Hedda Gabler (Henrik Ibsen)
Cover of Hedda Gabler (Plays for Performance)
In a gallery of startling portraits of female character, Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler nonetheless stands out. Mercurial, attractive, and cursed with frustrated ambition, Hedda is both victim and victimizer. Arguably, no other female character that makes the role of Hedda so challenging for actresses and directors. To audiences she presents a similar challenge, showing us several faces that, while different, are harmonized within the complexity of her character. Hedda is study in psycho-social repression. She is also Circe, a demonic force. Ibsen, at the height of his dramatic powers when he wrote the play, resists easy explanation for the various catastrophes Hedda engenders. Like Shakespeare, he teases us with too many motives or, alternatively, too few. Unlike Shakespeare, who typically confined “motiveless malignity” to male characters like Iago or Richard III, Ibsen found that by 1890 the public could tolerate --- although just barely—a female character as complicated, elusive, and brutal as Hedda Gabler.
Social themes and issues are abundant in the drama Hedda Gabler. The major 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 Gabler’s daughter. What a life she had in the general’s day!” 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. In Gassner’s words, “she is a crystal clear example of a maladjusted woman.”
The drama proceeds and unfolds the truth that Hedda 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: “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 of himself.”
This all shows materialistic approach of Hedda that she married a person of lower class foreseeing that one day he would earn some name and when asked about loving her husband, she remarks: “Ugh—don’t use that syrupy word!”
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 Lövborg, that astonished Hedda and she 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?” This act for Hedda is unimaginable because she fears scandal above all. “Brought up as a lady, she was required at all times to conduct herself correctly.
And on the other hand, Thea is of a lower social ranking and hasn’t much of a name to lose. She says, “God knows they’ll say what they please. I only did what I had to do.”
There are three women presented in the play but they all belong to different classes—Hedda Gabler, Thea Elvsted and Mademoisell Danielle. There sexual situations are remarkable 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. She remains faithful to him only in order to maintain her reputation, for she feels no moral obligation to be loyal to him.
Whereas, Thea is a middle class girl. She was governess of Mr. Elvsted’s children and after his wife died, she married Mr. Elvsted. There is a large age difference between them.
“I just can’t stand him! We haven’t a single thought in common. Nothing at all – he and I.” (Mrs. Elvsted’s remarks about her husband
She left Mr. Elvsted in hopes of using her sexuality to secure a loving marriage with a better prospect, Mr. Lövborg. Unfortunately, her
plan was unsuccessful and the reader must wonder in what way she will manage to support herself now.
Finally, Mademoisell Danielle is a singer and a prostitute. Just as Thea and Hedda, Danielle must offer her sexuality as a means to support in a male-dominated world. Rather than finding a husband to support her, Danielle has found the most freedom becoming a prostitute. Danielle has freedom but she has attained it in a socially unacceptable manner and is thus at the bottom of the social order.
There is much in the play to quality it as a “liberal tragedy,” the expression coined by the English Marxist critic Raymond Williams. In these plays, an alienated individual (usually a male) struggles against a stifling bourgeois society, finding himself hamstring by the ever-tightening ropes of conformity. Ibsen, himself at odds with late nineteenth century Norwegian culture, perfected this form of social drama and gave us memorable types of the alienated individual in Oswald Alving in Ghosts or Dr. Thomas Stockmann in An Enemy of the People. Although Raymond Williams has a particularly Marxist take on the alienated individual, the annals of drama (and literature, for that matter) are full of disaffected males. It is to Ibsen’s credit that he was one of the first major dramatists to show how the same forces that estrange men from society can also affect women. Nora in A Doll’s House or even young Hedvig in The Wild Duck struggles as much as their male counterparts; however, among Ibsen’s characters it is Hedda who most acutely embodies the dilemma of the socially-frustrated female.
