Hedda Gabler Study Guide

Hedda Gabler was published in 1890 before opening in Munich, Germany in 1891 to
terrible reviews. Indeed, Ibsen was not happy with the premiere, citing the overly declamatory
inflections of the lead actress. The play seemed destined to fail. Hedda Gabler, however, is
largely dependent on the performance by the lead actress and her interpretation of the role - with
Hedda as either hero, anti-hero, or villain - and with numerous productions springing up around
the globe, Ibsen's new play slowly gained acknowledgment from the dramatic community as a
tour de force role for female actresses capable of making Hedda their own.

In his later works, Ibsen created a new genre of "problem" plays in which he used his
characters to trace either the general moral decay of society or to pinpoint a specific problem that
would ultimately lead to the downfall of a community. Hedda Gabler is one of these, though it
has always been a subject of debate as to what exactly Ibsen is critiquing through his central
character. Ibsen himself offered a clue when he wrote to a friend, "The title of the play is Hedda
Gabler. My intention in giving it this name was to indicate that Hedda as a personality is to be
regarded rather as her father's daughter than as her husband's wife. It was not really my intention
to deal in this play with so-called problems. What I principally wanted to do was to depict human
beings, human emotions, and human destinies, upon groundwork of certain of the social
conditions and principles of the present day. When you have read the whole, my fundamental
idea will be clearer to you than I can make it by entering into further explanations."

Hedda Gabler remains one of Ibsen's most performed plays, and had a recent revival on
Broadway in 2005 when Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett starred in the coveted title role.

Hedda Gabler Summary

Hedda Gabler and her new husband, George Tesman, return from their six-month
honeymoon to their new house.

Tesman's Aunt Julia is there to welcome them home. Hedda is quite rude to the older
woman, so Julia leaves quickly. After her departure, Mrs. Elvsted arrives to let the Tesmans
know that Eilert Lovborg, Tesman's academic nemesis, has returned to town after having fallen
into alcoholism and taken two years to achieve sobriety and return to society. Mrs. Elvsted hints
to Hedda that she truly loves Lovborg, and doesn't care about her husband anymore - but that
she's worried that Lovborg's return to the city will mean that he'll start drinking again.

Judge Brack arrives as soon as Mrs. Elvsted leaves, and lets the Tesmans know that
Lovborg has been greeted warmly, and that his new book has been a major success. Indeed,
Brack tells Tesman that the professorship he's been expecting might go to Lovborg instead.
Privately, Hedda tells Brack that she cares little for her new husband, and that she hopes that the
Judge might be able to somehow entertain her during these dull years of marriage. She agrees
that Brack will be part of their "triangle" - a relationship that won't necessarily involve explicit
adultery, but will provide her with some much-needed companionship.

Tesman returns to the room and says that he's going the stag party that the Judge is
holding later that night. Eilert Lovborg soon arrives, and privately confesses his long-held love
for Hedda. Once upon a time, they used to be friends, but Lovborg got "too close" and Hedda cut
off ties with him - even, at one point, threatening to shoot him. Now he hopes to at least restart a
friendship. Mrs. Evlsted arrives, and Hedda mischievously uses the information she has from
both parties to pit the two against one another. She makes Mrs. Elvsted look like a fool for
having worried that Lovborg would suddenly start drinking again. In retaliation, Lovborg decides
to follow Tesman and Brack to their stag party, clutching the pages of the handwritten
manuscript for his "revelatory" new book about the future.

Hedda and Mrs. Elvsted wait all night for the men to return, but Tesman doesn't arrive
until morning. He is carrying Lovborg's manuscript, which he says the scholar dropped in a fit of
late-night drunkenness. Tesman leaves the manuscript with Hedda while he goes out to visit a
dying relative, and in the meanwhile, Judge Brack arrives to tell the women that Lovborg got
into trouble with the police the night before after assaulting a group of women whom he said
took his manuscript.

Lovborg soon arrives and tells Hedda and Mrs. Elvsted that he didn't lose the manuscript,
but rather tore it into a thousand pieces. Mrs. Elvsted leaves, devastated that Lovborg has
become so self-destructive. Just before leaving, however, Lovborg tells Hedda that he did in fact
lose the manuscript. Hedda, who possesses the manuscript herself, says nothing about it, but
rather encourages him to follow through on his thoughts of suicide, handing him one of her
father's pistols. Lovborg leaves, and Hedda burns the manuscript.

Mrs. Elvsted arrives that night and tells the Tesmans that Lovborg is missing and is
rumored to be in the hospital. Brack arrives to confirm the reports that Lovborg has died of a
bullet wound to the chest. While Mrs. Elvsted and Tesman sit in the living room trying to
reconstruct his manuscript from the notes Mrs. Elvsted possesses, Brack privately tells Hedda
that Lovborg did not kill himself, but rather died from a wound inflicted to the bowels - either
the result of an accident or someone else's fire. Brack tells Hedda that either she must account for
the pistol being hers, or do whatever he tells her to, as only he can keep her from falling into the
police's hands or suffering through a public scandal. Realizing that she is now in Brack's power,
Hedda goes into the next room and shoots herself.
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.

