. Where Nora exchanges motherhood for autonomy, Ellida is able
to truly embrace (step) motherhood only because Wangel has rendered her autonomous.
Conclusion
The Lady from the Sea may stand as the last word on the question of Ibsen and feminism. For
insofar as it reverses the pattern of ADoll’s House, it does not present women with the choice
between motherhood and solitary New Womanhood but rather powerfully advocates women’s
right to choose their destiny and combine roles as they desire. Supporting the belief that a
woman’s mind and body are hers to control as she wishes, Ibsen’s oeuvre allies him with
feminist thinkers not only of his era but of our own day as well.

Hedda Gabler: A Play of Destruction

Loevborg: Why did you not shoot me then?
Hedda: Because I have such a dread of scandal.

For Hedda ‘shooting’ and ‘scandal’ are opposite quantities. Her father’s pistols are her solace
and her strength against a world in which scandal and its constituents are dominant. And
Hedda, when she is ‘bored’ is admitting in the only way she can that life is more inclined
towards scandal than towards pistols. The key to Ibsen’s play lies in this opposition of hers.
Ibsen’s intention is to juxtapose in the character of Hedda the two forces by which her life is
ruled, and through the conflict of which, destroyed.
Loevborg and Hedda
The phrase, which Hedda uses to describe Loevborg, has the same romantic implications as her
pistol-shooting: He must have ‘vine leaves in his hair’, and he must have the courage to keep
them there when the entire world knows that he is simply drunk. For Loevborg, in spite of his
gifts, he is a character with weakness, which even the abstracted academic George Tesman can
perceive clearly. But these very weaknesses make him amenable to Hedda, for they seem to be
anti-social, and Hedda is primarily concerned to reject a society, which makes life too painful,
too boring for her. So that Hedda is drawn to Loevborg whilst he is dissolute, for his dissipation
are a protection and an assertion for her. But if she is drawn to him it must not be thought she
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loves him when there relationship promises to become physical, adult, anything beyond the
talking stage, Hedda rejects Loevborg. He might be forcing ‘scandal’ on her; she is not interested
in anything but the ‘rebellion’, which she and Loevborg can talk together.

Hedda’s Idealism
So ‘scandal’ is for Hedda Gabler the physical reality of life, and it is this reality, which must be
subjected to the romanticism of ‘vine leaves’ and pistols. Hedda is rejecting sexuality, and in this
rejection we find one source of her frigidity, her inhumanity, and her idealism. It is Hedda’s
idealism with which Ibsen is most concerned.
The usual public for the play takes Hedda as a femme fatale to be played with melodramatic
verve by the latest serious actress, and Thea, the women whom Loevborg calls ‘comrade’ when
he is sober and reformed; they take to be the idealist. And certainly Thea is platonic in her
regard for Loevborg; she is concerned with soul-saving, with great ideals with nature sweet-and-
pure. But if she is white then so is Hedda, for they are equi-distant from reality. Hedda because
she takes drunken libidinousness to be romantic, and Thea because she has conquered it as Una
conquered the lion. The woman in both of them is far from the man in Loevborg, and he too is
far from his masculinity for he alternately takes these man-eaters to be authentic women.
Hedda’s Madness
Ibsen takes the extreme case in Hedda Gabler. Hedda is so for gone with the idealist rot that she
cannot for a moment acknowledge reality. Life is continually letting her down, only her fantasy
of life as it ought to be, clear and beautiful—for Thea this become sweet and pure—remains
constant to her. And this degree of idealistic fervor Ibsen considers madness. Mad, Hedda
certainly is. Mad in her insistence upon the rightness of her vision against all reality, mad in her
idealistic meddling in the lives of people sufficiently tainted with idealism themselves to be
quarry for her, mad, finally, in the complete servility of her fate. For Hedda is proven wrong
most drastically in the conclusion of the play, Judge Brack, the scheming political man has her
completely at his disposal. Her ideals lead to his kind of servility, to be exploited and possessed
by a ’smiling sixty-year old public man’. And to this point she comes by way of the myth of self-
sufficiency, controlling her own and men’s destinies.
Hedda’s Farcical and Abnormal Behavior
In a sense Hedda Gabler is a farce. Hedda is continually made ridiculous by the facts as Ibsen
reveals them. Her favorite romanticism, suicide by shooting, is not spared ridicule either.
Hedda’s victory promises to be the subjection of Loevborg to the destiny which she has worked
out for him—this suicide by shooting. And Loevborg is hypnotically instructed to shoot himself
cleanly through the temple. In point of fact the gun kills him when it accidentally goes off in his
pocket, and Loevborg dies slowly with his bowels torn to pieces. The death of Loevborg then is
the significant crisis in the play. It represents to Hedda the final obtrusion of reality upon her
identity for the final victory of the fantasy has become dirtied by scandal the too-physical image
of Loevborg, her Pagan god, dying with his bowels spattered about the room. At no point in her
history has the ideal projected upon this or that external reality, justified to Hedda. At no point
has she accepted reality as an adult is forced to accept it, and with its pain and its conflicts,
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attempted to negotiate it. Hedda remains a child, and her way out of this disillusionment is by
the deluded way of a child. If reality will not conform to her pattern then she will escape reality,
she will escape scandal, dirt, disillusion. She will deny herself to reality and to Judge Brack, she
will win the empty victory of suicide, and she will die the death of the hero, a death which will be
a gesture of defiance to the dirty world.

Conclusion
So Hedda fulfilling the logic Ibsen perceives operative in the neurotic life of such a romantic
idealist kills herself. She represents the wastage of a system of thinking and feeling which places
the highest valuation upon the beauty of as opposed to the grimness of reality. And it is wastage
not only of Hedda, but of Loevborg’s genius and masculinity, of his work, and finally the child
Hedda might be carrying. This child can be considered the final assault of reality ‘scandal’ upon
Hedda. She follows out the logic of rejection; her own sexuality, male sexuality, adult
responsibility, conflict, the child, and life are all made dirt and are destroyed.

Psychoanalysis in Hedda Gabler

The established view of Hedda Gabler sees the play as a study of the frustration and despair
engendered in the exceptional individual by a conventionalized society. In this paper I present a
psychoanalytic re-interpretation of the play which in certain respects inverts this received
reading.
Insofar as it does so, however, my interpretation is intended not to cancel the received view but
to play against it. The first section of the paper is predominantly Freudian in approach. The
second section takes up certain Kleinian ideas which are broached in the first, and explores
them more fully. The third section exploits some of Winnicott’s key concepts, especially as they
have been elaborated by Christopher Bollas. The paper seeks to enlarge our understanding of
the nature of Hedda Gabler’s alienation and despair through a fresh study of the dynamic
structure of the play as a whole. I am also suggesting that Ibsen should be seen as a major
precursor both of Freud and the object-relations tradition in psychoanalysis.
Section I - The Figure In The Carpet Introduction -
Ibsen And Psychoanalysis
‘Ibsen did not write or think as a Freudian,’ writes Robin Young in the Preface to his study of the
dramatist (1989, p.12). As a scholar of the Norwegian language and its literature Young writes
with at least one kind of indisputable authority. Unsurprisingly he asserts that Ibsen can only be
understood in the context of the Norwegian literary culture he grew up with, and in this respect
Young’s book makes interesting reading, especially in its provocative contention that Ibsen was
in many respects an anti-Romantic. But if there is one truth which has emerged clearly from the
age of theory it is that no text can be finally enclosed in a single defining and exclusive context,
and of this truth Robin Young’s book provides striking illustration, for in reality both his general
approach to Ibsen’s plays and his detailed interpretations of them would be unthinkable had
Freud never written. Young consistently reads Ibsen’s symbolism as pointing to early
experiences which have left his major characters emotionally crippled: Young’s Ibsen, like
Freud, is an archaeologist of the psyche. It is in fact something of a regular feature of critical
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writing on Ibsen that where the critic feels impelled to distance himself from psychoanalysis (as
several do), the Freudian infection will nevertheless be seen to have invaded his text in one
surreptitious fashion or another. (Clurman, 1977, and Gray, 1977, are notable examples.)
Critical writing on a given author will frequently reproduce the field of forces which animate the
author’s work. In my view psychoanalysis features as the ‘other’ of Ibsen criticism because the
conception, birth and development of psychoanalysis are in fact profoundly foreshadowed in
Ibsen’s major plays. In this paper I argue, indeed, that Ibsen writes and thinks not only as a
Freudian, but that in Hedda Gabler in particular he is a major precursor of both Melanie Klein
and D.W.Winnicott. Moreover among contemporary analytic writers one of the most interesting
of the successors of Klein and Winnicott is Christopher Bollas. I shall suggest that the argument
is strikingly confirmed, therefore, when we find that Bollas’s work on the ‘unthought known’, the
‘first human aesthetic’ and the ‘destiny drive’ resonates uncannily with Ibsen’s play (Bollas,
1978, 1987, and 1989) and in particular with the heroine’s characteristic preoccupation with the
‘beautiful’. As I attempt to substantiate these large claims I am also proposing a radical
reorientation of the received understanding of Hedda Gabler, for in my view the play has been
emptied of much of its originality through a reading which reduces it to a familiar critique of
‘bourgeois society’ - a reading, that is to say, which is itself shallow and conventionalised.
Plot And Themes Of The Play
The established reading of Ibsen’s play focusses very much on its central character, who is seen
in some qualified sense at least, as an existential, or romantic, or tragic heroine. Hedda Gabler,
it seems, presents us with a particular version of ‘liberal tragedy’, that form in which the claims
of an alienated individual are uncompromisingly asserted against those of a conventional society
(Williams, 1966 and 1971). At the age of twenty nine, and having ‘danced herself out’, the
aristocratic Hedda Gabler has married Jorgen Tesman, an indefatigable scholar and pedant. If
Tesman’s world seemed to offer her some sort of security, in the event she feels that she is
suffocating in its claustrophobically middle class atmosphere. The action of the play is presided
over by the portrait of Hedda’s father, General Gabler, which now hangs in the Tesmans’
drawing room. This portrait of Hedda’s dead father serves as the symbol of a moribund military-
aristocratic world which no longer offers his daughter a home. Of her mother we hear no
mention at all, and Hedda’s only other remaining connection with the world she comes from is
the pair of pistols which she has inherited from her father. Her disconcerting habit of firing off
these pistols, from time to time, dramatises the profound dissonance between herself and her
present world, and her frustration with the emptiness of her life. It seems she can conceive of no
future for herself other than a life of excruciating boredom. During the opening scenes of the
play various hints are thrown out to suggest that Hedda is pregnant, but the prospect of
motherhood is so far from providing her with a reason for living that it seems to be anathema to
her. Certainly the child would be born into an unpromising environment, for throughout the
play we have the utmost difficulty in thinking of Hedda and Tesman as a parental couple.
Tesman’s assumption that they have everything in common is matched by Hedda’s inward belief
that they have nothing. I shall suggest in my later discussion that the struggle to constitute the
parental couple is one of the play’s deep preoccupations.
If Hedda’s character has been formed in a military-paternal setting, Tesman still lives in an
atmosphere of motherly concern, brought up as he has been by a trio of adoring and self-
sacrificing women - his two Aunts, Julle and Rina, and Berte, the maid. During the opening
sequence of the action, with the Tesmans newly returned from a six month honeymoon trip in
Europe, we are given an early indication of Hedda’s hostility to the world in which she finds
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herself when, on an impulse, she speaks slightingly of a hat which she knows to be Aunt Julle’s,
but which she pretends to believe is ‘the maid’s’. That she knew the hat to be Aunt Julle’s is
revealed to us through a subsequent passage of dialogue between Hedda and Judge Brack. The
latter is a friend of the family with whom she shares a habit of risqué conversation; he is as cold-
bloodedly cynical as Tesman is naďve and good-natured, and his one purpose throughout the
play is to engineer an affair with Hedda.
Meanwhile much greater scope for the central character to act upon her world opens up before
her with the arrival on the scene of Thea Elvsted, a younger colleague of Hedda’s during her
schooldays. A good deal of our sense of the play’s direction is produced by the interplay between
these two female characters. It can hardly be said, however, that the initial comparison suggests
that Hedda is the more independent or romantic of the two women. Hedda has married Tesman
apparently for no better reason than that ‘he insisted with might and main on being allowed to
support me’ (HG, p.300). Thea, on the other hand, has just walked out of her own marriage of
convenience on account of what now seems to her a higher vocation, for she has become
dedicated to the role of companion and support to Ejlert Loevborg, a gifted but unstable writer,
who might at any moment, it seems, return to his former drunken habits, but for Thea’s loyal
ministrations.
Complications unfold when we learn that Hedda herself has had an earlier relationship with
Loevborg, which broke up when she threatened to shoot him. It seems that she did so because,
for her, Loevborg had in some undisclosed fashion begun to ask too much of the relationship.
Since that time Loevborg’s life has taken another turn, for under the tutelage of Thea Elvsted he
has written two books - the first, a general history of society, has been a succčs d’estime; the
second, a meditation on the future, exists only in manuscript but promises to make a
considerable stir when it is published. Hedda’s complex feelings about the relationship between
Thea and Loevborg fuel the action of the play. To what extent her apparent belief that Loevborg
should be liberated from the constraints of his relationship with Thea is a rationalization of her
jealousy it is not easy to discern, but at any rate she so works upon him that he goes to a
bachelor party given by Brack and gets drunk once again. The consequence is that he loses the
manuscript, which by this time has acquired an intense emotional value for all concerned - they
have come to think of it, in fact, as a child. When the manuscript comes into Hedda’s possession,
via Tesman (who found it by the roadside), she burns it; and when the distraught Loevborg (who
knows only that he has lost the ‘child’) returns to her house, she encourages his thoughts of
suicide - and puts into his hands one of her father’s pistols. Loevborg makes his way back to the
rooms of ‘Mademoiselle Diana’, where he believes the manuscript was stolen from him, and in
an unruly scene (reported to Hedda by Judge Brack) the pistol goes off and Loevborg is killed.
Brack attempts to use these circumstances to play upon Hedda’s fear of scandal and so to
blackmail her into a liaison. But in the dénouement, while Thea and Tesman are beginning to try
to reconstruct Loevborg’s manuscript from the notes which Thea kept, Hedda shoots herself. It
is left to the dismayed Brack to pronounce the final speech: ‘One doesn’t do that kind of thing.’
(HG, p.364)
Imagining The Child
As I have indicated I think that Robin Young is correct when he argues that much of the
published commentary on Ibsen’s plays gives an over romantic view of his work. In the case of
Hedda Gabler even John Northam (1973), perhaps the most reliable of Ibsen critics (in English
at any rate) seems to me to give a hugely distorted account of the play. Like other commentators
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Northam is preoccupied with the character of the protagonist, her supposed revolt against
‘middle class society’, the authenticity or otherwise of her final action, and hence the validity of
her claims to heroic status. Though these issues routinely provide the agenda for most
discussion of the play, I shall argue that they are only very partially what Hedda Gabler is about.
The protagonist of Ibsen’s play is for all of us a deeply troubling dramatic creation - outside of
Shakespeare and the Greeks, none more so perhaps. Northam attempts to escape from the
challenging perplexity which Hedda Gabler arouses in our minds by producing a highly
romanticised appraisal of her character and actions. When he attributes to Ibsen’s heroine ‘a
residually creative sense of human potentiality’ (p.182) Northam undoubtedly points to
something which is at the heart of the play, but his belief that she also displays ‘serene self-
confidence’ (p.168) is simply astonishing, for what is Hedda Gabler if not a deeply troubled soul?
In producing his idealized portrait of Ibsen’s central character Northam is responding, albeit
wrong-headedly, I believe, to the central dynamic of Ibsen’s play. It seems to me that as we
watch Hedda Gabler we feel that the cast of characters as a whole faces the responsibility of
nurturing the germ of life doubly symbolised by Loevborg’s book and Hedda’s unborn child. As
the play goes forward it evokes in us a profound concern and apprehension for the future of this
‘child’. The play works upon us with such gravity and depth of feeling because from first to last
we fear that the human group before us is mortally near to failure in the ‘holding’ and
nurturance of its ‘offspring’. Critical misreading of the play derives from the obscuring of this
very troubling question of the fate of the ‘child’ - and the corresponding flight into an attempt to
redeem Hedda Gabler so that, however desperately, she may be seen not as a destroyer but as
the carrier of the life-principle in the play. These processes of repression and distortion are at
work in Northam’s paragraphs on the burning of the book. In describing this event Northam
more or less veils from sight the eerily dreadful spectacle of the mother-to-be burning a ‘child’:
‘Now I’m burning your child, Thea - you and your curly hair! Your child and Eilert Loevborg’s.
Now I’m burning - now I’m burning your child.’ (HG, p.345) The fearful ambiguity of that last
sentence (‘I am burning...’) reveals that the annihilating hatred which is dramatised in this scene
is directed as much against the self as against the object. To refer to this moment as a
‘tremendous fulfilment’, as Northam does (p.169), serves not only to obscure the horror of it, but
to prevent us altogether from grasping the significance of the book-child theme within the play
as a whole.
Triangular Patterns
To ignore this theme is to turn aside, understandably perhaps, from some of the deepest
unconscious fears, phantasies and anxieties which the play arouses: that if we surrender to some
of our darkest impulses, for instance, we may destroy everything that is good in the world. It is
also, at the same time, to miss the way in which the book-child theme shapes the structure of the
play as a whole. Throughout Hedda Gabler there is a triangular patterning which has been given
remarkably little attention, despite the fact that it is very prominently highlighted during the
scenes between Hedda and Brack:
Brack: All want is to have a pleasant intimate circle of friends where I can be useful, in
one way or another, and can come and go freely - like a trusted friend.
Hedda: Of the husband, you mean?
Brack: (Leaning forward) To be quite frank, preferably of the wife. But of the husband,
too, in the second place, of course. I assure you that sort of—shall I call it
triangular relationship? – is actually a very pleasant thing for everybody
concerned.
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(HG, p.300-1)
I shall suggest that in the course of the play this triangular patterning continually forms and re-
forms itself - as if in some shifting magnetic field - in three distinct but essentially related
figurations. The book-child theme is embedded in the more overt drama of sexual liaisons and
rivalries, for example, in that the various couplings suggest a range of possibilities as to the
parentage of the ‘child’. And because the play generates so many different ‘subject positions’, in
this and other ways, we come to feel that it is being staged in some figurative space in which the
potentialities of human nature are being very profoundly explored.
(i) Sexual Jealousies
If, as I shall go on to show, the book-child motif is truly the figure in the carpet, it is the play of
adult sexual relationships which provides as it were the setting for the more subliminal
modulations of the theme. All of the major characters are most obviously defined of course by
the parts they play in the kind of triangular situations which are of such absorbing interest to
Hedda and Brack. The two female characters (three if we include the non-appearing
Mademoiselle Diana) are combined with the three males (four if we include Thea Elvsted’s
husband) to produce almost every possible coupling. Thea is married to Elvsted, but devoted to
their children’s tutor, Loevborg; at the close she will form a relationship with Tesman to
resurrect the ‘child’ she created with Loevborg. Hedda is married but not committed to Tesman.
Earlier in her life she feared to commit herself to her affair with Loevborg, and now she toys
dangerously with Judge Brack. Thea Elvsted is jocularly referred to as an old flame of Tesman’s.
Now respectably married, however, this complacent husband has no thought that he might have
rivals - though in fact Loevborg is jealous of him and Brack is determined to outflank them both.
Finally, the two women are also involved in a complex pattern of rivalry. Hedda is jealous of
Thea’s relationship with Loevborg and of the latter’s connection with Mlle Diana, while Thea is
jealous of the ‘other’ woman of Loevborg’s imagination - who may again be Diana but is most
probably Hedda herself.
The ways in which sexuality figures in human life are further dramatized in the play through
such varying manifestations as the off-stage world of Mlle Diana, which shadows the bourgeois
respectabilities, on the one hand, to Aunt Julie’s domestic rejoicing in Hedda’s pregnancy, on
the other. In fact it is only the relationship between Hedda and Brack - a sterile and destructive
sparring between egotisms - which has no reference at all to the theme of the ‘child’. From
Hedda’s marriage to Tesman, to the relationship formed during the closing scene by Tesman
and Mrs Elvsted (with a view to their resurrecting Loevborg’s book-child) each liaison is shaped
by this second ‘triangular’ theme - that is to say, the parental couple with their embryonic
offspring. At the level of social themes Ibsen’s supposed preoccupation with individual
fulfillment is inseparable in this play from the equally powerful theme of responsibility. If it is
obvious that Hedda Gabler reworks the plot and themes of A Doll’s House, one of the major
differences is that, unlike the earlier play, Hedda Gabler does not sidestep the question of the
children, or child. On the contrary, so intensely is the theme of the child-book imbricated in the
sexual relationships that the play does not allow us to think of freedom, fulfillment and
responsibility as separable concepts. Conventional readings and some of Ibsen’s polemical
utterances notwithstanding, this play, as a whole, is so far from proposing an isolated
individualism as an ideal that it presents the theme of human potentiality in terms of the
creative/destructive couple and moreover makes the fate of the child-book within that setting an
essential measure of the relationship itself. So central is this motif that, in my view, the struggle
within the play to constitute a realm within which the child-book might survive is the play.
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(ii) The Parents-And-Child Triangle - Klein, Winnicott And Creativity