"Hedda Gabler has no ethical ideals at all, only romantic ones. She is a typical nineteenth-century figure, falling into the abyss between the ideals which do not impose on her and the realities she has not yet discovered.” (G. B. Shaw)
Born into an aristocratic-military household, Hedda experiences that most troubling of nineteenth-century impasses: she possesses more class than money. Indeed, late nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature is filled with female characters who cope with some version of status insufficiency. Like Hedda, they are born to a station in life they can no longer afford (think Edith Wharton here), or they have money but no class (think Trollope or Mrs. Gaskell), or they lack money and class (think Dickens), or, worst of all, they have money but also the ill fortune to be American (think Henry James). In Hedda’s case, her expectations collide with the social reality of having married an academic who provides her with a comfortable but hardly grand lifestyle. That her desires outstrip their means is everywhere evident in the play, from the lavish honeymoon Tesman must provide to the vast sums, he borrows to outfit their own new home. The proscriptions placed upon women in that society further compound Hedda’s woes. A respectable, upper-class female, she cannot move about freely, she cannot harbor professional ambitions, nor can she experiences firsthand the louche escapades available to her former suitor, Eilert Lövborg. Instead, Hedda lives vicariously, quizzing Lövborg about “a world . . . that she isn’t supposed to know anything about.
That curiosity about the more forbidden aspects of male life—the brothers and all-night benders—shows us another face of Hedda Gabler: the woman frightened, if not repulsed, by her own sexuality.
There is a strong suggestion in the play—and, indeed, Ibsen himself famously remarked—that “Hedda wants to live the life of a man.” The social consequences of such a wish are apparent enough: more freedom, more choices, even the possibility of rebellion. These outcomes, though, also apply to female sexuality and Hedda equally struggles against a destiny that is as much biological as social. In the years preceding the action of the play, Hedda keeps suitors at arm’s length, a game she continues to play with Lövborg and Brack after marriage. She is without a significant dowry by the time she succumbs to Tesman’s proposal, “having dances myself tired” as she remarks wearily to Judge Brack. Marriage, of course, negates the game endlessly deferring the desires of suitors. The play hints that Hedda has returned from the suggestion of her condition, refusing to acknowledge this tangible evidence of her femininity. Instead, Hedda attempts to maintain the fiction with her importunate lovers that she is still the beautiful General Gabler’s daughter, not the pregnant Mrs. Tesman, as the title of the play makes evident. Above all, Hedda rejects the somnolent ripening of the pregnant female, the woman who waits for an event that will happen of its own accord. “For once in my life,” Hedda declares, “I want to feel that I control a human destiny.” Because she cannot control the life within her (or even her own life), Hedda turns to that most masculine of pastimes: guns and destruction. One need not stress the obvious Freudian overtones and, not surprisingly, Hedda turns to firearms at the very movements her own sexual powerlessness threatens to overwhelm her.
Annihilation takes us to the final face of Hedda: Circe, the goddess and sorceress who figures in Greek mythology. Hers is a dual nature, split between primal, destructive urges and nurturing, womanly impulses. She provides food and wine to Odysseus and his men, but she turns his sailors into swine. She destroys what has momentarily pleased. Hedda too is associated with the chaos that comes of these discordant elements. She repeatedly offers wine to Lövborg, but this otherwise hospitable act is poisonous to a reformed alcoholic, as Hedda well knows. When Lövborg fails mightily, Hedda urges him to destruction, envisioning him “crowned with vine leaves” like Olympic hero. She directs equally ruinous behavior at her husband and Mrs. Elvsted. Sometimes Hedda is merely feline in her cruelty, languidly watching the discomfort of her squirming victims. She jokingly threatens to set fire to Mrs. Elvsted’s abundant red hair, and she deliberately “mistakes” Miss Tesman’s new hat for a dirty cast-off left by the maid. Nettled that Mrs. Elvsted could inspire reform in the dissipated Eilert Lövborg, Hedda sets about dismantling all that is wholesome in their relationship.