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 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
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 Lovborg 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 Lovborg 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 Lovborg 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
Lovborg: 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
acclaim. Tesman, however, is too afraid to ever indulge his own original thoughts, and so
dedicates his life to reconstructing Lovborg'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.

Hedda Gabler Early Reviews of Hedda

Gabler
When Hedda Gabler first began to be performed, it was not a popular play by any means.
In fact, it was Ibsen's most poorly-received work to date, and was expected to go down in history
as a colossal failure. Slowly, however, as more and more theaters began to put on performances,
the play received an increasingly great amount of attention. Audiences marveled at the way in
which each actress's interpretation of the role revealed more about Hedda Gabler's complexities.

"The production of an Ibsen play impels the inquiry, What is the province of art? If it be
to elevate and refine, as we have hitherto humbly supposed, most certainly it cannot be said that
the works of Ibsen have the faintest claim to be artistic. We see no ground on which his method
is defensible...Things rank and gross in nature alone have place in the mean and sordid
philosophy of Ibsen. Those of his characters who are not mean morally are mean intellectually -
the wretched George Tesman, with his enthusiasm about the old shoes his careful aunt brings
him wrapped up in a bit of newspaper, is a case in point. As for refining and elevating, can any
human being, it may be asked, feel happier or better in anyway from a contemplation of the two
harlots at heart who do duty in Hedda Gabler?...We do not mean to say that there are not,
unhappily, Hedda Gablers and George Tesmans in "real life". There are; but when we meet them
we take the greatest pains to get out of their way, and why should they be endured on the stage?"

- Saturday Morning Review

"Now, to us Hedda Gabler appears a wonderful work of art, one that must produce a
profound impression upon those who will accustom themselves to regard a stage-play from the
point of view of real, living character in actual contact with the facts and sensations and
possibilities of human experience, instead of gauging it by the conventional standard of
playmaking, or the superficial observation of ordinary social intercourse. Ibsen has a way of
going to the root of the matter, and exposing the skeleton in the cupboard, which is certainly not
always a pleasant sight. But life, with its infinite subtleties and inconsistencies, is always
interesting, and Ibsen shows the wonder and the pity of it, while perhaps he only infers its
loveliness by contrast. But therein he proves himself a master artist, for his point of view is
definite, and the impression he produces is complete and final. In Hedda Gabler he gives us a
typical tragedy of modern life, and in the strange, sensitive, selfish heroine, he presents one of
the most wonderful and subtle conceptions of woman in the whole range of dramatic literature."

Brief Biography of Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen was born into a wealthy, highly respected family. His father, Knud, was a
merchant who met with success early on in life, but suffered a great financial loss when Henrik
was seven. As a result, Knud became jaded and began to drink heavily. He took out his troubles
on his children and his wife, Marichen Altenburg, who remained loving and self-sacrificing
throughout this period of hardship. Ibsen would later model many of his characters after his
mother and father. At the age of fifteen, Henrik was forced to discontinue his education after his
father declared bankruptcy. He then moved to Grimstad to become an apprentice pharmacist,
and also began writing plays. Ibsen resolved to seek a university education in Christiania
(present-day Oslo), but did not pass the entrance exams. Fortunately, by this point Ibsen had
persuaded himself that a university education would not help him succeed in writing great plays
—he committed himself wholly to his art as a playwright from then on. He was, incidentally,
remarkably unsuccessful in this vocation at first, and he and his wife Suzannah Thoresen were
very poor. Their household survived on Ibsen’s meager income as a writer, director, and
producer at the Det norske Theater in Bergen. As his threadbare years of artistic anonymity
ground on, Ibsen became increasingly dissatisfied with life in Norway. As a result, in 1864 he
left his wife and their five-year-old son, Sigurd (who grew up to become the Prime Minister of
Norway), and moved south, first to Sorrento, Italy, and later to Dresden, Germany. He didn’t
return to Norway until 1891. It was during this self-imposed exile that Ibsen came into his own
as an artist. During this period he composed his visionary verse plays Brand (1865) and Peer
Gynt (1867), which won him fame and success. A little more than a decade later, he had
pioneered and perfected the realist, bourgeois drama, as evidenced by the stream of
masterpieces he published between 1879 and 1886, including A Doll’s
House(1879), Ghosts (1881), and what some consider to be his masterpiece, The Wild
Duck (1884). This period saw Ibsen ascend to his highest level of fame—he became a
household name internationally, and was perhaps the most famous writer of his time. He was
both celebrated for his perfectly crafted plots and deep character studies, and also denounced for
his unflinching penetration into the sickness of modern life. After the most successful career in
the theater since Shakespeare’s, Ibsen died in Oslo in 1906, the result of several strokes. He is
often considered to be “the father of modern drama” and has served as an influence for artists
ranging from Arthur Miller to James Joyce.