In her chapter on ‘Art and the depressive position’ in Dream, Phantasy and Art Hannah Segal
refers to the familiar notion that the ‘work of art is often felt by the artist as a symbolic baby’
(1991, p.95). In Kleinian terms symbol-making is linked, of course, with the idea of ‘reparation’.
While the rage and frustrations of infancy are vented, in imagination, against the frustrating
object (the breast/mother), the ‘depressive position’ is reached when the infant becomes able to
deal with ambivalent feelings of love and hate towards the frustrating object, to experience guilt
and depression about his/her own destructiveness, and to wish to ‘restore’ the maternal object
which has been ‘destroyed’. For Hannah Segal this line of thought leads to an important
Kleinian paradox, namely that ‘the artist’s work is new and yet arises from an urge to recreate or
restore’. Insofar as creative work is a restoration of lost objects in the internal world it generates
a sense of re-discovery; but insofar as the process is necessarily symbolic, the subject ‘has the
freedom of its use - it is something created anew’. Hannah Segal goes on to capture this Kleinian
paradox in a sentence which resonates extraordinarily, I believe, with Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. Of
the dual process of restoration/creation she writes: ‘It is a restoring in one’s internal world of a
parental couple creating a new baby.’ (p.95)
In my view this is a beautifully succinct statement of the dynamic which engages us so deeply in
Hedda Gabler. The reason why we are so actively engaged in Ibsen’s play is that we are drawn
into a realm of potentiality - by the means which I have outlined. The world of the play is not
given - it is not there in the list of dramatis personae, in an account of the plot, or even in the
action on the stage insofar as this might be the object of a spectator’s attention. The work which
Ibsen has given us is there only as we participate in the play of effects whereby the existence of a
realm in which the ‘baby’ might have a life is always in question: throughout the play this realm
is always being created - and destroyed.
The play concerns itself with the making and unmaking of the human world. The sense of some
fundamental breakdown within the community of the play is dramatised in the strange duality
of the book-child theme. In ‘Living Creatively’ Winnicott writes:
... it has to be remembered that a baby may be conceived uncreatively - that is
without being conceived of, without having been arrived at as an idea in the mind.
On the other hand, a baby may start up just at the right moment when it is wanted
by both parties. In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Edward Albee studies the fate
of a baby that is conceived of, but without taking flesh. What a remarkable study in
both play and film! (1970, p.48)
Albee’s play has striking affinities with Hedda Gabler. The unborn child of the Tesmans’
marriage has been conceived but not conceived of, while the book-child of Thea and Loevborg
(like George and Martha’s imaginary son in the later play) has been conceived of, but is not a
fleshly child. Like Albee’s play, Hedda Gabler uses the intriguingly subtle theme of the
imaginary child to explore what it means to live creatively, and more particularly, what it means
when one is unable to find the clue to doing so. For Ibsen, as for Winnicott, there is no more
fundamental theme. In Hedda Gabler Ibsen’s most memorable character wages a life and death
struggle to overcome her sense of futility, to escape from her despair at being unable to live
creatively. For Hedda is no more able to create a living conception of her own life than she is to
conceive of a life for the child she has conceived with Tesman.
In ‘Living Creatively’ Winnicott summarises much of his thinking on this subject when he says
that ‘Creativity... is the retention throughout life of something that belongs properly to the infant
experience: the ability to create the world.’ He goes on to say that, ‘for the baby this is not
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difficult, because if the mother is able to adapt to the baby’s needs, the baby has no initial
appreciation of the fact that the world was there before he or she was conceived or conceived of.’
(p.40) In a later paragraph he outlines the process whereby creativity is retained as the ‘reality
principle’ makes itself felt:
The infant becomes ready to find a world of objects and ideas, and, at the same pace of growth of
this aspect of the baby, the mother is presenting the world to the baby. In this way, by her degree
of adaptation at the beginning, the mother enables the baby to experience omnipotence, to
actually find what he creates, to create and link up with what is actual. The nett result is that
each baby starts up with a new creation of the world. (p.49)
When ‘what we create’ and ‘what we find’ are ‘linked up’ we are of course in the realm of the
transitional object, that ‘third area’ or ‘potential space’ in which play and symbol-making begin,
and continue throughout life (Winnicott, 1971). In the world of Hedda Gabler it is as if there has
been some tear in the fabric of things whereby she is denied access to this realm of experience.
For her the actual is no more than the actual. At a loss to find the gesture which would effect the
transformation she yearns for, Hedda will seek to animate her existence through manipulation
of the lives of others.
(iii) The Primal Scene
What are the obstacles to the creative realization of the powerful energies embodied in the
heroine of Hedda Gabler and those around her? How is it that the birth and survival of the child-
book, bound up as they are with the gestation of the play itself, are attended by so much anxiety
and apprehension? An initial part of the answer to this question concerns the way in which
Freud’s ‘primal scene’ figures in the play - haunts it indeed, from beginning to end. The opening
exchange of the play, between Tesman’s Aunt Julle, and his servant Bertha, notify us that the
young couple, Jorgen Tesman and Hedda Gabler, having returned the previous evening from a
six month honeymoon trip, are still in bed, though it seems to be quite late in the morning.
These events, especially as they are spoken of by these two good-hearted and motherly women,
are natural enough in themselves, but everything which subsequently happens in the play serves
to make the nature of the sexual relationship between the off-stage couple (which is of course
variously constituted) a source of great perplexity for the ‘spectator’ both on and off the stage,
this of course being the essence of the primal scene experience. Here then we have the third
variation of the triangular figure which structures the play. The primal scene, in Ibsen’s play at
least, is the troubling shadow of the process outlined by Hannah Segal. ‘The restoration...of the
parental couple creating a new baby’ constitutes a set of good object relations in the ‘inner
world’, but the primal scene engenders jealousy and, as Melanie Klein suggests, envy. The one
promotes a secure relationship between self and world, the other a disturbing confusion
between reality and fantasy: the benign autonomy of the inner stage on the one hand, and the
anxious fascination of the peep-show - with the voyeur as victim, on the other.
Projected for us by Aunt Julle and Bertha, our initial impression of the sexual couple is, it seems,
perfectly wholesome. In every aspect of the play, however, benign impressions rapidly give way
to a sense of unease, anxiety and menace. If the primal scene effects are complex and multi-
layered, however, one reason for this is that while Hedda Gabler features as the female partner
in that opening sequence, for much of the play she figures as the child-spectator. Her intimacy
with Judge Brack, for instance, is constituted not so much by any mutual passion but by his
feeding her sexual curiosity with gossip about the goings on in circles which are closed to her:
Brack: And so the procession starts, gentleman. I hope we shall have a gay time, as a
certain charming lady puts it.
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Hedda: Ah, if only that charming lady could be there, invisible –