Ultimately, we don’t know exactly what motivates Hedda, and therein lays the dark lure of Ibsen’s tale. The play’s concluding line—Judge Brack’s horrified exclamation that “people don’t do such things!”—has particular resonance. As the media daily remind us, people continue to “do such things,” and we still know as little of the mysteries of the human heart.
"The biological principles of heredity, the tenants of psychology, and the cultural matrices of conventional morality, and the laws of economics combine in Ibsen’s plays to form patterns of fate and nemesis that assume that functions filled by the supernatural in classic tragedy. " (Charles McFarlane)
Social themes and issues are abundant in the drama Hedda Gabler. The major 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 Gabler’s daughter. What a life she had in the general’s day!” 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. In Gassner’s words, “she is a crystal clear example of a maladjusted woman.”
The drama proceeds and unfolds the truth that Hedda 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: “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 of himself.”
This all shows materialistic approach of Hedda that she married a person of lower class foreseeing that one day he would earn some name and when asked about loving her husband, she remarks: “Ugh—don’t use that syrupy word!”
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 Lövborg, that astonished Hedda and she 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?” This act for Hedda is unimaginable because she fears scandal above all. “Brought up as a lady, she was required at all times to conduct herself correctly.
And on the other hand, Thea is of a lower social ranking and hasn’t much of a name to lose. She says, “God knows they’ll say what they please. I only did what I had to do.”
There are three women presented in the play but they all belong to different classes—Hedda Gabler, Thea Elvsted and Mademoisell Danielle. There sexual situations are remarkable 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. She remains faithful to him only in order to maintain her reputation, for she feels no moral obligation to be loyal to him.
Whereas, Thea is a middle class girl. She was governess of Mr. Elvsted’s children and after his wife died, she married Mr. Elvsted. There is a large age difference between them.
“I just can’t stand him! We haven’t a single thought in common. Nothing at all – he and I.” (Mrs. Elvsted’s remarks about her husband
She left Mr. Elvsted in hopes of using her sexuality to secure a loving marriage with a better prospect, Mr. Lövborg. Unfortunately, her
plan was unsuccessful and the reader must wonder in what way she will manage to support herself now.
Finally, Mademoisell Danielle is a singer and a prostitute. Just as Thea and Hedda, Danielle must offer her sexuality as a means to support in a male-dominated world. Rather than finding a husband to support her, Danielle has found the most freedom becoming a prostitute. Danielle has freedom but she has attained it in a socially unacceptable manner and is thus at the bottom of the social order.
There is much in the play to quality it as a “liberal tragedy,” the expression coined by the English Marxist critic Raymond Williams. In these plays, an alienated individual (usually a male) struggles against a stifling bourgeois society, finding himself hamstring by the ever-tightening ropes of conformity. Ibsen, himself at odds with late nineteenth century Norwegian culture, perfected this form of social drama and gave us memorable types of the alienated individual in Oswald Alving in Ghosts or Dr. Thomas Stockmann in An Enemy of the People. Although Raymond Williams has a particularly Marxist take on the alienated individual, the annals of drama (and literature, for that matter) are full of disaffected males. It is to Ibsen’s credit that he was one of the first major dramatists to show how the same forces that estrange men from society can also affect women. Nora in A Doll’s House or even young Hedvig in The Wild Duck struggles as much as their male counterparts; however, among Ibsen’s characters it is Hedda who most acutely embodies the dilemma of the socially-frustrated female.
"Hedda Gabler has no ethical ideals at all, only romantic ones. She is a typical nineteenth-century figure, falling into the abyss between the ideals which do not impose on her and the realities she has not yet discovered.” (G. B. Shaw)
Born into an aristocratic-military household, Hedda experiences that most troubling of nineteenth-century impasses: she possesses more class than money. Indeed, late nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature is filled with female characters who cope with some version of status insufficiency. Like Hedda, they are born to a station in life they can no longer afford (think Edith Wharton here), or they have money but no class (think Trollope or Mrs. Gaskell), or they lack money and class (think Dickens), or, worst of all, they have money but also the ill fortune to be American (think Henry James). In Hedda’s case, her expectations collide with the social reality of having married an academic who provides her with a comfortable but hardly grand lifestyle. That her desires outstrip their means is everywhere evident in the play, from the lavish honeymoon Tesman must provide to the vast sums, he borrows to outfit their own new home. The proscriptions placed upon women in that society further compound Hedda’s woes. A respectable, upper-class female, she cannot move about freely, she cannot harbor professional ambitions, nor can she experiences firsthand the louche escapades available to her former suitor, Eilert Lövborg. Instead, Hedda lives vicariously, quizzing Lövborg about “a world . . . that she isn’t supposed to know anything about.