Historical Context of Hedda Gabler

Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, Ibsen focused his energies on writing what we have
learned to call “problem plays” (e.g. A Doll’s House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People)—plays
that, in the words of one critic, investigate “contemporary controversy of public importance—
women’s rights, unemployment, penal reform, class privilege—in a vivid but responsibly
accurate presentation.” A Doll’s House is one of Ibsen’s most famous problem plays, and it
shares the same social groundwork as the later Hedda Gabler. The late nineteenth century was
dominated by strict Victorian social codes and laws that severely restricted the rights of all
women, and especially married women like Nora in A Doll’s House and Hedda herself. While
this historical background is important to Ibsen’s purposes in Hedda Gabler, this play
nonetheless represents a marked turn away from the earlier problem plays and toward the more
personal, visionary, symbolic, and evocative dramas that constitute Ibsen’s late period.

Other Books Related to Hedda Gabler

As is perhaps inevitable for a dramatist, Ibsen was deeply influenced by the plays of
Shakespeare.Hedda Gabler is particularly indebted to Shakespeare’s plays Othello and Antony
and Cleopatra, for Ibsen’s portrait of Hedda draws on the character of the devilish Iago in the
former and the melodramatic, charismatic Cleopatra in the latter. Like Iago, Hedda is
egotistical, sadistic, and deceptive, and, to some minds, both characters are motiveless in their
acts of destruction. Just as Iago plots the downfall of his dear general Othello, so Hedda plots
the downfall of her intimate comrade, Ejlert Lövborg. Like Cleopatra, on the other hand, Hedda
has a touch of the diva about her, and she is also committed to a vision of beauty (unlike Iago).
Formally speaking, in plays like Hedda Gabler Ibsen pioneered and perfected realistic modern
drama—that is, drama which focuses on every day, middle-class life, written in a prose that
imitates everyday speech. In this regard, Ibsen’s influence cannot be overstated, as Chekov,
Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, and Arthur Miller all wrote plays indebted to
Ibsen’s dramatic innovations.

Key Facts about Hedda Gabler

 Full Title: Hedda Gabler

 When Written: 1889-1890
 Where Written: Mostly in Munich, Germany
 When Published: December of 1890
 Literary Period: Theatrical realism, modernism
 Genre: Drama
 Setting: The Tesmans’ villa, located in a Norwegian
city modeled on Christiania
 Climax: Hedda burns Lövborg’s manuscript
 Antagonist: Hedda Gabler herself, to some extent, in
her role as an antihero

Extra Credit for Hedda Gabler

What’s in a Name? It may seem surprising that Ibsen titles his play Hedda Gabler given
that, when the action of the play begins, his main character is actually named Hedda Tesman.
Why does he do this? The playwright wants us to understand, in his words, “that Hedda as a
personality is to be regarded rather as her father’s daughter than as her husband’s wife.” After
all, she shares her father’s aristocratic and warlike temperament, much more so than Tesman’s
bourgeois and bookwormish one. Hedda’s first name, it should be added, appropriately means
“strife.”
A Stormy Rivalry.
Ibsen’s great dramatic rival and contemporary was the Swedish playwright August
Strindberg, whom Ibsen regarded as “delightfully mad” and whose portrait hung in Ibsen’s
study as a provocation. After reading Hedda Gabler, Strindberg recognized that he himself had
served as source material for the character of Ejlert Lövborg, whom Hedda inspires to suicide.
Of this, Strindberg wrote: “It seems to me that Ibsen realizes that I shall inherit the crown when
he is finished. He hates me mentally… And now the decrepit old troll seems to hand me the
revolver! … I shall survive him and many others and the day The Father [a play by Strindberg]
kills Hedda Gabler, I shall stick the gun in the old troll’s neck.”

Summary:

Hedda, the beautiful daughter of General Gabler, has recently married Jörgen Tesman,
an academic who is facing financial hardships in attempting to satisfy his wife’s grand and
aristocratic ways. The two have just returned from their long honeymoon when the play begins—
a journey during which Jörgen toiled away in archives and libraries, mostly. However, he did
find time to impregnate Hedda, who is ashamed for this fact to be aired publicly. Hedda also
finds her new life with Tesman monotonous and excruciatingly boring.

The morning after the couple’s arrival back in town—the action of the play takes place in
September—they are visited by Jörgen’s childhood caretaker, Miss Juliane Tesman, or Aunt
Julle, who dotes on her nephew. In the Tesmans’ spacious, handsome drawing room, the two
discuss, among other things, Jörgen’s confidence that he will soon be appointed as a university
professor: a prestigious, financially stable post. Aunt Julle also mentions that Jörgen’s other
aunt, Rina, is still very ill, and that Jörgen’s old friend and rival, Ejlert Lövborg, is back in
town. Several years earlier, Lövborg had gone on a spree of drunken debaucheries and fell from
social grace—now, however, Lövborg has published a new book to enormous praise.

At this point, Hedda comes into the drawing room. She says that she cannot manage
with Berte, the household maid, whom Hedda accuses of having strewn her old hat on a chair.
Jörgen is appalled: the hat is his aunt’s, not Berte’s, and it is new. Miss Tesman is offended and
prepares to leave. Before she does so, however, Jörgen smooths things over by hinting that
Hedda is pregnant—to Hedda’s perturbation and Aunt Julle’s great satisfaction.