Brack: Why invisible?
Hedda: So as to hear a little of your gaiety—uncensored, Mr Brack. (HG, p.323)
On the following morning Brack describes to Hedda how Loevborg ‘fetched up at a party at
Mademoiselle Diana’s rooms’, and how - when Loevborg created a scene about the
disappearance of his pocket-book, the result was ‘a general fight in which both the ladies and the
gentlemen were involved’ (HG, p.336). And all this comes to a climax when Brack later reveals
to Hedda that Loevborg did not die in hospital but was actually ‘found shot in - in Mademoiselle
Diana’s boudoir’ (HG, p.358). Though the nuance of Ibsen’s text is apparently untranslatable,
we are to understand that the bullet destroys Loevborg’s sexual organ. (See Durbach, p.47.)
During the course of the play the scene of sexual coupling, which remains pretty constantly
before the mind’s eye, is transformed from the domestic picture of the newly-weds asleep in bed,
to that of an indiscriminate and deadly combat taking place in a house of ill-repute. Freud noted
that the primal scene is felt by the child to be sadistic in nature, but he did not explain this
finding. Melanie Klein holds that the child projects its own envious hatred into the scene - and
into the phantasy of the ‘combined parent figure’ - which both denies the parents’ sexuality and
embodies the child’s hostility (‘a general fight in which both the ladies and the gentlemen were
all involved’). The processes of splitting, doubling and inversion in the play are beyond anything
like exhaustive analysis, but perhaps the most important version of the primal triangle is that
constituted by Loevborg and Thea - with Hedda as ‘spectator’. In my view Hedda’s notion that
she breaks up the Loevborg-Thea relationship in order to ‘liberate’ Loevborg is a transparent
rationalization of the ruthless envy which impels her to destroy this creatively parental liaison.
In the end it seems that the only staging of the primal scene which Hedda will be prepared as it
were to live with is the dreadful inversion of it which is constituted by the scene of her own
death - where she turns the paternal pistol-phallus against herself and seeks an astonishingly
paradoxical affirmation of selfhood through the psychic erasure of any trace of her own origin.
SECTION II -’THE WORST SYNNE THAT IS’ CREATIVITY, ENVY AND
DESTRUCTIVENESS
The restoration within the play of a realm embodied in ‘the parental couple creating a new baby’
is menaced, as I’ve said, by its shadow - in the form of primal scene anxieties, and more
obviously by the drama of sexual conflict and rivalry. The dramatis personae in Hedda Gabler
can rather crudely be classified in two categories - the concerned (Thea Elvsted, Tesman, Aunt
Julie, Berte) and the demonic (Loevborg, Brack, Hedda). If the play is viewed in this way then
the theme which I have explored might be expressed as a search for a profoundly elusive sense
of integration. But if it is the case that creativity would be realized in the marriage of
imagination and concern, then this union seems to be (almost) beyond the play’s conceiving, for
within the collective psyche of the play imaginative energy seems to be entirely dissociated from
concern and inseparably linked with ruthlessness. It is clear in fact that the sense of creative
potentiality which the play generates is matched, if not overborne, by a will to destruction which
threatens to leave us with nothing but its own epitaph to contemplate.
Envy In Chaucer And David Fincher’s Seven
In my view the treatment of human destructiveness in Hedda Gabler presents us with a
remarkable anticipation of Melanie Klein’s writings on the theme of envy. In everyday speech
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the word envy carries no very sinister vibration perhaps, but there is nevertheless a variety of
testimony to the effect that this sin is the most deadly aberration of which human nature is
capable. In Chaucer’s ‘Parson’s Tale’, for instance, we are told that ‘Envye... is the worst synne
that is’, for two very similar reasons: one is that envy is the malicious enemy of ‘bountee’ - which
is the quality which characterises the ‘Hooly Goost’ itself; and the second is that envy is ‘ageyns
alle vertues and alle goodnesses’. Envy, we are told, is the only sin which does not have ‘som
delit in itself’ but only ‘angwissh and sorwe’ (Chaucer, 1957, pp.242-3). The medieval theme of
the seven deadly sins is re-examined in David Fincher’s horrifically gruesome but highly
intelligent film with the laconic title Seven. What is of particular interest here is that while the
sins come up in more than one order as the action proceeds, the traditional list is in the end re-
arranged so that envy features, very dramatically, as the final one - underwriting, as it were, all
the others. In the course of the film the psychotic character refered to as ‘John Doe’ (Kevin
Spacey) stages a series of seven murders, each of which revolves around one of the seven sins,
each of his victims being guilty of one of them. John Doe’s project is to preach a shattering
sermon on the condition of the times: his view of their grim corruption links him, ironically,
with one of the two detectives who are pursuing him - the humane but very disillusioned
Detective Lieutenant played by Morgan Freeman. In the dénouement of the film John Doe
contrives so to work upon the irascible temperament of Morgan Freeman’s younger colleague,
Detective Mills (Brad Pitt), that the latter shoots John Doe himself, as Doe had always intended
that he should. This final episode dramatises the last two sins on John Doe’s list - wrath and
envy - for John Doe has revealed that this latter is his own sin: ‘I wish I could have lived like
you’, he says to Mills, ‘I envy your normal life.’ While no summary can evoke the appalling
grimness of this dénouement, and all that has led up to it, the logic of the final revelation is clear
enough. As we are told in the ‘Parson’s Tale’, envy is different from and worse than the other
sins, and, as understood here - as the envy not merely of the other’s possessions (covetousness)
but of the quality of his life - it is the most consuming and destructive of those seven sins. This
view of the matter is also exactly in keeping with René Girard’s analysis, as he summarises it in
the introduction to A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare: ‘Envy involuntarily testifies to a
lack of being that puts the envious to shame... that is why envy is the hardest sin to
acknowledge.’ (1991, p.6)
Iago, ‘John Doe’, And Hedda Gabler
Mention of Shakespeare in this context will not necessarily bring to mind Othello, but I shall
suggest that both this play and Hedda Gabler are dramas of jealousy - each of which masks a
more rooted tale of envy. Hedda and Iago are compulsively driven to destroy that which puts
them to shame - the creative being of the other. One of the metaphors which animate the
speeches of Iago is the notion of riches and poverty as a figure for the individual’s sense of
himself and his relationship with the other:
...Poor and content is rich, and rich enough,
But riches, fineless, is as poor as winter
To him that fears he shall be poor... (III iii 176-8)
Like many of Iago’s speeches which are apparently calculated to create a certain effect upon
others, these lines are in reality expressive of something in Iago’s own nature. Hedda Gabler is
also a calculatingly ruthless manipulator of other people’s lives, and in a transitory moment of
self-revelation she gives expression to the link between her desire to control and her own
poverty of being in similar terms:
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Hedda: I want, for once in my life, to have power over a human being’s fate.
Mrs Elvsted: But haven’t you got that?
Hedda: I have not. I never have had.
Mrs Elvsted: Not over your husband’s?
Hedda: That would be worth having wouldn’t it? Ah, if you could only realise how poor I
am. And here you are, offered such riches! (Throwing her arms passionately
round her.) I think I shall burn your hair off, after all. (HG, p.324)
There is, then, a certain affinity between Iago, ‘John Doe’, and Hedda Gabler - a gnawing life-
emptiness which drives on to extreme solutions. If it is obvious enough that each of these three
characters is a manipulator of other people’s lives, what is so revealing is that none of them has
in view any object which might be classified as worldly gain. (Iago is ostensibly put out over
Cassio’s promotion, but this no more explains Iago than his fantastical notion that Othello has
cuckolded him does so.) Frighteningly unable to find the experience of guilt, still less the
impulse to make reparation, each of them seeks to fill the void of his or her own being through
control of the lives of others. What is then above all so strikingly similar is that each of these
characters is driven to stage a scene, or scenes, of appalling human destruction; for envy, of the
kind we are dealing with here, emerges as the most dramatic - or rather the most dramaturgical
- of the seven deadly sins. Envy in Hedda Gabler presents us with the antithesis of the ‘restoring
in one’s internal world of a parental couple creating a baby’. It stages the destruction of the
parental couple and the abortion/murder of the life of the baby. Once the exposition is complete
this dynamic shapes the action of the play: Hedda undermines the relationship between
Loevborg and Thea; she burns the manuscript which they created; she incites Loevborg to
commit suicide, providing him with one of her pistols so that he may do so; and with the other
pistol she shoots herself, thereby ending the life of the child she has conceived with Tesman.
‘The capacity to give and to preserve life,’ writes Melanie Klein, ‘is felt as the greatest gift and
therefore creativeness becomes the deepest cause for envy’ (1957, p.40). Observations such as
these are grounded of course in Klein’s reading of the relationship between infant and mother in
some of its earliest phases. The ‘good breast’ - the mother’s life-giving nurturance of the child -
is experienced as the first, the primal ‘good object’. While identification with this good object
provides a first ‘impetus to creativeness’, these processes are always complex: envy and
aggression may also be engendered against the magical but at times frustrating powers of the
good object, and while these primitive dynamics will as a rule be more or less overcome when, in
the ‘depressive position’, the capacity to live with ambivalence begins to develop, envy of
creativeness will (like the Oedipus complex) remain in varying degrees as a component of the
individual psyche.
From a Kleinian point of view the choice of alcoholism as the weakness of character which
Hedda is able to exploit - in order to wreak havoc upon the relationship between Loevborg and
Thea - is by no means an arbitrary one. If it is obvious enough that Thea Elvsted plays the part of
the good mother who literally weans Loevborg, lovingly, from his addiction, how is Hedda
Gabler’s cruel exploitation of that addiction to be understood? Like a number of other accounts
of her motives which she puts forward, Hedda’s claim that in driving Loevborg back to drink she
is liberating him clearly lacks authenticity. Like Iago’s more or less fantastic rationalisations,
and indeed John Doe’s claim that for him to carry out a series of psychotic murders is to preach
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a sermon to humanity, her assertion bears all the signs of a perverse rationalisation. Gnawed by
her emptiness Hedda gives herself the phantasy ‘satisfaction’, through her identification with
Loevborg, of both greedily consuming and wreaking vengeance upon the frustrating good object.