That curiosity about the more forbidden aspects of male life—the brothers and all-night benders—shows us another face of Hedda Gabler: the woman frightened, if not repulsed, by her own sexuality.
There is a strong suggestion in the play—and, indeed, Ibsen himself famously remarked—that “Hedda wants to live the life of a man.” The social consequences of such a wish are apparent enough: more freedom, more choices, even the possibility of rebellion. These outcomes, though, also apply to female sexuality and Hedda equally struggles against a destiny that is as much biological as social. In the years preceding the action of the play, Hedda keeps suitors at arm’s length, a game she continues to play with Lövborg and Brack after marriage. She is without a significant dowry by the time she succumbs to Tesman’s proposal, “having dances myself tired” as she remarks wearily to Judge Brack. Marriage, of course, negates the game endlessly deferring the desires of suitors. The play hints that Hedda has returned from the suggestion of her condition, refusing to acknowledge this tangible evidence of her femininity. Instead, Hedda attempts to maintain the fiction with her importunate lovers that she is still the beautiful General Gabler’s daughter, not the pregnant Mrs. Tesman, as the title of the play makes evident. Above all, Hedda rejects the somnolent ripening of the pregnant female, the woman who waits for an event that will happen of its own accord. “For once in my life,” Hedda declares, “I want to feel that I control a human destiny.” Because she cannot control the life within her (or even her own life), Hedda turns to that most masculine of pastimes: guns and destruction. One need not stress the obvious Freudian overtones and, not surprisingly, Hedda turns to firearms at the very movements her own sexual powerlessness threatens to overwhelm her.
Annihilation takes us to the final face of Hedda: Circe, the goddess and sorceress who figures in Greek mythology. Hers is a dual nature, split between primal, destructive urges and nurturing, womanly impulses. She provides food and wine to Odysseus and his men, but she turns his sailors into swine. She destroys what has momentarily pleased. Hedda too is associated with the chaos that comes of these discordant elements. She repeatedly offers wine to Lövborg, but this otherwise hospitable act is poisonous to a reformed alcoholic, as Hedda well knows. When Lövborg fails mightily, Hedda urges him to destruction, envisioning him “crowned with vine leaves” like Olympic hero. She directs equally ruinous behavior at her husband and Mrs. Elvsted. Sometimes Hedda is merely feline in her cruelty, languidly watching the discomfort of her squirming victims. She jokingly threatens to set fire to Mrs. Elvsted’s abundant red hair, and she deliberately “mistakes” Miss Tesman’s new hat for a dirty cast-off left by the maid. Nettled that Mrs. Elvsted could inspire reform in the dissipated Eilert Lövborg, Hedda sets about dismantling all that is wholesome in their relationship.
Ultimately, we don’t know exactly what motivates Hedda, and therein lays the dark lure of Ibsen’s tale. The play’s concluding line—Judge Brack’s horrified exclamation that “people don’t do such things!”—has particular resonance. As the media daily remind us, people continue to “do such things,” and we still know as little of the mysteries of the human heart.
"The biological principles of heredity, the tenants of psychology, and the cultural matrices of conventional morality, and the laws of economics combine in Ibsen’s plays to form patterns of fate and nemesis that assume that functions filled by the supernatural in classic tragedy. " (Charles McFarlane)
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Its a very good play about the social class. good work by Ibsen
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