Soon after Aunt Julle’s departure, another guest arrives, Mrs. Thea Elvsted, an old
schoolmate of Hedda’s and an old flame of Tesman’s. She has come seeking Ejlert Lövborg,
whom she fears will relapse now that he’s back in the big city and surrounded by temptations.
Hedda asks her husband to write a warm, friendly letter to Lövborg to invite him over so that
they can keep an eye on him. Meanwhile, Hedda interrogates Thea and learns that she has
scandalously come to town without her husband’s permission, and that she has served as
Lövborg’s helpmate and muse.

Another guest then pays a visit to the Tesmans, Judge Brack, who has helped Mr.
Tesman arrange his finances. Brack reminds Mr. Tesman that he promised to attend his bachelor
party, to be held later that night. Brack also has some serious news: the appointment to the
professorship which Tesman was counting on might well be contested—by none other than
Ejlert Lövborg. Tesman is dismayed, as this development threatens to worsen his already
strained financial situation. After Brack’s exit, Jörgen tells his wife that, to save money, she will
have to curtail her social life. Hedda says ominously that at least she has one thing to pass the
time with: her father’s pistols.

Later that afternoon, while Tesman is away at his aunts’ house, Judge Brack pays another
visit to Hedda. She playfully fires a loaded pistol at him as he walks up from the garden,
shocking him. The two at last sit in the drawing room, and Hedda tells Brack about the hat
incident—she says that she knew all along that the hat she mocked belonged to Aunt Julle and
not to Berte. Hedda also confides in Brack how monotonously miserable her married life is.
Brack, for his part, insinuates that he would like to be more than a trusted friend in the Tesman
household. Hedda implies, however, that she would never engage in an extramarital affair.

Tesman arrives back at the villa, and Lövborg appears soon afterward. Lövborg reveals
that, in addition to his newly published book, he has written a manuscript about the future course
of civilization. He’s poured his true self into this manuscript, and he considers it to be like his
own child. Lövborg also announces that he will not compete with Tesman for the professorship,
to Tesman’s great relief. Judge Brack invites Lӧvborg to his bachelor party, but Lӧvborg
declines. He also declines to drink the alcoholic punch he’s offered.

While Tesman and Judge Brack drink, smoke, and talk in the inner room, Lӧvborg sits
with Hedda in the drawing room and the two pretend to interest themselves in a photo album.
Really, they whisperingly reminisce: we learn that the two of them had a very intimate
relationship during their adolescence, one Hedda violently broke off after it threatened to
develop a sexual dimension. Hedda threatened to shoot Lӧvborg at the time, but at last didn’t—
Lӧvborg accuses Hedda of fearing scandal and being a coward. Hedda agrees with him.

Mrs. Elvsted enters and comes to sit in the drawing room with Hedda and Lövborg.
Lövborg praises Thea’s beauty and courage, and this inflames Hedda’s jealousy. Hedda tempts
Lӧvborg to drink, saying that the other men will think less of him if he doesn’t, but Lӧvborg is
firm in his principles. Hedda then reveals that Mrs. Elvsted came to the Tesmans’ earlier that
morning in a state of desperation, fearful that Lӧvborg would relapse. That Mrs. Elvsted
demonstrably has so little confidence in her companion wounds Lövborg to his soul: he
consequently delivers a grave toast, and then drinks two glasses of alcoholic punch. When
Tesman and Judge Brack make ready to leave for the bachelor party, Lӧvborg announces, despite
Thea’s quiet pleas, that he’s going to join them. He promises to return at ten o’clock that night.

Mrs. Elvsted passes a sleepless night at the Tesmans’ villa, while Hedda sleeps quite
well. At ten, neither Tesman nor Ejlert Lӧvborg has returned from the party. Mrs. Elvsted is
panicked, but Hedda advises her to go into her bedroom and rest. Meanwhile, Tesman returns
home. Hedda catches him tiptoeing in and asks how his night went. Tesman confesses to being
jealous of Lӧvborg’s manuscript. He also has a sad story to tell: Lӧvborg got debauchedly drunk,
and while he was being walked home, he lost his precious, irreplaceable manuscript. Tesman,
who had fallen behind the other men, found it in the gutter. Tesman says he must return it to
Lӧvborg at once, but before he can he receives a letter informing him that his Aunt Rina is dying.
Tesman hurries to her at once, leaving Lӧvborg’s manuscript in Hedda’s care.

Just as Tesman leaves, Judge Brack enters. He also has some news for Hedda: after the
party broke up and the revelers went their separate ways, Lӧvborg went to the salon of
one Mademoiselle Diana, who is the madam, or procuress, of a brothel. What’s more, Lӧvborg
accused Mademoiselle Diana or one of her prostitutes of robbing him. He started a fight over the
matter, and when the police arrived he even struck an officer and tore his tunic. Lӧvborg then
had to go to the police station—disgracing himself again. The Judge advises Hedda to close her
doors to Lӧvborg from there on out. He exits.

Soon after, Hedda hears an altercation in the hall. Despite Berte’s best efforts, Lӧvborg
enters in a state of confusion and excitement. Mrs. Elvsted enters, also, from Hedda’s bedroom.
Lӧvborg lies and says that he tore up his manuscript and scattered its thousand pieces into the
fjord. Mrs. Elvsted cries out that this act seems to her as though Lӧvborg had killed a little child.
She exits.