Hedda Gabler, Jorgen Tesman and the Masks of Envy

The stereotypical reading of Hedda Gabler, which sees Tesman, with his relatives and
household, as representing a claustrophobically bourgeois complacency - and Hedda, by a
simple antithesis, as the imprisoned spirit of authentic protest - makes the real complexities of
Ibsen’s play impossible to discern. Within the terms of this conventional opposition Hedda’s
marriage, for example, can only remain an unaccountable riddle. Her own explanation - ‘I had
simply danced myself out...’ (HG, p.299) - is patently inadequate, another characteristic
rationalisation. Are we not invited to ponder the idea that in some very much unacknowledged
fashion Hedda Gabler is actually drawn to Jorgen Tesman and what he represents for her? A
powerful insight of Melanie Klein’s seems to me to make clear how this might be so:
A particular cause of envy is the absence of it in others. The envied person is felt to
possess what is at bottom most prized and most desired - and this is a good object,
which also implies a good character and sanity. Moreover the person who can
ungrudgingly enjoy other people’s creative work and happiness is spared the
torments of envy, grievance and persecution. Whereas envy is a source of great
unhappiness, a relative freedom from it is felt to underlie contented and peaceful
states of mind - ultimately sanity. (p.41)
The subject of envy comes up at a crucial moment in one of the scenes between Hedda and
Tesman, when Tesman is about to reveal that he has Loevborg’s manuscript in his possession.
Before revealing this he makes clear in his own way how much the book has impressed him:
Tesman: You can’t think what a book that’s going to be. I should think it’s going to be one
of
the most remarkable things that’s ever been written. Just think!
Hedda: No doubt. That doesn’t interest me.
Tesman: I must admit one thing Hedda. When I read it, a perfectly detestable feeling
came over me.
Hedda: Detestable?
Tesman: There I was envying Eilert for having been able to write a thing like that. Just
think, Hedda.
Hedda: Yes, yes. I am. (HG, pp 330-1)
The ironies which arise from this interchange are by no means what might be expected. To begin
with let us note that it is Tesman who is stirred by the book, and Hedda who is too self-enclosed
to take any interest in it, even though the play leads us to believe that she is one of its begetters,
and the critics would have us believe that she is the poetic-imaginative spirit of the play. At the
same time, if the kind of innocence which Tesman displays in this passage makes him frequently
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appear comically naďve in the eyes of the audience and tediously limited in Hedda’s, the
‘relative freedom’ from discontent which very much goes with it, is also itself enviable.
That Hedda should despise what she is drawn to is a not unfamiliar trait in human nature. In my
view she is not only drawn to Tesman’s good nature in itself, but to the atmosphere of motherly
concern which has given him a sense of well-being not always distinguishable, it’s true, from the
self-centredeness of the spoilt child. Nor is Aunt Julle’s affectionate concern for those around
her merely shallow or sentimental. Her care for her sister is uncomplaining and long-suffering,
and whether Hedda Gabler’s dealings with death are any more ‘authentic’ is, I would suggest, at
least debateable. At any rate Hedda’s irrational attacks on Tesman’s world, as exemplified by the
episode with Aunt Julle’s new hat, can clearly be read as expressions of her destructive envy.
Hedda Gabler and Her World Of Objects
If the play gives us many indications of the benign experiences which Tesman has incorporated
in his psyche, what does duty for the good object in Hedda’s inner world is the pair of pistols
previously belonging to her father. The inner poverty of which she speaks to Thea is highlighted
by the fact that the pistols are indeed the only objects, animate or inanimate, real or imaginary,
with which she has what might be referred to as positive relationship. It is an obvious feature of
the play that whereas Tesman’s world is a maternal one, it appears that for Hedda the only
available identifications are with paternal objects. What is equally obvious from a Kleinian point
of view is that the phallic pistols substitute as good object for the maternal breast. If the portrait
of Hedda’s father presides over the action of the play and his pistols figure so significantly
within it, of course it is conspicuously the case that no reference is made to Hedda’s mother.
That the mother figures as absence is highlighted, I think, when Hedda explains to Brack in Act
III how she and Tesman have come to be living in ‘the very home (she) wished for’. Hedda
recalls that once when Tesman was at a loss for something to talk about, and feeling sorry for
him, she said - ‘quite casually - that I should like to live here in this villa.’ This ‘thoughtlessness’,
she goes on, ‘had its consequences’, for it led to their marrying:
HEDDA: ...You see, it was through this passion for the villa of the late Mrs Falk that
Jorgen Tesman and I found our way to an understanding. That led to our
engagement and marriage and wedding trip and everything. Well, well. As one
make’s one’s bed one must lie on it, I was going to say.
Brack: This is delightful! And all the time, it seems, you weren’t interested in the least?
Hedda: No. Heaven knows, I wasn’t.
Brack: Well, but now? Now that we have made it more or less comfortable for you?
Hedda: Oh! I seem to smell lavender and dried roses in all the rooms. But perhaps Aunt
Julle brought the smell with her.
Brack: (laughing) No, I should think it’s more likely the late Mrs Falk bequeathed it to
you!
Hedda: It reminds one of the departed, all right. Like one’s bouquet, the day after a ball...
My friend you can’t imagine how horribly bored I’m going to be out here.
Brack: But won’t there be some object or other in life for you to work for, like other
people, Madam Hedda?
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Hedda: An object ... that would have something fascinating about it?
Brack: Preferably, of course.
Hedda: Lord knows what kind of an object it could be...
(HG, pp 304-5)
According to Hedda’s account her interest in the house of the late Mrs Falk is as casually
motivated as her marrying Tesman, but the intensity of the play of effects in this passage again
gives the lie to Hedda’s dismissive rationalisations. The house is not only that of a dead woman,
but is linked by sensuous association with the world of Aunt Julle, who represents loving
concern on the one hand, but is linked with the dying Aunt Rina on the other. It reminds Hedda
of ‘the departed’, and like ‘one’s bouquet the day after a ball’, it seems to be associated with
absence and loss, with a bliss which is gone forever.
In her conversation with Brack, Hedda goes on to toy with the notion that Tesman might go into
politics, but, having pointed out why this is an unlikely development, Brack hints broadly that
before long she might have another kind of responsibility to live for, whereupon Hedda declares
that she has ‘no gift for that kind of thing’, and that indeed the only thing she does have a gift for
‘is boring (herself) to death.’ (HG, pp 306-7) A sequence is established here which will be
repeated later in the play. It is in Act III that the book-child comes into Hedda’s possession, and
it is at the end of the act that, bloodcurdlingly, she burns it. Meanwhile, when Tesman has told
Hedda how he came to find the manuscript and has confirmed that such an ‘inspired’
production could not be re-written, she hands him - ‘casually’, as the stage direction says - a
note in which, as he quickly informs Hedda, Aunt Julle tells him that her sister is dying. At
certain moments, when Hedda faces the prospect of motherhood, it is as if she finds herself
haunted by the shadow of a dead or dying mother figure; and her impulse at this moment is to
erase the existence, real or imagined, of any offspring she herself might have. That is to say, it is
as if she seeks to destroy the creative at the very roots of her own being.
SECTION III - FATE OR DESTINY?
Why is Hedda Gabler so preoccupied with style? Why is the aesthetic of suicide of such
importance to her? And how are we to judge this final action of hers? If Hedda is bidding for the
full tragic effect, does the setting of her action after all render it grotesque, absurd, overblown?
Is she in the wrong play - a tragic heroine framed by the elements of farce? When the curtain
falls, has the play’s heroine brought about a transformation of her life, or been mocked in the
attempt? Imposed her own poetic shape upon her life and circumstances, or lent herself, in the
endeavour, to scandal and derision - or mere incomprehension?
Transition And Transformation
This familiar array of unresolvable questions indicates that the dénouement of the play is the
climax of the oscillating relationship between Hedda and her environment which has been
apparent from the earliest scenes. I have already suggested that, in spite of herself, Hedda is
drawn to Tesman’s world on account of the enviably benign object-relations which it appears to
embody. In the final section of this paper I extend the argument by calling on Winnicott’s
thinking about ‘the use of an object’ (Winnicott, 1969), especially as it has beeen elaborated by
Christopher Bollas, through the concepts of the ‘transformational object’ and the ‘destiny drive’.
I suggest, paradoxically enough, that in throwing in her lot with Jorgen Tesman, Hedda Gabler
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is seeking an environment in which she might experience a transformation of her life. In the
event she is unable to use the objects in her internal and external worlds to give shape to her
belief in the ‘beautiful’, or what Northam calls her ‘residually creative sense of human
potentiality’. At the end of everything what she stages is a dramatisation of her strange illusion
that only through destruction can her world come into being - that destruction is creation.
The audience is alerted to the problematic relationship between Hedda and the setting in which
she finds herself even as the play begins. Almost her first words are: ‘One has to get used to
anything new. By degrees.’ (HG, p. 273) During the next few moments she appears concerned
about the open veranda door, the sunlight pouring in, and the flowers which fill the room. It is
then that Aunt Julle presents Tesman with a package containing the old pair of slippers to which
she knows he is attached. ‘Aunt Rina embroidered them for me in bed, lying ill like that. Just
imagine how many memories are worked into them’, he says to Hedda. ‘Not for me,
particularly’, she replies. For readers of Winnicott it must be evident that the slippers are for
Tesman a transitional object; they belong to a mode of experience in which past and present, self
and other are interwoven to create a fabric which is always in the making and therefore gives
point to life. Moreover we sense that his preoccupation with ‘domestic crafts’ in Brabant in the
middle ages is a continuation of the same theme - which has carried him little further into adult
life. It is precisely because Tesman remains caught up in his early attachments of this kind that
Hedda is drawn to him in spite of herself. Tantalisingly, for Hedda, Tesman and his slippers
represent the baffling clue to the way in which ‘objects’ are used to create a world.
Several moments of related significance follow the exchange about the slippers, in an interesting
series. Hedda’s unconscionable behaviour over the hat dramatises her immediate response to
this initial episode. Though she later tells Brack that such behaviour ‘just comes over (her)’ and
she has no idea ‘how to explain it’ (HG, p.303), her impulse in this case is clearly to desecrate
the signifier of her deprivation. A moment later, when Tesman invites his Aunt to notice how
‘plump’ Hedda has grown, Miss Tesman: is overjoyed to think that she is pregnant. Hedda’s
reaction during the subsequent exchange gives the first indication of the way she recoils from
the prospect of motherhood. There is no potential space in her life for a child to come into; she
cannot, as I’ve argued, conceive of the idea. If Tesman can scarcely conceive of it either, the
reason is that he himself is still in the place of the child. From this point of view, then, there is an
oddly inverted mirror relationship between Hedda and her husband.
When Miss Tesman: has departed we see Hedda, alone on the stage, ‘raising her arms and
clenching her hands, as if in fury’ (HG, p.276). On Tesman’s return she remarks to him how
withered the flowers look, and goes on to reject her husband’s appeal to her to behave a little
more like one of the family. There follows a brief discussion on the question of her piano. It is a
conversation which shows how different is Hedda’s life-world from Tesman’s. What we would
like to feel at this point is that the piano suggests one way in which Hedda might be accustomed
to express her potentia, to elaborate a personal aesthetic, and to acquire a sense of ‘living
creatively’. But the turn of the conversation oddly undermines any such expectation. For
Hedda’s concern is simply that this ‘old piano’ of hers ‘doesn’t go with these other things’ (HG,
p. 277). She wishes to see it moved to ‘the back room’ and a new one purchased for the drawing
room. The result is that we see the piano, after all, as a mere physical object occupying a physical
space in the house. We do not feel that two pianos would fill up the absences in Hedda’s life any
more than one.
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If the first act of the play is among other things a remarkable study of the life-worlds of Hedda
and Tesman through their relationships with a range of environmental objects, then of course
the two most dramatically significant of these objects are the portrait of Hedda’s father, and the
pair of pistols. Each of these emphasises the dissonant relationship between Hedda and her new
environment - the portrait because it is a presence which, hauntingly, is never refered to directly
throughout the play; the pistols because, somewhat similarly, they create the impression of a
potential detonation which would destroy this world at a stroke. In psychoanalytic terms the
portrait and the pistols are signifiers of Hedda’s ‘object-relations’ (as are the slippers in
Tesman’s case). Hedda’s desire is to articulate her inner world (her object-relations) in a way
which would promote a sense of living creatively, but the way in which the portrait and the
pistols figure in her world suggests that she is caught up in the repetition of a ghost-filled past
rather than engaged in the creation of a future.
The First Human Aesthetic
In my view certain developments in Winnicott’s thought which have been introduced by
Christopher Bollas illuminate, and are illuminated by, Ibsen’s presentation of Hedda’s quest to
realise her life in terms of her own dramatic idiom. In The Shadow of the Object Christopher
Bollas summmarises his thought about ‘the first human aesthetic’ in the following way:
The mother’s idiom of care and the infant’s experience of this handling is one of
the first if not the earliest human aesthetic. It is the most profound occasion when
the nature of the self is formed and transformed by the environment. The uncanny
pleasure of being held by a poem, a composition, a painting, or, for that matter,
any object, rests on those moments when the infant’s internal world is partly given
form by the mother since he cannot shape them or link them together without her
coverage. (1987, p.32)
The first aesthetic moment belongs to a phase of experience which is pre-cognitive and certainly
pre-verbal. At the same time it remains beyond the subject’s cognitive grasp or verbal
articulation; it is ‘neither social nor moral; it is curiously impersonal and even ruthless.’ What is
also to be noted is that ‘transformation does not mean gratification...(and), likewise, aesthetic
moments are not always beautiful or wonderful - many are ugly and terrifying but nonetheless
profoundly moving because of the existential memory tapped.’ (p.29) While ‘the search for
symbolic equivalents to the transformational object, and the experience with which it is
identified, continues in adult life’, the quest may be pursued ‘to the utter shock or indifference of
the person’s subjective experience of his own desire. A gambler is compelled to gamble.
Subjectively he may wish he did not gamble, even hate his compulsion to do so.’ (p.27) Bollas
concludes the second chapter of his book with this statement: ‘Transformational object-seeking
is an endless memorial search for something in the future that resides in the past. I believe that
if we investigate many types of object relating we will discover that the subject is seeking the
transformational object and aspiring to be matched in symbiotic harmony within an aesthetic
frame that promises to metamorphose the self.’ (p.40) I am suggesting of course that Hedda
Gabler is seeking just such a transformation of the self.
Aware that the spectre of ‘reductionism’ haunts such accounts of human experience, Bollas
observes: ‘It is possible to see how the reduction of spiritual experiences to the discrete
administration of the mother always strikes us as somehow an insult to the integrity of uncanny
experience, as the sacred precedes the maternal. Our earliest experience is prior to our knowing
of the mother as an object in her own right.’ (p.39) What seems to me more important than this
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ingenious observation, however, is that in introducing the category of the aesthetic he makes it
possible to think the relationship between psychoanalysis and art in a way which does not
‘privilege’ the one against the other, or ‘insult’ the experience of being a person. Considered from
this point of view Ibsen and Freud are alike in that they think of becoming a person as the
struggle to shape a style out of an inheritance. Winnicott’s contribution can then be taken to
suggest a revised formulation to the effect that becoming a person is the process of staging our
inheritance in the space of (the) play.
Fate and Destiny
Embedded in this metaphor is the issue which haunts our thinking about psychoanalysis and
literature. Does psychoanalytic interpretation commit us to the idea that literary characters (and
real human beings) are to be seen, necessarily, as acting out a script which is always already
written? In my view the issue has been greatly clarified by certain formulations which
Christopher Bollas has developed in Forces of Destiny (1989) and Being a Character (1993). The
essence of the matter is the distinction he makes between ‘fate’ and ‘destiny’. In the earlier book
he writes:
A person who is fated, who is fundamentally interred in an internal world of self
and object representations that endlessly repeat the same scenarios, has very little
sense of a future that is at all different from the environment they carry around
with them. The sense of fate is a feeling of despair to influence the course of one’s
life. A sense of destiny, however, is a different state, when the person feels he is
moving in a personality progression that gives him a sense of steering his
course. (1989, p.41)
The first two sentences give us an extraordinarily apposite description of the haunted world
which Hedda Gabler inhabits during most of the play. The third sentence encapsulates the mode
of existence she is reaching for - in which the ‘spontaneous gesture’ would open up the sense of a
living future. It is the difference between conforming to a blueprint and fulfilling a potentiality;
between living out time and creating one’s own arc in time. In an earlier chapter of the book
Bollas formulates the ‘sense of destiny’ in a passage which, again, might have been composed
with Hedda Gabler in mind:
The fashioning of life is something like an aesthetic: a form revealed through one’s
way of being. I think there is a particular urge to fashion a life, and this destiny
drive is the ceaseless effort to select and use objects in order to give lived
expression to one’s true self. Perhaps the creativity of a human lifetime is the talent
in articulating one’s idiom. If the person continues to be and feel true to himself
(not living compliantly) and is surprised by the continuing elaboration of his self,
then he is fulfilling his destiny. (1989, p.110)
My suggestion is that Hedda’s despair arises from the fact that she is not able ‘to use objects in
order to give expression to (her) true self’. She is not able to do so because, from a Winnicottian
point of view, she scarcely lives in a world of objects at all. Bollas takes up the obvious question:
What does it mean to ‘live a life in the world of objects’? Do we not all live in a
world of objects’? Do we know of anyone who does not? The issue Winnicott
addresses can only be understood if we grasp that he does not assume that we all
‘live’ a life. We may construct the semblance of such and certainly the false self
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attests to this. But to live a life, to come alive, a person must be able to use objects
in a way that assumes such objects survive hate and do not require undue
reparative work. (p.26)
The word ‘object’ is of course laden with ambiguities, and very usefully so, I think. In the first
place it may refer to a physical object, or, in ‘object-relations’ theory, to a human figure; but in
the second place it may also refer to external or to internal objects, that is, internalised figures or
‘part-objects’ (the breast, the phallus). As we know, it is the question of the relationship between
the subjective and objective which energises a great deal of Winnicott’s thinking. In ‘The Use of
an Object’ he makes a remarkable contribution to our understanding of the way in which the
subjective/objective distinction is established in the course of individual development. It is in
assigning a positive value to aggression within this process that, as Adam Phillips writes,
Winnicott ‘makes his final, and in some ways decisive, revision of the work of Freud and Klein’.
Phillips goes on to summarise the Winnicottian argument as follows: ‘If, in Winnicott’s terms,
the self is first made real through recognition, the object is first made real through aggressive
destruction, and this, of course, makes experience of the object feel real to the self. The object,
Winnicott says, is placed outside omnipotent control by being destroyed while, in fact, surviving
the destruction.’ (1988, p.131) In other words the object acquires a quality of ‘out-thereness’ as a
result of surviving (repeatedly) its destruction in phantasy. Consequently, as Winnicott himself
writes, ‘the subject may now have started to live a life in the world of objects, and so the subject
gains immeasurably...’ (1969, p.90) The gains are those that have been extensively elaborated
upon by Christopher Bollas in his discussion of the way we ‘select and use objects’ to give
expression to an individual idiom or ‘aesthetic’.
My reading of Ibsen’s play can now be stated in a very few words. The figure of the book-child is
a wonderfully imagined device for exploring the theme of ‘the use of an object’. Within the play
as a whole this object is, firstly, both human and non-human; secondly, both internal and
external; and thirdly, both literal and metaphoric. Thus we may think of the book-child as the
play’s transitional object and we can go on to say that the reason why Hedda Gabler is unable to
‘fashion a life’ is that, in her personal world, objects (for the most part) do not survive. That is to
say in the realm where it matters they do not survive her envious hate and destructiveness, and
are therefore not available to be used creatively.
Why does Hedda Gabler commit suicide? It is a moment of astonishing complexity. She has
been trapped by Judge Brack and the humiliation of it is too much for her to live with perhaps.
At the same time she is in despair at the failure of Loevborg’s suicide to ennoble his life, or hers.
Yet, almost concealed by the superficial ironies, a greater despair haunts the following exchange:
Hedda: ...Doesn’t it feel strange to you, Thea? Here you are sitting with Jorgen Tesman
just as you once sat with Eilert Loevborg.
Mrs Elvsted: Well, if only I could inspire your husband too –
Hedda: Oh, that will come out all right - in time.
Tesman: Yes, do you know, Hedda, I really think I am beginning to feel something of the
kind.
But you go back and sit down with Judge Brack again.
Hedda: Is there nothing here I can help you two with?
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Tesman: Not a thing in the world... (HG, p.362)

