Hedda Gabler

The translation is by Una Ellis-Fermor. 

1/ At the centre of the play is the marriage between Jørgen Tesman and Hedda (née Gabler).

Jørgen is dull—respectable and learned but dull, and not particularly perceptive. He is reminiscent of both Charles Bovary and Mr Casaubon. Ibsen shows from the start that Jørgen can be simple and naïve, failing to get his aunt’s meaning, and we can quickly see the contrast between him and his new wife in the scene with Thea Elvsted: he notices nothing whereas Hedda quickly sees through her old friend’s little lies. 

Hedda Gabler Tesman however is not Emma Bovary, and definitely not Dorothea Brooke. Dorothea marries Mr Casaubon because of her naïve idealism and misjudgement of his character, Hedda has no delusion. Hedda shares with Emma ennui and contempt for her husband and her marriage, but unlike Emma, she is neither sentimental nor sensual. She doesn’t seem to like sex. 

In some ways, she is more like Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country: both like money and luxury, both seem indifferent to sex, and both are manipulative. The main difference, I think, is that Edith Wharton’s character manipulates in order to gain money and social status, whereas Hedda manipulates in order to—what? 

2/ In The Wild Duck, Gregers interferes in Hjalmar’s life partly because of his ideals, and partly because he wants to get back at his own father. At the beginning, he gets all the skeletons out of the Ekdal family, to set Hjalmar’s marriage on a new foundation of truth, but he doesn’t stop there. He goes further, and in a way wants Hjalmar’s family to be worse off and little Hedwig not to get help, just so he can be proven right and his father wrong—like it’s all a contest, a game. 

Now let’s look at Hedda: 

“MRS ELVSTED There’s something behind all this, Hedda. 

HEDDA True; there is. I want, for once in my life, to have power over a human being’s fate.” 

(Act 2) 

Similarly, Hedda wants to interfere in people’s lives, and she does so only because she wants to have power over a human being’s fate. She wants to manipulate and corrupt and even ruin Ejlert Løvborg only because the idea that he has been reformed by the simple Thea offends her sensibilities. 

But why? 

3/ It is difficult to read Hedda Gabler, especially Act 3, without strong feeling of contempt and loathing for the titular character—she is despicable. Compared to other trapped wives in literature such as Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, Effi Briest, Dorothea Brooke, etc., Hedda is not very sympathetic—I would even say that she hardly has any redeeming quality. Self-awareness, perhaps.  

I’ve seen from the start that she is cold and callous about small things such as Jørgen’s old slippers or his aunt’s hat, humiliating the old woman for no reason, but it’s in Act 3 where it becomes clear that Hedda is indifferent about everything, even in matters of life and death. Nothing moves her, nothing matters, and it is terrifying. Her irrational, inexplicable hatred, if it may be called hatred, gets to the peak at the end of Act 3. In a way, Hedda is reminiscent of Iago in her “motiveless malignity” (to use Coleridge’s words).

However, unlike Iago, Hedda also hates herself: she hates people and society and her marriage; she also hates herself for being a coward. As she says, she has accepted and walked into this marriage herself, which she despises. She can’t help feeling contempt for the Tesman family, who is socially beneath her. But she lacks the courage to walk out. 

Hedda hates Thea also because Thea has the courage to leave her husband, the courage she herself doesn’t have.  

4/ In a way, the characters in Hedda Gabler can be put into 2 groups: the good-natured, kind, “simple” Jørgen, Thea, Aunt Juliane, and even Ejlert belong together; in the other group with Hedda is Brack. Ibsen creates Hedda, and creates Brack, the judge and family friend, who is cold and ruthless and calculating in his own way—he sees through her and knows her fears, and near the end of the play, destroys her illusion, holds some power over her, and inadvertently pushes her to the inevitable. 

Ibsen ends Act 3 with such terror that one wonders how he keeps the dramatic tension afterwards, but he does. And see what he does in Act 4, especially the ending!  

5/ So far I have been vague. Those of you who haven’t read/seen the play and don’t want to know important plot details may want to stop here.  

A Doll’s House, Ghosts, and Hedda Gabler may be seen as connected, because A Doll’s House is about a woman who walks out and leaves her husband, Ghosts is about a woman who runs away then returns to her husband and suffers 19 years of misery and other consequences, and Hedda Gabler on the surface is about a woman who gets into a marriage she despises and has no courage to walk out. But they don’t have much in common: each play is a study of a different situation, a different kind of woman. 

I saw that some people called Hedda Gabler a feminist play, which I found laughable. Hedda is too cold, manipulative, and full of self-loathing to be a strong woman or a feminist figure. Hers is not simply the predicament of a woman strapped in an unhappy marriage and bound in a patriarchal society—it is a lot more complex, and to see the play in mere feminist terms is to reduce it, to strip it of complexity and ambiguity. It also fails to answer lots of questions about the play: why does Hedda hate that Ejlert is now reformed and has great potential for success? Why does she goad him back into drinking? If she wants to retain her hold and influence over him, offended that he has been tamed by Thea, why? Why does she give him a gun afterwards? Why does she destroy the manuscript? She has some illusion about a free and beautiful action, but why? 

The constraints of a patriarchal society alone cannot explain her actions. Hedda is not a victim. Hedda Gabler is fascinating because she is complex and her motivations are complex.  

Feminist criticism is often offensive as it reduces men and women to simple categories, and doesn’t see the individual.