Alone with Hedda, Lӧvborg says that his life is hopeless, and he confesses that he could
not bring himself to tell Mrs. Elvsted the truth about the manuscript—namely, that he lost it. He
also reveals his intention to kill himself. Hedda, far from protesting, just asks that he do so
beautifully. She tells him to leave and never come back—but before he goes she gives him a
memento, one of her father’s pistols, to be used in carrying out his “beautiful” suicide. Lӧvborg
exits. Once he leaves, Hedda takes his manuscript out from her bookshelf and feeds it into
the fire of her stove.

That evening, Aunt Julle comes to the Tesmans’ villa to inform Hedda of Aunt Rina’s
death. Tesman comes in soon after, broken up about not only the death of his beloved aunt but
also about Lӧvborg’s disgrace. He says that he must return his manuscript to him. Once Aunt
Julle leaves, however, Hedda confesses that she destroyed the manuscript. To assuage her
husband’s outrage, she insists she did it out of love for him, so that he wouldn’t be outshone by a
better mind. Tesman is torn between doubt and happiness to learn this news.

Mrs. Elvsted enters. She’s heard that Lӧvborg has had some kind of accident. Judge
Brack enters soon after and confirms that Lӧvborg is in the hospital, fatally shot in the breast. To
everyone’s shock and alarm, Hedda praises the courage and beauty of his suicide. Tesman,
moreover, is wracked by guilt: Lövborg’s manuscript, which would have made its author’s name
immortal, is now lost to the world forever. Mrs. Elvsted says that that’s not entirely the case,
because she is in possession of the notes that Lövborg used to dictate the manuscript to her. On
the spot, Tesman and Mrs. Elvsted decide to team up and reconstruct Lövborg’s work.

Meanwhile, Judge Brack informs Hedda that Lӧvborg’s death seems not to have been an
intentional suicide: he was shot at Mademoiselle Diana’s salon, while raving about his
manuscript. He was also not shot in the breast, as Brack had previously reported, but rather in the
abdomen. Hedda is disgusted to consider the fact that seemingly everything she touches becomes
petty and farcical. Brack then reveals that Hedda will be implicated in a scandal when it comes
out that Lӧvborg shot himself with her pistol. Brack says that no one need know that the pistol
was Hedda’s, however—so long as he holds his tongue.

Hedda understands at once that she is in the lecherous Judge Brack’s power, a prospect
she cannot endure. Nor can she endure the prospect of her husband being away with Mrs. Elvsted
working on the manuscript all the time, leaving her with only Brack for company. Hedda retires
to the inner room, plays a wild tune on the piano, and then shoots herself in the temple with her
remaining pistol. All in the house are horrified: “People don’t do such things,” exclaims Judge
Brack.

Themes:
Power and Influence
 Every character in Hedda Gabler seeks power and influence of some kind. As one critic
describes it, the play “is most convincingly read as the record of a series of personal campaigns
for control and domination: over oneself, over others, and over one’s world.” Most of the power
struggles are petty:Jörgen Tesman wants to know more than anyone else about medieval
domestic crafts, of all things, so that he might gain the professional and social power that would
come with a prestigious professorship. Judge Brack wants a hold over Hedda, his verbal
sparring partner, presumably so that he can have sexual access to her (Hedda, for her part, cannot
endure the idea of being “subject to [his] will and [his] demands”). More grandly, Ejlert
Lövborg wants to intellectually control the world by seeing into its future, even though,
ironically enough, he can’t control himself when under the influence of alcohol. Mrs. Elvsted,
for her part, comes to the “terrible town” where the Tesmans live so that she can exert a counter-
influence over Lövborg and save him from his self-destructiveness.

While most of the characters in the play want power and influence for practical reasons,
Hedda seeks to control and dominate others on a whim—seemingly she wants only to alleviate
the excruciating boredom of her life, and so makes others suffer for no better reason than
because she can. As Ibsen wrote in one of his notebooks, “The demonic thing about Hedda is
that she wants to exert influence over another person.” She has an insatiable will and burns to
accumulate things, but finds no satisfaction in what she has. As such, she has exhausted her
wishes—but her will itself still requires exercise, and she exercises it precisely by hurting others,
which lessens her own suffering and pleases her as an expression of her power. Performing
power, then, becomes an end in itself for Hedda, from insisting that her maid Berte refer to
Tesman not as mister but as doctor, to something so monstrous as encouraging Lövborg to
suicide. In this sense, Hedda is the most extreme example of her society’s lust for power.
Whereas her father, General Gabler, led men to death on the battlefield, Hedda leads men to
death from the comfort of her drawing room.