How ironic that Tesman should have the unwitting power so to exclude Hedda Gabler from the
circle of life, and that the two objects of her envious scorn, Tesman and Thea, should unite to
restore the object she has destroyed. And how ironic also that they should begin to use the book-
child (however ineptly and improbably) to create a new future. A moment later, with inevitable
dramatic logic, Hedda Gabler ‘goes into the inner room...draws the curtain’, and sits down at her
instrument: ‘Suddenly she is heard playing a wild dance tune on the piano’. The last nail is
hammered home when, on account of Aunt Rina, and ‘Eilert’, Tesman cuts short her first defiant
gesture of aesthetic self-expression. Then, within Hedda’s hearing, he goes on to suggest to Mrs
Elvsted that she should move into Aunt Julle’s house so that they can continue their work
together. During these moments Hedda Gabler is thrust back, even more deeply, into the void of
her self-experience: it is as if life has no place for her, whether as begetter or begotten.
In whatever terms we think of it Hedda Gabler’s inheritance is death and despair, absence and
loss. Experiencing herself as an uncreated void her ‘unthought’ project is to stage the scene of
her own conception. Yet at the same time the play reveals in all its workings that Hedda has no
‘inner image of psychic procreativity.’ (Bollas, 1993, p.84) While the play as a whole is struggling
to create such an image the troubling enigma of the central character is that for her this same
struggle constitutes a maddening aporia: to conceive the inconceivable. The logic by which the
dilemma finds its resolution is even more strange. It is when she destroys everything - that is to
say, herself and the future (her unborn child) - that Hedda Gabler finally succeeds in making her
own idiomatic gesture. To destroy everything is to leave nothing left to want, nothing left to
envy. If nothing is left to be reduced to nothing, something may begin to be. ‘A terrible beauty is
born’, and a destiny is fatefully fulfilled.
Epilogue - Staging The Play
Finally I shall claim that the two best known and most distinguished productions of Hedda
Gabler in recent years lend support to the reading of the play which I have developed in this paper.
I have in mind Trevor Nunn’s version, filmed for television, with Glenda Jackson in the central
role (RSC,1975); and Deborah Warner’s production, also made for television, with Fiona Shaw as
the protagonist (BBC,1993). In many ways these two productions are remarkably different from
each other, above all in the central performances. From moment to moment Glenda Jackson’s
Hedda is barely able to conceal her disdain for the people and the world around her; Fiona Shaw’s
Hedda, on the other hand, is almost girlishly unsure of herself. It has to be said that Fiona Shaw’s
Hedda is entirely lacking in aristocratic hauteur, and the production is to that extent
unsatisfactory; but in certain other respects Deborah Warner’s interpretation of the play provides
some uncanny insights and effects - which, I shall suggest, go to the heart of the play.
What the two productions have in common is that in different ways they are both very
carefully conceived explorations of dramatic space, organised around the shifting relationships
between the major characters, the thematic objects and the setting of the play. Trevor Nunn’s
production is based on the triangle. Again and again we see two characters face to face - and
between them we see either the face of a third character, or one of the thematic objects - slippers,
pistols, fire, or manuscript. The potentialities, both creative and destructive, of the space between
two human beings are fascinatingly explored in this production. The space we are continually
aware of in Deborah Warner’s production, on the other hand, is the total dramatic environment.
The set is a drawing room whose proportions are beyond any ordinarily domestic scale. Costumes
and set are in a range of colours which merge into each other - grey, green, silver, black. The
overall tone merges in turn with that of the enormous gilt-framed mirror which, daringly, seems
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to take the place of the portrait of the General. The surface of the mirror is not clear, but misted
over with an unevenly opaque grey, so that neither Hedda, who looks searchingly into it from time
to time, nor any of the other characters, is able to see herself or himself in it. Often the characters
speak to each other from an unusual distance; frequently they stand very close to the wall, mirror,
or curtains, almost losing their identities. Hedda herself makes her first entry into the room by
backing into it, carrying a chair. During the course of the play she continues to move the furniture
about, and, at dramatic moments, to smash things or throw them across the room. In short it is
as if she can make no sense of the relationship between herself, her environment, and the objects
in it: the relationship remains beyond both her and the audience’s grasp. The dramatic energy of
these two productions is generated, then, through their exploration of the questions concerning
the relationship between internal and external space which are inscribed in Ibsen’s text.
Conclusion - Ibsen’s Contribution
In my view the nature of Ibsen’s contribution to the drama in the late nineteenth century is
inadequately stated in the commonplace notion that he created a naturalistic drama which
represents a fixed bourgeois world, and that he went on to extend the range of this theatre by
introducing a ‘natural’ symbolism. As we know Ibsen inherited what had become a highy
conventionalised dramatic tradition. This petrified object he broke down and recreated in a new
form, fashioning in the process his own poetics of the theatre. The outcome was not merely the
staging of a determinate social reality, with a later admixture of symbolism. It was, more vitally,
the re-creation, for the modern period, of the potential space of the drama.

Can Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler be considered a tragedy?

Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler is a definitive look at social conditions involving women at the
turn of the Century. His title character is a complex individual who is driven to destruction by
her great desires. Hedda epitomizes women of that time period by their dependency on social
convention, and she is motivated to do so many things but unfortunately is without the courage
to act upon them.
There are many elements used by Ibsen to depict a tragic hero, and therefore a tragic play. For
example, the reader sees a specific worldview, a main character of noble birth, and both
concepts of the hamartia and peripetia which are vital to the tragic plot. This raises the question
of whether this work can be considered a tragedy. Critics have continuously debated this issue,
even since it was written in 1890. Many thought the character of Hedda to be too unrealistic,
thus the play melodramatic rather than tragic. However, through the elements mentioned above
and by using literary techniques such as symbolism and irony, Ibsen succeeds in creating this
timeless tragedy.
Dependency Between Genders:
Firstly, Ibsen creates a specific worldview to his audience, and he does this by suggesting
a mirror dependency between genders. The male characters in this play are dependant on
women, and the women are dependant on social conventions. Jorgen Tesman, Hedda’s vacant
minded husband is dependant on his Aunt Juliane whereas Hedda is constantly restrained by
her reliance on her ‘what would other think/say’ mentality. The female characters of this play
are dependent on the fact that others depend on them, and Rina is a striking symbol of this very
fact. She symbolizes the vulnerability of everyman being the invalid that she is thus projecting
Ibsen’s idea that everybody is dependant in some way. This viewpoint is extremely accurate in
describing women’s roles in European society in both the 1800’s and present day. Men are
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generally viewed as the bread winners, who come home after a hard day at work expecting to be
taken care of by their wives. Women on the other hand, are expected to be seen and not heard,
keeping both the house and family name in tact.
Secondly, the author has created a character of noble birth, another important
characteristic of a tragic play. Evidence of Hedda’s nobility is found in the conversation between
Aunt Julie and the servant Bertha. Julie is reminiscing about Hedda riding by with her father,
obviously an important general of some kind. There is a portrait of General Gabler that hangs
above the sofa, and the reference to the guns that he has left his daughter represent something
with a much deeper meaning. The guns are kept in the back room along with the piano and
writing desk, every outlet of energy for her. This symbolizes the entrapment that Hedda feels in
marrying a man that is perhaps in a lower social class, and it is this background that leads
directly to her hamartia, rather the decision that leads her to a tragic end and perhaps one of the
more important factors in categorizing this play as a tragedy.
Hedda’s Rash Judgments:
Hedda makes quite a few rash judgments throughout the course of this play so it is
difficult to pinpoint which one to be the most detrimental. There is her decision to hold on to
Eilert Loevborg’s manuscript, to give him the gun that would be the cause of his accidental
death, and the final, fatal choice to end her life. However, none of these errors in judgment seem
as harsh as one that the audience doesn’t even witness, that being her marriage to Tesman.
Hedda was nearing her thirtieth birthday and felt pressured to get married, so she entered into a
union with a man she didn’t love. She thought he was destined for greatness in his becoming a
professor, but has merely set herself up for disappointment when she sees his true nature. As a
result we see the entrapment that Hedda feels, a feeling that leads to her demise.
Use of Peripetia:
Lastly, the audience sees the use of peripetia, the concept that suggests that the
progression of a tragic character will lead them to a reversal: that they get what they want, but
what they want is destructive. This is perhaps central to this play, for it is this that truly defines
Hedda Gabler as a tragic character. Hedda’s motivation in this play is to control somebody’s
destiny, and preferably male. Hedda wants to live vicariously through Loevborg, and so to some
extent she does get what she wants, but the outcome is disastrous. The moment that Hedda has
control of Eilert is when she gives him the gun encouraging him to kill himself, without coming
out and saying so. This is what clinches Loevborg for he feels that he is no longer useful,
exemplifying his dependence on women. The peripetia becomes obvious when Brack tells her
that Eilert has been accidentally killed and the audience sees that Hedda truly is a destructive
character. This reversal is extremely ironic in terms that she wanted Loevborg to be a real man
(as opposed to her husband who behaves according to his infantile dependency) and at the end
we discover that Loevborg dies due to an injury that robs him of his every manliness.
Conclusion:
The complexities of Hedda and the rest of characters in this play are all puppets of
Ibsen’s view and mentality. He creates a vivid picture of a woman who is socially tortured
beyond her control, and she eventually is led to the tragic end of what was presumably a tragic
life. Through his literary techniques and tragic elements, Ibsen creates a tragic masterpiece of
his time, and one that could well be applied to this time. She portrays women in society so afraid
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of social scandal, and she was willing to avoid one at all costs. This is another example of irony
because during that time women like Hedda did not commit suicide, and therefore in choosing
to end her life she creates something to talk about. This is ironic for the simple fact that her
death arose out of a situation that she so desperately tried to avoid.

“Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, creates three major triangulations between

characters”. Discuss.
Relationships are developed throughout the play and it is the breakdown in the
relationships with Hedda that lead to the dramatic closure of the play. Hedda initiates
one of the triangulations in an attempt to “have power over a human being’s fate”.
Judge Brack creates the second an unsuccessful parallel to Hedda’s own power
advancing creation. Jorgen Tesman and Thea Elvsted form the last triangulation in an
attempt to rebirth Eilert’s manuscript.
The first triangular relationship is between Hedda Gabler, Eilert Loevborg and Thea
Elvsted. Hedda created this relationship, controlling it by relying heavily on her
influence over Eilert. Hedda’s power over Eilert are hinted at when Hedda says “So I,
poor thing have no power over you at all?” and Eilert replies “Not where that’s
concerned.” Suggesting that Hedda does have power over him in other areas. Tension
arises when Hedda becomes jealous of his newfound success with out her, she also
wishes she was his inspiration.
The relationship between Hedda and Thea is hostile on Hedda’s part because Hedda is
jealous of Thea, wishing to be the Red headed, pistol wielding “woman standing between
Eilert Loevborg and me (Thea).” Hedda is jealous of Thea’s beauty, threatening to “...
burn it off (Thea’s hair)”, and her influence over Eilert and his work. The only way
Hedda can control Thea is by controlling Eilert and due to Thea’s loyalty and devotion
consequently control Thea. Thea and Eilert appear to be the perfect combination but
tension arises between them as a result of Hedda burning their ‘child’.
The second triangulation is created by Judge Brack. It involves Hedda, Jorgen Tesman
and Judge Brack. In this triangle, Brack tries unsuccessfully to play a role parallel to
Hedda’s in the previous triangle. Brack and Hedda are from the same social circle,
giving Brack an advantage over Jorgen with Hedda, making him acceptable to her more
readily as a result. Jorgen is indebted to Brack but no conflict occurs between these two
characters for two reasons: Brack is not looking for a commitment to Hedda and Jorgen
is blinded by naiveté. The relationship Brack is working towards is purely plutonic,
Hedda tempts him but is unwilling to commit to this relationship. Hedda keeps the
sexual tension high and doesn’t end her relationship with Brack completely because she
believes that as long as she can keep him interested, and at the same time not submit to
him, she can stay on top of the power struggle with Brack and manipulate him as well.
The final triangle was mutually formed between Jorgen and Thea to rebirth the ‘child’ of
Eilert and Thea. This triangle includes Jorgen, Thea and Hedda. Hedda is jealous of
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Thea’s Influence over Jorgen and is angry because she is gradually loosing her power
over Jorgen because of Thea’s influence. Hedda and Jorgen obviously had a marriage
purely for convenience. Jorgen is not intimate; on his honeymoon he was “rummaging
in libraries” and “copying out old parchments”. Hedda also denies any feelings for
Jorgen refusing the word love saying “don’t use that sentimental word”, and telling Aunt
Julle to “be Quiet” when she mentions anything referring to the baby that links Jorgen
and Hedda.
Up until Act Four all of these triangles were controlled by Hedda. Hedda controls the
first triangle by controlling Eilert and using alcohol on him to maintain superiority over
Thea by lowering Eilert’s social standing. Hedda controls the second triangle by not
allowing Brack the relationship he yearns for. The third relationship is not active until
the end of Act Four. The dramatic closure of the play is not caused by the triangles
themselves but the breakdown of Hedda’s power base as a result of the conflicts between
Hedda and the other characters. After Hedda’s prompting “do it beautifully”
Eilert commits suicide. Immediately Hedda is unable to control the first triangle, Eilert
is dead and Thea is released from the power hold Hedda had over her. Without the first
triangle, Hedda turns to the second for her control, but is shocked when she discovers
that Brack knows it was her gun that killed Eilert. Brack abuses his power and uses the
information to try to blackmail Hedda into the relationship he has been pushing for.
Hedda cannot accept the sexual relationship, nor can she refuse, Brack has won the fight
for power supremacy in his triangle. Thea and Jorgen decide to recreate the manuscript
together, Hedda loses power over Jorgen and the third triangle.
Hedda decides to solve her problem of no power by shooting herself in the temple.
Hedda says “I want, for once in my life, to have power over a human being’s fate.”
Hedda still has control over her unborn child’s life. Ironically, by killing herself, Hedda
destroys the baby and her potential power over it. By killing the baby Hedda, also
destroys the link between herself and Jorgen the only person who could/would have
saved her. In the destruction of her baby she destroys her future; people will remember
Eilert because of his ‘child’ but there is nothing left to remember Hedda by. The
dramatic closure is caused by the destruction of Hedda’s power base in the form of
triangular relationships; this destruction is caused by her own manipulation of the
triangles.

Q. 3. How far is the dramatic use of detail effective and

according to the plot structure of the play? Discuss
In Act 1 of Hedda Gabler, Tesman and Hedda have just returned from their honeymoon.
Tesman’s Aunt Juliana has paid them a welcome-home morning visit, and just before
she leaves, gives her nephew a little package wrapped in newspaper:
Tesman: (opens the package) what is it, Tesman, you’ve kept them! Hedda, this is
really very touching. What?
Hedda: (by the what-nots on the right) what is it, Tesman?
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Tesman: My old shoes! My slippers, Hedda!

Hedda: Oh, them. I remember you kept talking about them on our honeymoon.
Tesman: Yes, I missed them dreadfully. (Goes over to her). Here, Hedda, take a
look.
Hedda: (goes away towards the stove) Thanks, I won’t brother.
This tiny incident of the slippers dramatizes how intensely Hedda’s husband is still a
small boy, surrounded by the smothering, adoring love of his two maiden aunts and
their elderly maid, Bertha, in which he has been brought up. But perhaps ‘small boy’ is
wrong. Their possessive idolatry has turned him too into a kind of old woman, obsessed
by the little rituals of his own comfort. Hedda’s lack of interest in the slippers, her curt ‘I
won’t bother’, reveals the quiet desperation of her realization that she has married not
only Tesman but Auntie Juju and Auntie Rena and Bertha as well. She has married into
a claustrophobic coziness completely hostile to her conception of herself as a free, proud
and aristocratic spirit.
As Ibsen himself puts it in the draft notes for the play:
George Tesman, his old aunts, and the elderly serving-maid Bertha,
together form a whole and a unity. They have a common way of thinking,
common memories, and a common attitude to life. For Hedda they appear
as an inimical and alien power directed against her fundamental nature.
The realistic surface details – the slippers, the chintz covers, Auntie Juju’s new hat – are
convincing at the naturalistic level, then, but are only of dramatic importance in so far
as Ibsen uses them, as he habitually does, to enable us to penetrate that surface to the
hidden truth beneath.
It would be wrong, then, to confuse Ibsen’s use of realistic detail, so intimately
connected with psychological revelation of character, with the very different, less
selective realism of the documentary kind. But even more important, Ibsen’s plays are
not ‘problem plays’: they are only superficially ‘about’ the topical social issues of his day.
This is true even of plays likeGhosts and A Doll’s House, and certainly of a play Like
Hedda Gabler. The real inner center of Ibsen’s drama is its powerful portrayal of the
fundamental clash between man and society. This is what prevents Ibsen’s plays from
seeming dated, and what gives some of them what many seek is a tragic intensity.

Is Hedda Gabler a tragedy or a play about the problem of relationship

between the Individual and the society?
The Individual and Society
Ibsen may be seen as a social dramatist in the sense that Hedda Gabler, like many of his
greatest plays, is deeply engaged with the problems of the relationship between the
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individual and society. But he is not a social dramatist in the simpler sense that he is
trying to find answers to remediable social ‘problems’. Rather, his great dramas, in
various ways, deal with the major theme of Hedda Gabler, which is simultaneously a
characteristic and tragic dilemma of modern man: how to be oneself, yet at the same
time how to live in society? Because Ibsen sees no easy answer to this impasse or
perhaps no answer at all, he has created one form of modern tragedy. John Northam’s
remarks are apposite:

For a man of Ibsen’s generation the great opponent of man was seen to be
society – not just society in its ‘problem play’ aspect, the source of definable,
limitable, and often remediable misery, but society as a force working
through a myriad of obscure agencies and trivial occasions, but working
with a power and mystery comparable to that displayed by the Greek gods
or the Elizabethan universe.

Is Hedda Gabler a Tragic Drama?

Many would object to the view that Hedda Gabler could be considered a tragedy. Such
objections might be based, for example, on a feeling that prose is an inappropriate
medium for the tragic vision, lacking the dignity and loftiness of the verse employed in
Greek and Elizabethan tragedy, and incapable of embodying in language the large
aspiration and greatness of soul associated with the traditional tragic hero. W. B. Yeats,
for example, found in Ibsen only ‘the stale odor of split poetry’. Closely related is a
traditionalist assumption that only certain types of characters are suitable for tragic
treatment: Kings, Princes, those in high places. Hedda may seem ‘aristocratic’ to the
mediocre Tesman, but her brand of aristocracy would not be of the kind to give her
tragic status in the eyes of the traditionalists. Her fate does not involve the fate of
nations; her drama is domestic rather than public and social. However, it can be pointed
out to the traditionalists that to tie the essence of tragedy so firmly to a kind of social
register seems more and more inappropriate in an egalitarian age, and that much
literature of the last two hundred years – in the novel form as well as in the dramatic
medium – has powerfully challenged ‘the assumption that tragic suffering is the somber
privilege’ of the great and high-born, as in Greek and Elizabethan tragedy. It is true that
verse can add immeasurably to the tragic effect, intensifying emotion, deepening our
sense of character and widening the horizons of a drama to give it a quality of university.
But it would be wrong to believe that Ibsen’s deliberate rejection of verse meant that he
was not only committing himself to prose, but to the prosaic. Hedda Gabler (indeed all
of Ibsen’s plays from The Wild Duck onwards) reveals his ability to imbue his realistic
settings, natural and mundane object, and ordinary speech with a persistent and – to
my mind – convincing symbolic resonance. Ultimately it is the power of Ibsen’s
conception which he sees Hedda’s position ensures that we too see not merely a
Norwegian housewife walking about in a drawing-room, but a theatrical image of
trapped spirit in a cage; and the famous pistols and the references to the ‘vine leaves in
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the hair’ are only extreme examples of a tendency in all the dialogue to move towards
deeper and ‘symbolic’ significances, as Ibsen strives to give dramatic embodiment not to
the superficial externals but to the inner core of Hedda’s dilemma.
Is Hedda a Tragic Heroine?
It could still be argued that Hedda is not sufficiently sympathetic to be seen as a tragic
heroine. Her contempt for her husband, her meanly destructive treatment of Thea, and
her shocking and predatory interference in Loevborg’s life – none of these things is
likeable. And what do her life and death teach us? Where are the positives in the play?
Behind all this there lies the view that insists that the tragic hero must have nobility of
spirit, and learn something positive from his suffering. R. P. Draper questions these
prescriptions, which, as he says, work well for plays such as Hamlet but perhaps not
quite so well for another kind of play, such as Macbeth:
Criticism which centers on this kind of tragedy (‘heroic tragedy’ like Hamlet,
with its positive emphases) . . . tends to look for triumph in defeat, a tragedy
that reassures rather than depresses. The tragedy which comes from
distortion and perversion of the vital forces sustaining humanity, or the
tragedy of bleakness deriving from a Schopenhauerian sense of the
delusiveness of life itself – these are not catered for, or they are demoted to
the level of non-tragedy.
Perhaps, as Draper implies, we need to broaden our notion of the tragic if it is too
narrow to admit Hedda Gabler; we need to appeal to the theatrical experience.

In what ways Hedda’s suicide can be called a reasonable act? Discuss

by referring to the period of the text’s construction.
In the late nineteenth century, the forces of capitalism and colonialism that shaped European
society were veiled in doubt by the evolution of several new ways of thinking. In France, the
beginnings of the impressionist movement reformed art, drama and literature by questioning
the long-standing tradition of realism.
In central Europe, Sigmund Freud’s revolutionary science of psychoanalysis gained momentum;
changing the way people related to each other and paving the way for surrealist art and progress
of alternative thinking. Finally, Karl Marx’s promotion of social systems which were alternative
to the dominant capitalism of the time raised peoples’ awareness of the severe injustices their
new way of living had created.
It was in this social milieu that Henrik Ibsen turned for a final time to write a play with a
particular social agenda. In his effort to comment on events around him and assess the impact
of society’s new ideologies on a specific echelon of society, Hedda Gabler was born.
The title of the play is the maiden name of its protagonist. The audience is invited into Hedda’s
new home in Norway shortly after she has returned from honeymoon with George Tesman, a
scholar of Middle Ages history. In the introductory conversation between George and their
maid, Bertha, we are introduced to Hedda’s upbringing which is to play a crucial role in events
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to come. With the renowned General Gabler as a parent, Hedda was conditioned for a life of
independence, entertainment and decadence. After her father dies and her life of horseback
riding comes to an end, Hedda slowly realises that her society will not let her live in the way she
would like.
As a bourgeoisie woman, taking up a job is both awkward and very difficult for Hedda. In A
Doll’s House, Ibsen demonstrates that it is usually only in times of desperation that a upper or
middle class woman will work, as Nora was forced to do to save her husband’s life. Hedda has
little choice: she must marry if she wants to have any chance of supporting the extravagant way
of living to which she had become accustomed.
In George Tesman, Hedda found both the perfect solution of her situation and the inevitable
curse of boredom and discontentment. George, brought up by his Aunts, is as conventional and
colourless as his name suggests. His conversation is trite, and he is completely oblivious to the
subtlety; failing to notice Aunt Julie’s suggestive questions about Hedda’s pregnancy. He is
dedicated to his studies, having spent his honeymoon researching “marvelous old documents
that nobody knew existed”.