Provincialism and Patriarchy

Despite being well-educated and well-traveled, Hedda Gabler lives in a very small,
small-minded world—that is, a provincial world. The streets she rode down as a young woman,
accompanied by her father General Gabler, are the same streets she rides down now as a
married woman. One of her early admirers, the academic Jörgen Tesman, is now her husband, a
man who during the couple’s honeymoon abroad revealingly neglects the cultural riches of Italy
in favor of toiling away in libraries. When financial strain curtails Hedda’s social life, her days
become monotonous and stale. Consequently, she feels imprisoned: she has “not a single
intellectual interest or moral enthusiasm,” as one critic describes it. She spends her long, dull,
oppressive days planning to make purchases she and her husband can’t afford and gossiping
somewhat deviously with Judge Brack—all the while fantasizing about freedom.

What’s more, Hedda is especially limited in exercising her considerable intelligence and
fiery lust for life because she is a woman living in a society dominated by men: a patriarchy. The
men in her social circle have war, politics, and wild drinking parties to give scope to their action,
thought, and feeling. In contrast, the women in the play mostly care for and serve the men, as
Tesman’s Aunt Julle cares for her rather dependent nephew, or as Mrs. Elvsted serves to
inspire the self-centered Ejlert Lövborg(revealingly, Mrs. Elvsted thinks her own husband treats
her like cheap and useful property). Tesman sees Hedda as a prize and as the mother of his child,
while Lövborg sees her as a fascinating maze, and Judge Brack sees her as a charming pet and
toy. No one sees Hedda for the great and destructive soul she really is. In response, Hedda
attempts to downplay her womanhood—by repressing her pregnancy as best she can, among
other things—and to influence and even participate in the sphere of action traditionally
dominated by men. She seems to have established her early comradeship withLövborg, for
example, both to subtly challenge her father’s authority and also to live vicariously through her
male comrade’s confessions. As Hedda explains, it’s understandable that a young girl should
want to find out about a world that is supposed to be forbidden to her. The central symbol for her
fascination with this male world, then, is General Gabler’s pistols, the phallic objects of
authority and power which Hedda takes delight in brandishing.

While it would be an oversimplification to say that Hedda’s nihilism and cruelty are a
product of patriarchal oppression, it is not too much to say that provincialism and patriarchy
characterize the social world Hedda wages quiet war against.

Modern Society v. the Individual

Throughout his career, Ibsen investigated the interplay between modern society and the
heroic individual, and in his plays he generally privileges the latter. The ordinary members of
society whom he represents tend to be materialistic, and uncommitted to anything other than
maintaining the status quo and advancing their petty self-interests. Jörgen Tesman, amiable
though he may be, is just such a person: he mostly concerns himself with bourgeois comforts and
conventions, and his academic specialization in history and medieval domestic crafts is at once
arbitrary and spiritually trivial. He is in all senses a “secondary” man, studying only what other
men have done and made instead of doing or making anything for himself. Indeed, by the end of
the play Tesman vows not to imagine the future of civilization for himself, but rather to
reconstruct Lövborg’s partially destroyedmanuscript on that subject. Nonetheless, Judge
Brack refers to Tesman as “outstanding,” if only because Tesman holds a socially prestigious
academic post, makes good money, and is married to the great beauty Hedda. Judge Brack, for
that matter, is also rather ordinary. His one violation of social convention—seeking intimacy
with a married woman—is itself very conventional.

In contrast to the Tesmans and Judge Bracks of the world, Ibsen gives us the visionary
Ejlert Lövborg and the extraordinary Hedda Gabler. Lövborg has risen from social disgrace to
academic prominence with the publication of a conventional book that was met with enormous
praise: “I put nothing into the book but what everyone would agree with,” he explains (again
suggesting that the most efficient means of rising in modern society is to tell people what affirms
their prejudices and beliefs). However, Lövborg is no plodder like Tesman—he has also written
a manuscript he has put his true self into, one not about the past but the future: a subject fit only
for visionaries. Whether or not Lövborg really is a man of genius, Ibsen declines to reveal, but
we know that he is at least a courageous thinker with passionate commitments. Lövborg’s
inability to drink in moderation is a sign of this passion, and it also suggests the extent to which
an extraordinary person is out of place in modern society and especially vulnerable to its vices.

But it is ultimately Hedda who is the most extraordinary figure in the play. She is more
intelligent, more elegantly destructive, and more possessed by a vision of courage and beauty
(albeit a terrifying one) than any other character. She is an antihero who sees society as an abyss
to play in, and she also has the skill to conceal her nihilism from others. We know this because
her destructiveness, at least until the main action of the play, has not affected her high social
standing. She limited herself to such cruelties as pulling the hair of fellow schoolgirls,
brandishing General Gabler’s pistols, and tactfully mocking Aunt Julle’s hat—that is, she has
been, in Lövborg’s words, “a coward,” unwilling or too canny to wholly reveal her true self. That
all changes, however, when she takes it upon herself to pressure Lövborg to drink and tempts
him to kill himself “beautifully.” These actions, and her consequent suicide, at last prove that
Hedda is supreme in the passion of her commitments and distinctly an individual over and
against modern society. “People don’t do such things!” Judge Brack exclaims after Hedda
commits suicide, and, for the most part, he’s correct. Hedda is unique in her isolated
individualism and her more than unconventional commitment to fulfilling herself by destroying
others.

Marriage, Love, Sexuality, and Jealousy

 Lӧvborg accuses Hedda of fearing scandal because she is a coward, and Hedda concedes
that she is. But it is perhaps her marriage to the mediocre Tesman that represents the far greater
concession to her cowardice. Hedda chose Tesman for his socioeconomic solidity and
respectability, and also because her own “marriageability” was ebbing. She does not love him—
she finds the very word “love” to be “glutinous” and “sickening”—nor is she even amused by
him. It is with a sense of wry deprivation that she now anticipates being in his company at all
times, in all seasons, consoled only by the fact that he stands to attain to the highest social
distinction. For Hedda, then, marriage is a wretched compromise one has to make with one’s
body and one’s society in order to live respectably and without scandal.

Hedda wants nothing to do with other men—at least sexually—either. Judge

Brack repeatedly insinuates that he would like to be more than a trusted friend in the Tesman
household, and he obliquely propositions Hedda. The passengers aboard the train of marriage
jump out and move about a little, he suggests—meaning that people often and casually indulge in
extramarital affairs. “I never jump out,” Hedda responds. Her fidelity to Tesman may be
motivated by her aversion to scandal, but it may also be motivated, as many critics have
suggested, by sexual frigidity and repression on Hedda’s part. She does tend to disengage from
her male companions as soon as their relationship threatens to “develop into something more
serious,” in her words, just as she did with Lӧvborg when the two were adolescents.
Furthermore, she is ashamed when Tesman announces to Aunt Julle that she, Hedda, is pregnant
—and she is perhaps also disgusted that anyone should have a reason to imagine her engaging in
intercourse. Ibsen, however, leaves us few clues as to the cause and significance of Hedda’s
sexuality. Perhaps she is disturbed by the fact that her destructive spirit is housed in a body
capable of sexual reproduction, or perhaps she is merely unable to muster much more than
egotism and hatred in relation to others.

While Hedda is evasive of her sexuality, she is readily and openly prone to jealousy. Her
social world, after all, is fraught with love triangles: Judge Brack tries to get between Hedda and
Tesman, Lӧvborg succeeds in getting between Mrs. Thea Elvsted and her husband, Hedda tries
to get between Lӧvborg and Mrs. Elvsted, and so on. Hedda’s jealousy of Mrs. Elvsted, however,
is not so much motivated by love as by a lust for power and influence over the fates of others.
Indeed, Hedda seems to confuse the products of love and the products of power. For example,
she thinks of Lӧvborg’smanuscript about the future as being his child, conceived by his helpmate
and muse Mrs. Elvsted—and she burns this manuscript, murmuring as she does so, “Now I’m
burning your child, Thea.” If the manuscript is Lӧvborg and Thea Elvsted’s labor of love, which
Hedda’s jealousy destroys, Hedda in contrast conceives with Lӧvborg the idea of his courageous,
beautiful suicide. It would seem that she is keen to produce only destruction, despite being
literally pregnant herself.

Beauty, Tragedy, and Farce

Modern life, at least to Hedda’s sensitive mind, is full of routine ugliness. Because
nothing is sacred, people become sentimental about personal trifles, as Tesman is about the
slippers his Aunt Rinaembroidered for him and which his Aunt Julle brings for him as a gift.
“Oh, you can’t imagine how many memories they have for me,” Tesman exclaims. “But not for
me, particularly,” Hedda responds. Then there is the ugliness of being married “everlastingly,” as
Hedda is, to a solid man who nonetheless lacks the charisma necessary for the glories of politics.
There is also the associated ugliness of being in the company of men like Judge Brack, who
vulgarly sexualizes and tries to intellectually battle with Hedda. There is, moreover, the ugliness
of debt, which threatens the Tesmans from the beginning of the play. It is no wonder, then, that
Hedda defiantly longs for beauty, and not the trivial beauty of a new hat and parasol, but for
tragic beauty—what she herself calls “an act of spontaneous courage… of unconditional beauty.”

But where is such beauty to be found? Hedda would respond that one does not find
beauty—rather, one creates it. So it is that she sets about like a theater director to produce a
tragic spectacle, full of pity and terror. She opportunistically casts Ejlert Lövborg at first as
a vine-crowned god on the rise and then, failing that, as a tragic hero, the flawed man who is
nonetheless superior in degree to other men. Then, with a ruthless commitment she has never had
the courage to make before, Hedda inserts her will into his destiny (and it is here that Hedda’s
accumulation of power at last finds a worthy purpose): she pressures him to drink because of his
vulnerability to alcohol, she destroys the manuscript he loses that night, and then, in her
crowning moment, Hedda gives Lövborg one of her father’s pistols so that he can kill himself,
asking Lövborg to “let it happen…beautifully.” This suggests that Hedda consciously thinks of
Lövborg’s death as a work of art. As further evidence of this, Hedda imagines Lövborg
throughout the play as having vine leaves in his hair: an allusion to the Greek god Dionysus, who
presides over intoxication and tragic insight. In the end, Hedda praises Lövborg’s “performance”
of suicide, declaring, “I say that there is beauty in this deed.”