It would have been very dangerous for Hedda to pass up George’s offer of marriage. With
Loevborg and Brack, two men with whom she had relationships in the past, indisposed, doing so
would have squandered her opportunity to live comfortably in marriage. Hedda realizes the
merit in marrying a man who is to soon become a professor, and feels scared of approaching age
and loneliness. Her decision, however, is guided predominantly by the structure of her
patriarchal society which dictates that she must depend completely on men and on marriage for
her future happiness.
It is with her marriage to George that Hedda’s life of monotony and boredom increasingly
strains her personality and livelihood. She declares: “Sometimes I think I only have a talent for
one thing… boring myself to death!” and becomes obsessed with the task of finding interest and
beauty in her life. The tragedy of Hedda Gabler begins when Hedda is unable to discover these
qualities in her own life. She cannot have the fulfillment of a profession - the interest in another
world of studies, colleagues and relationships. As an uninfluential member of society, she is not
challenged intellectually or socially. Living under a monarch and as a woman in a patriarchal
society, she can have no influence on the future of her community. With European countries
establishing colonies throughout the world, Hedda realizes the inexorable domination of her
society and feels a helpless victim of its hegemony.
To find the interest and beauty she desires, Hedda must turn to others. In her earlier life, she
made use of Loevborg to satisfy herself. Often described as Hedda’s alter ego, Loevborg had an
intense relationship with Hedda during childhood. Hedda was attracted by the “style and
Romantic secrecy” and ended the relationship when it threatened to become physical. In a
revealing dialogue with Loevborg, Hedda exposes her profound desire for fascination and
intrigue in an otherwise uninteresting life:
Do you find it so incredible that a young girl, given the chance in secret, should
want to be allowed a glimpse into a forbidden world of whose existence she is
supposed to be ignorant?
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Society demands that Hedda be ignorant of the forbidden world she so desires, and it is because
of this suffocation that Hedda’s actions become perverted. One outlet for her new boredom is
playing with her father’s guns – one of few pastimes that seems to give her any satisfaction.
After George remarks that they will be unable to afford a riding horse or a butler, Hedda
confirms: “…at least I have one thing left to amuse myself with… my pistols, George.”
After George and Brack vehemently try to dissuade Hedda from playing with the pistols, we
realize that their society considers it inappropriate for a woman to indulge in interests of this
nature. Ibsen highlights Hedda’s perversion by reversing the gender roles of the married couple.
Hedda’s horse riding and playing with guns are seen as masculine activities; and she speaks of
the financial situation of the family, a role usually reserved for men. Most significantly, she
scorns at the thought of being pregnant and rejects the role of childbearing that women would
traditionally embrace. “Be quiet! You’ll never see me like that!”
Instead, Hedda embraces opportunities to find gratification through people around her. When
Brack asks if she could not find a goal to work towards in her life, she responds by suggesting
she could get Tesman into politics. At that point, we realise that her idea of finding fulfillment
has become completely misguided. Hedda considers the contest between Loevborg and George
for the professorship “like a kind of championship match.” To Thea Elvsted, she comments: “For
once in my life, I want to have power over a human being.”
When Judge Brack comes to hold power over Hedda through his knowledge of the burnt
manuscript, her quest appears a complete failure. The reality is that, in her society, it is
impossible for a woman to hold power over anyone else except through the manipulation of
others.
In Loevborg, Hedda sees the opportunity to witness beauty. She envisages Loevborg dying
beautifully, “with a crown of vine leaves in his hair, burning and unashamed.” She encourages
his suicide, handing him a pistol with which to commit the act. Jealous of Loevborg’s
relationship with Thea and anxious to ensure he will carry out the “beautiful” act, Hedda burns
Loevborg’s manuscript, the symbol of his relationship with Thea and the product of Thea’s
inspiration of Loevborg that Hedda envies.
When carrying out these acts, Hedda is continually afraid of scandal. She worries enormously
about how society will perceive her actions; an additional pressure with which she has to cope.
Her fear of public scrutiny is demonstrated when she questions Thea: “But what do you think
people will say?”
Ibsen makes use of the set in Hedda Gabler to illustrate the sum of these pressures on the
protagonist. The Tesman’s residence is “decorated in dark colours” to create a sombre,
melancholy mood. It is full of heavy wood furniture, and is covered with thick carpets. The set is
symbolic of the life to which Hedda has committed herself – the death of her extravagant way of
living and the start of a life of boredom. In the first two acts, the set is full of sinister bouquets of
flowers which Hedda considers oppressive rather than refreshing as we would expect: “The
room needs some fresh air. All these flowers!”
Judge Brack describes the smell of the residence as “a bequest from the late Mrs. Falk” – the
smell of death already hangs over the characters, and, as the motif of death continues with the
passing away of Aunt Rina and the obscure death of Loevborg, we realize that a climax as a
result of the pressures placed on the protagonist is inevitable.
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It is a culmination of these pressures that forces Hedda to suicide. In the final acts of the play,
each one of these pressures grows to new proportions – the ungraceful death of Eilert and
George’s plan to dedicate his life to the restoration of Loevborg’s book place added stress on
Hedda. The event which finally impels Hedda to take her own life, though, is the thought of
Brack having power over her through his blackmail involving the manuscript and the added
grievance of knowing that she would have to spend every evening with the man. Brack ironically
remarks: “We’ll have great times here together, the two of us!”
Hedda plays a wild tune which is almost as out of place in a household that is mourning as she is
out of place in society, and ends her life beautifully with a shot to the temple.
Judge Brack’s concluding comment, “But good God! People don’t do such things!” establishes
the conventionality and rigidity of his contemporary society. In the context of a society which
placed significant pressures on women by denying them the life they desired, the outcome is not
predictable. In Hedda’s case, a combination of pressures from her society and circumstances
surrounding her upbringing lead to a perversion of her every action. Her suicide, then, is
reasonable because the alternative would have been for Hedda to lead an unsatisfying life,
continually restraining her behavior in fear of scandal.
In the late twentieth century, Hedda’s life may have been very different. The rise of materialism,
technology and a culture of instant satisfaction have contributed to make contemporary society
very different from that of the late nineteenth century. Hedda would have been able to develop a
career, have a say in the future of her community and would have had suitable channels through
which she could satisfy her desire for interest and beauty in life. Hedda Gabler is an outstanding
example of the power of drama to illustrate the relationship between society and its members.
Ibsen’s timeless reminder of how ordinary lives can be tainted by outside influences makes
Hedda Gabler’s reasonable suicide a significant one in the study of literature.

“The play Hedda Gabler is the product of a mind deeply

preoccupied with the nature of power, particularly the
power of one mind to influence and impose itself upon
others”. Discuss. (P.U. 2004)
Henrik Ibsen portrays a microcosm of nineteenth century Norwegian society in his play Hedda
Gabler. Hedda, the protagonist, exhibits a mixture of masculine and feminine traits due to her
unique upbringing under General Gabler and the social mores imposed upon her. However,
although this society venerates General Gabler because of his military status, his daughter
Hedda is not tolerated due to her non-conformity to the accepted gender stereotypes.
Hedda’s gender-inverted marriage to Jorgen Tesman, her desire for power and her use of
General Gabler’s pistols are unacceptable in her society and motif of “One doesn’t do such a
thing!” that is alluded to during the play and expounded upon Hedda’s death that shows that
Hedda’s uncertain stance between masculine and feminine gender roles and their associated
traits is not tolerated by her society.
Reversal of Traditional Gender Roles
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Ibsen employs a reversal of traditional gender roles within Hedda and Jorgen Tesman’s
marriage to emphasize Hedda’s masculine traits. Hedda displays no emotion or affection
towards her husband Jorgen. This appearance of indifference is a trait that is usually common to
men:
Tesman: My old morning shoes. My slippers look!…I missed them dreadfully. Now you
should see them, Hedda.
Hedda: No thanks, it really doesn’t interest me.
In another gender role reversal, Hedda displays a financial awareness, which her husband,
Jorgen does not posses. Although Brack corresponds with Tesman about his honeymoon travels,
he corresponds with Hedda concerning the financial matters. This is a role that is usually
reserved for men.
Hedda does not only display traits, which are definitively masculine, or feminine, she also
objects to and often defies the conventions established for her gender by society. She rejects
references to her pregnancy as a reminder of her gender:
Tesman: Have you noticed how plump (Hedda’s) grown, and how well she is? How much
she’s filled out on our travels?
Hedda: Oh be quiet!
Hedda is reminded not only of her feminine role of mother and nurturer here, but also as wife
and “appendage” to Tesman. As a woman of the haute bourgeoisie, Hedda is “sought after” and
“always had so many admirers” and has been “acquired” by Tesman as his wife. Hedda resents
the gender conventions that dictate that she now “belongs” to the Tesman family - a situation
that would not occur were she a man.
Tesman: Only it seems to me now that you belong to the family…
Hedda: Well, I really don’t know…
Although these traits displayed by Hedda are masculine, they are not those, which her society
cannot tolerate. To entertain herself in her “boring” marriage she plays with her father, General
Gabler’s pistols.
Hedda: Sometimes I think I only have a talent for one thing…boring myself to death! I
still have one thing to kill time with. My pistols, Jorgen. General Gabler’s pistols.
Tesman: For goodness’ sake! Hedda darling! Don’t touch those dangerous things! For my
sake, Hedda!
These pistols are a symbol of masculinity and are associated with war, a pastime which women
are excluded from other than in the nurturing role of nurses and are thus not tolerated by
society. Tesman implores Hedda to cease playing with them, but even his “superior” position as
her husband does not dissuade Hedda, who is found to be playing with them by Brack at the
beginning of act two. Brack also reminds Hedda of the inappropriate nature of her
“entertainment” and physically takes the pistols away from Hedda.
Hedda: I’m going to shoot you sir!
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Brack: No, no, no!…Now stop this nonsense! (taking the pistol gently out of her hand). If
you don’t mind, my dear lady.…Because we’re not going to play that game any
more today.
As a parallel to Hedda’s masculine game of playing with General Gabler’s pistols, Hedda plays
the traditionally female role of a “minx” with Brack.
Hedda: Doesn’t it feel like a whole eternity since we last talked to each other?
Brack: Not like this, between ourselves? Alone together, you mean?
Hedda: Yes, more or less that.
Brack: Here was I, every blessed day, wishing to goodness you were home again.
Hedda: And there was I, the whole time, wishing exactly the same.
At the beginning of act two, Hedda encourages Brack’s flirtation with her by telling him the true
nature of her marriage to Tesman that it is a marriage of convenience:
Brack: But, tell me…I don’t quite see why, in that case…er…
Hedda: Why Jorgen and I ever made a match of it, you mean? I had simply danced myself
out, my dear sir. My time was up.
Brack is emboldened by Hedda’s seeming availability and pursues the notion of a “triangular
relationship” with Hedda. Not only does Hedda’s “coquettish” behaviour towards Brack exhibits
the feminine side of her nature, it also demonstrates that in some instances she conforms to
society’s expectations of females. Hedda’s reference to “(her) time (being) up” shows the socially
accepted view that women must marry, because they are not venerated as spinsters. By
conforming to this aspect of her society’s mores and marrying before she becomes a socially
unacceptable spinster, Hedda demonstrates that she is undeniably female and accepts this.
Hedda constantly seeks power over those people she comes in contact with. As a woman, she has
no control over society at large, and thus seeks to influence the characters she comes into
contact with in an emulation of her father’s socially venerated role as a general. Hedda pretends
to have been friends with Thea in order to solicit her confidence:
Thea: But that’s the last thing in the world I wanted to talk about!
Hedda: Not to me, dear? After all, we were at school together.
Thea: Yes, but you were a class above me. How dreadfully frightened of you I was in
those days!
Once Hedda learns of Thea’s misgivings about Loevborg’s newfound resolve, she uses it to
destroy their “comradeship”.
Hedda: Now you see for yourself! There’s not the slightest need for you to go about in this
deadly anxiety…
Loevborg: So it was deadly anxiety …on my behalf.
Thea: (softly and in misery) Oh, Hedda! How could you!
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Loevborg: So this was my comrade’s absolute faith in me.

Hedda then manipulates Loevborg, by challenging his masculinity, into going to Brack’s
bachelor party and resuming his drunken ways. Hedda’s “reward” for this is to find that
Loevborg’s manuscript, his and Thea’s “child” falls into her hands, where she burns it, thus
destroying the child and also the relationship, both of which Hedda was jealous of.
Similarly, Hedda seeks to push her husband, Jorgen, into politics: “(I was wondering) whether I
could get my husband to go into politics…” This would raise Hedda’s social standing and allow
her to attain and maintain power. Hedda’s manipulation of people in order to attain power is a
trait that is stereotypically predominant in men. The society of nineteenth
century Norwayvenerates the image of submissive, static passive and pure women. Roles of
power are normally allocated to men in such a society.
The society in Hedda Gabler demonstrates its intolerance of Hedda’s masculine behavior by
contributing to her death. Hedda is found to be playing with her pistols in act two by Brack.
After disgracing himself and returning to his “immoral” ways at Hedda’s behest, Loevborg is
manipulated by Hedda into “taking his life beautifully” and she gives him one of General
Gabler’s pistols. However Loevborg dies from an accidental wound to the stomach rather than a
patrician death from a bullet to the head and Brack, utilizing his position of power within the
judicial system, sees the pistol that he accidentally killed himself with. Recognizing it as being
General Gabler’s pistol, he returns to Hedda to stake his claim. Hedda refuses to be in the power
of Brack, she had been “heartily thankful that (he had) no power over (her)” however, her fear is
realized as Brack attempts to force his way into a “triangular relationship” with Hedda (and
Tesman) in return for not exposing the scandal that she had provided Loevborg with the
instrument of his death. Hedda is “as fearful of scandal as all that” and takes her life, ironically
avoiding the scandal surrounding Loevborg’s death and yet causing a scandal concerning her
own. Hedda’s masculine preference for the pistols to any feminine task of housekeeping and her
fear of scandal due to not conforming with society’s accepted gender roles leads her to kill
herself, thus demonstrating that things which “one doesn’t do” are not tolerated by her society of
nineteenth century Norway.

Focused on character rather than plot, on contemporary people and

society, and plumbing psychological depths in a realistic style, Ibsen
challenged cotemporary audiences accustomed to lighter
entertainment and the “well-made play.” Discuss

Focused on character rather than plot, on contemporary people and society, and
plumbing psychological depths in a realistic style, Ibsen challenged cotemporary
audiences accustomed to lighter entertainment and the “well-made play.”Which is not
to say that Hedda Gabler does not have a reasonable complexity of plot, many events
transpire here, including three deaths, albeit all of them offstage.
The focus, though, is on Hedda, the daughter of a ranking military officer whose portrait
looms over the proceedings throughout, suggesting, perhaps, the structured society of
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the military and the rigidity of its role definitions which are reflected, if not generally
articulated, in the broader society of the time. Women’s place was to be wife, mother,
and caretaker, all roles largely defined by others, leaving little room for an independent
thinker or one who could not adapt within those limitations.
Hedda has married George Tesman, who adores her. He’s naïve, a scholar, a bore, a bit
of a ninny, and he seems rather oblivious to the financial realities of supporting Hedda
in the style she has deceptively led him to believe she requires. Hedda, a beauty of social
standing, is a catch for George, but he is clueless as to just what it is that he has caught.
Hedda is an indifferent wife, barely tolerating George, and she is in abject fear and
rather hysterical denial of her pregnancy that leaves only the role of caregiver,
exemplified in the play by George’s aunt, who is selfless and finds genuine fulfillment in
caring for others, as well as by Mrs. Elvsted, who centers her life in assisting and
supporting the work. But Hedda, selfish and self-centered, is a taker, not a giver, so this
last socially acceptable route is not an option for her.
Indeed, each of Hedda’s relationships with her husband, with her alcoholic friend
Loevborg, and with Judge Brack, a predatory manipulator, is based on what she can
gain from the other. And control is her unstated, but core issue constrained by the rules
of a society that she doesn’t have the courage to flaunt, she, like the judge, ruthlessly
attempts to influence the events unfolding around her, but those events take turns she
did not anticipate . She waves pistols about —and shoots them–with carefree abandon
on the surface, but those weapons express a sort of control and power that might be
seized by the otherwise powerless.

Bring out the dramatic significance of the symbols used in Hedda

Gabler. (P.U. 2006)
Hedda and Thea are presented as not only opponents for the soul and genius of Eilert Loevborg,
but as contrasts in sterility and fertility. Although Hedda is pregnant and Thea has no children,
Thea is fertile and Hedda is sterile. Hedda rejects even the idea of her own pregnancy, while
Thea works with Eilert Loevborg, and later with George Tesman, to bring the book “child” of
Eilert and herself to birth. Mayerson points out that:

Ibsen uses Thea...to indicate a way to freedom which Hedda never apprehends.
Through her ability to extend herself in comradeship with Loevborg, Thea not only
brings about the rebirth of his creative powers, but merges her own best self with
his to produce a prophecy of the future.
This notion of a woman fulfilling herself by inspiring a man is rather dated, but Ibsen clearly
approved of Thea’s nurturing femininity. Thea, despite her totally feminine nature, is able to
break with the social standards of her culture to leave her husband and follow Eilert Loevborg.
Of all the characters in Hedda Gabler, Thea is the most able to act from her own conscience and
convictions, despite the disapproval of society.
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Mayerson comments that:

The manuscript is Loevborg’s and Thea’s ‘child,’ the idea of progress born of a
union between individuals who have freed themselves from the preconceptions of
their environment. This manuscript the sterile Hedda throws into the fire at the
climax of her vindictive passion. Her impulse to annihilate by burning is directed
both toward Thea’s “child” and toward Thea’s hair and calls attention to the
relationship between them....Ibsen was using hair as a symbol of fertility ...”
According to the Ibsen’s stage directions, Hedda has “not especially abundant” hair, while
Thea’s “hair is...exceptionally wavy and abundant.” Hedda has evidently been jealous of it since
their days at school. Thea remembers that she was frightened of Hedda in school, because:
Thea: Whenever you met me on the staircase you used to pull my hair.
Hedda: No, did I?
Thea: Yes. And once you said you’d burn it all off.
Hedda is jealous of Thea’s hair which represents both her femininity and her fertility.
Consequently, Hedda attacks both Thea’s femininity and her fertility, destroying her
relationship with Eilert Loevborg and destroying the manuscript, the “child” of Thea and Eilert.
However, Thea’s abundant fertility conquers even this, and as the play draws to an end, she is
working with Tesman to reconstruct the manuscript/child.
While Thea is able to create and recreate, brilliant Hedda can only destroy. She destroys the
manuscript, destroys Eilert Loevborg, and finally, destroys herself. She is, ultimately, an
ignorant, highly romantic woman, trapped in the rigid bourgeois society of 19th century Norway.
The other major symbol in the play is the pistols of General Gabler, which, along with his
portrait, seem to be all Hedda has inherited from him. Hedda uses the pistols throughout the
play to assert her identity as her father’s daughter. This role is the most glamorous one available
to Hedda in her limited world.
Such pistols traditionally belong to an officer who cherishes a code of bravery and honor.
Hedda’s trifling use of them mocks this traditional role. She threatened Eilert Loevborg with her
pistols before he left town years ago, and she playfully shoots at Judge Brack as he approaches
her house through the back door. This is a mockery of protecting her “honor,” especially since
she is so dishonest in her sexual relationships with the men in her life. She sent away Loevborg,
whom she evidently desired, married George Tesman whom she does not like, let alone love, in
order to be supported comfortably, and flirts with Brack, despite her marriage.

Does Hedda Gabler give way to the discussions of social issues?

It has been suggested that Hedda Gabler is a drama about the individual psyche -- a
mere character study. It has even been written that Hedda Gabler "presents no social
theme" (Shipley 333). On the contrary, I have found social issues and themes abundant
in this work.
The character of Hedda Gabler centers around society and social issues. Her high
social rank is indicated from the beginning, as Miss Tesman says of Hedda, "General
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Gabler’s daughter. What a life she had in the general’s day!" (Ibsen 672). Upon Hedda’s
first appearance, she makes many snobbish remarks. First, she turns up her nose at
George’s special handmade slippers. Later she insults Aunt Julie’s new hat, pretending to
mistake it for the maid’s. Hedda seems to abhor everything about George Tesman and his
bourgeoisie existence. She demands much more class than he has been able to provide
her, for she was the beautiful, charming daughter of General Gabler and deserved nothing
but the finest.
As the character of Hedda Gabler develops, the reader learns that she has only
married George Tesman because her father’s passing away left her no significant financial
resources, nothing but a respectable heritage. She tells Brack of her decision to marry
Tesman: "I really had danced myself out, Judge. My time was up. ... And George Tesman
-- he is after all a thoroughly acceptable choice. ... There’s every chance that in time he
could still make a name for himself. ...It was certainly more than my other admirers
were willing to do for me, Judge." (Ibsen 684).
Hedda needed someone to support her financially, and George Tesman was the only
decent man to propose to her. She was forced to cross beneath her social class and marry
this commoner in the hopes that he would make a name for himself as a professor. As for
love everlasting, Hedda disgustedly comments to Judge Brack, "Ugh -- don’t use that
syrupy word!" Rather than having become a happy newlywed who has found true love,
"Hedda is trapped in a marriage of convenience" (Shipley 445).
Hedda was raised a lady of the upper class, and as such she regards her beauty with
high esteem. This is, in part, the reason she vehemently denies the pregnancy for so long.
A pregnancy will force her to gain weight and lose her lovely womanly figure. Hedda has
grown accustomed to her many admirers; therefore, Hedda is perturbed and embarrassed
when George says to Aunt Julie, "But have you noticed how plump and buxom she’s
grown? How much she’s filled out on the trip?" (Ibsen 676). "I’m exactly as I was when I
left," insists an annoyed Hedda (Ibsen 676). To Hedda, pregnancy is a despicable curse.
It will make her unattractive, and she will no longer be the talk of the town. For a lady
who has been forced to depend on her beauty to attract a suitable husband after the
general’s death, this is a crushing threat.
In Act II, Judge Brack gently suggests to Hedda that a child might relieve her from
the mundane existence she has been enduring with Tesman. Calling motherhood her
"most solemn responsibility," Judge Brack delicately hints that she will be having a child
within the year. "Be quiet! You’ll never see me like that!" she exclaims. "I have no talent
for such things, Judge. I won’t have responsibilities!" (Ibsen 687). Judge Brack has
reminded Hedda of what she already knew -- the pregnancy. Her fear of becoming
undesirable resurfaces, and she explodes in anger and denial.
Even in death, Hedda cherishes beauty. In discussing the planned suicide with Eilert,
she instructs him, "Eilert Loevborg -- listen to me. Couldn’t you arrange that -- that it’s
done beautifully?" (Ibsen 703). She then reminds him twice more in the following lines to
take his life beautifully. Still, upon his death he is shot in the stomach at a brothel, not at
all as beautifully as Hedda had intended. In the final lines of the play, Hedda finally gets
the beautiful ending she romanticizes. She takes her own life, shooting herself in the
temple as she lies stretched out on the sofa, beautifully.
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Further evidence of Hedda’s social class is found in her conversation with Mrs.
Elvsted. After Mrs. Elvsted reluctantly admits that she has left her husband in search of
Eilert Loevborg, the astonished Hedda replies, "But my dearest girl -- that you could dare
to do such a thing!" Hedda continues, "But what do you think people will say about you,
Thea?" (Ibsen 680). For Hedda, this act is unimaginable. The entire town will be gossiping
about Thea Elvsted, the sheriff’s wife, and her affair with Eilert Loevborg. Mrs. Elvsted’s
reputation will be permanently tarnished. For Hedda, this would be a nightmare. She has
been highly regarded by everyone and showered with attention from all the men. In fact,
as General Gabler’s lovely daughter, Hedda has been a major object of interest for the
townspeople for quite some time. "Hedda fears scandal above all" (Setterquist 162). She
can not begin to fathom how Thea could risk losing her honor. "Brought up as a ‘lady’, she
was required at all times to conduct herself correctly" (Setterquist 163).
Thea, on the other hand, is of a lower social ranking and hasn’t much of a name to
lose. She is able to follow her heart, and she explains, "God knows they’ll say what they
please. I only did what I had to do." (Ibsen 680).
Additional proof that Hedda fears scandal can be found in her private conversation
with Judge Brack after Loevborg’s suicide. He warns Hedda that if counsel were to
discover that the pistol was hers, there would be a scandal. "A scandal, yes -- the kind
you’re so deathly afraid of. Naturally, you’d appear in court... You’ll have to answer the
question: Why did you give Eilert Loevborg the pistol? And what conclusions will people
draw from the fact that you did give it to him?" (Ibsen 708). Her heart sinks, as Hedda
realizes that Judge Brack is right. She understands that she is helpless against his
blackmailing and no longer free, and in desperation she takes her own life.
Despite the clear distinctions between the social classes of the three women of the
play -- Hedda Gabler, Thea Elvsted, and Mademoiselle Diana -- their sexual situations are
remarkably similar. As women, they must all flaunt their sexuality to survive in a male
dominated society. Hedda is, of course, an upper class lady. She does not strive towards
her individual morality for any reason other than to maintain an impeccable reputation.
Scandals and rumors are her worst enemy. Rather than allow herself to fall from her high
social standing, she accepts the proposal of her only prospect -- George Tesman. She
marries him and thus must sleep with him, not out of love, but merely out of necessity.
Hedda uses her sexuality to attract Tesman who will provide an adequate means of
support for her. She remains faithful to him only in order to maintain her reputation, for
she feels no moral obligation to be loyal to him.
Similarly, Thea Elvsted was a middle class girl. She accepted a job as a governess to
Mr. Elvsted, and when his wife died he married her. There was a large age difference, and
she says of him, "I just can’t stand him! We haven’t a single thought in common. Nothing
at all -- he and I" (Ibsen 680). Thea did not love Mr. Elvsted any more than Hedda loved
Tesman. She, too, married for financial support. Since Thea did not have such a great
reputation to uphold around town, however, she had the freedom to have a sexual affair.
That is just what she did with Eilert Loevborg. Eventually, she left Mr. Elvsted in hopes of
using her sexuality to secure a loving marriage with a better prospect, Mr. Loevberg.
Unfortunately, her plan was unsuccessful and the reader must wonder in what way she
will manage to support herself now.
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Finally, there is the character Diana, a singer and prostitute. Just as Thea and Hedda,
Diana must offer her sexuality as a means of support in a male-dominated world. Rather
than finding a husband to support her, Diana has found the most freedom. In becoming
a prostitute, she sells her body to men without becoming trapped in a marriage full of
regret. While Diana has her freedom, however, she has attained it in a socially
unacceptable manner and is thus at the bottom of the social order.
Lastly, the tile itself represents the social theme of the drama. In using the name
Hedda Gabler, despite her marriage to George Tesman, Ibsen has conveyed to the reader
the importance of social class. Hedda prefers to identify herself as the daughter of General
Gabler, not the wife of George Tesman. Throughout the play she rejects Tesman and his
middle class lifestyles, clinging to the honorable past with which her father provided her.
This identity as the daughter of the noble General Gabler is strongly implied in the
title, Hedda Gabler.
In considering the many implications of the social issues as explained above, it can not
be denied that the very theme of Hedda Gabler centers on social issues. "Hedda
Gabler is ...indirectly a social parable".