Judge Brack, however, feels “compelled to disabuse [Hedda] of a beautiful illusion”:

Lövborg did not shoot himself intentionally, and, it would seem, he did not have the intention of
committing suicide after leaving the Tesmans’ house for the last time. To Hedda, then this means
that Lövborg’s death is not tragic at all, but rather farcical—that is, ludicrously futile and hollow
—a mockery of her noble purpose. It is this disillusionment, and also the recognition that Judge
Brack has control over her at last (through his knowledge that Hedda gave Lövborg the pistol he
shot himself with), that compel Hedda to kill herself—dying what she perhaps thinks of as a
beautiful death. We ourselves are left wondering, when the curtain falls, whether we have just
witnessed a beautiful tragedy—the fall of the great Hedda Gabler—or instead something more
farcical, hollow, and ironic.

General Gabler’s Pistols

Hedda inherited her pistols from her father, the great General Gabler, and her intimacy
with them suggests the extent to which Hedda is so much more her father’s daughter than her
husband’s wife. In this vein, we might say that the pistols are Hedda’s final material connection
to her glorious aristocratic past—a lifestyle which is now unsustainable because of the state
of Jörgen’s finances. The pistols mean much more than this to Hedda, however: they are
weapons for warfare, and phallic artifacts from a man’s world which is inaccessible to women
like Hedda in a patriarchal society. Hedda feels empowered and free when she holds these
instruments of power and domination, as when she fires in Judge Brack’s direction when he
comes through the garden. Moreover, Hedda herself is a loaded gun, so to speak, in waiting as
long as she does to unleash her powers for destruction, and the pistols underscore this
characterization. In the end, however, the pistols only empower Hedda in effecting her own self-
destruction.

Alcohol, Drunkenness, and Vine Leaves

The excessive consumption of alcohol in the world of Hedda Gabler is a privilege

enjoyed only by men, and so alcohol itself comes to symbolize, among other things, the social
freedom accessible to men but not to women in a patriarchal society. Tesman and Judge
Brack can escape from polite social conventions once in a while—during the Judge’s bachelor
party, for example—but Hedda, Mrs. Elvsted, and the other women in the play must always be
on their best behavior—otherwise they risk a scandal.

While ordinary men, drink as part of a social ritual—to give themselves license to behave
uninhibitedly or obscenely—the extraordinary Lövborg drinks to dissolve his ego and to render
himself susceptible to creative inspiration. Drunkenness, it is implied, is an almost religious
experience for him, full of free-spiritedness and courage. Given this, we need not wonder why
Lövborg drinks to dangerous, outrageous excess. It is in this sense, moreover, that alcohol
occupies a similar place in his life as Hedda does: both alcohol and Hedda inspire Lövborg, but
not so much to creation as to destruction. Mrs. Elvsted, in contrast, inspires Lövborg in his work
—and she also helps him control the influence alcohol has on his life.

It is worth noting here that Hedda does not will Lövborg to destruction consistently
throughout the play—only after Lövborg fails so disgracefully to control himself while under the
influence of alcohol. In fact, Hedda’s first plot for Lövborg centers on her vision of him with
vine leaves in his hair—an allusion to Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and tragic insight. Hedda
(or at least her better part) wants Lövborg to go to Judge Bracks’ bachelor party so that he can
prove that he has become wholly master of himself. In Hedda’s vision, the vine leaves symbolize
this almost divine self-mastery. In the end, however, Lövborg only proves that he is no
Dionysus, only an alcoholic, and so Hedda’s vision of his courage and beauty must be modified:
if Lövborg cannot live beautifully, she hopes that he can at least die beautifully.

Lövborg and Thea’s Manuscript

While General Gabler’s pistols and alcohol are destructive temptations launched from
characters’ pasts into their presents, Lövborg and Thea Elvsted’s manuscript symbolizes
creation, the redemption of the past, and hope for the future (the manuscript itself, after all, takes
the future for its subject matter). Mrs. Elvsted inspired Lövborg in writing the manuscript, in
what is virtually the only creative relationship between two people in the play. The manuscript
itself promises to redeem Lövborg of his past disgrace, as well as to establish him with a bright
reputation in the future. So important is the manuscript to Lövborg and Thea that they go so far
as to consider it to be their very own child. However, Lövborg’s lack of self-control, coupled
with Hedda’s destructive nature, lead to the loss and fiery death of this child. (Compare this with
the fact that Hedda, who is pregnant from the beginning of the play, dreads the paltriness and
boredom promised by motherhood, and takes her unborn child to death with her when she
commits suicide.) Perhaps Mrs. Elvsted will inspire Jörgen to successfully reconstruct the
Lövborg’s manuscript—this is the only prospect of creative redemption that the play leaves us
with when the curtain falls.

Fire and the Tesmans’ Stove

In the Tesmans’ drawing room is a dark porcelain stove which Ibsen invites us to pay
attention to throughout the play. Hedda goes toward it when Tesman tries to show her his
cherished old slippers, Hedda forces Mrs. Elvsted to sit next to it, and she sits next to it on
several occasions herself. The firein the stove also almost dies in Act III, only for Hedda to
revive it. We learn that the stove is onstage to serve a treacherous purpose only at the end of Act
 III, when Hedda kneels beside it and feeds into its fire Ejlert Lövborg’s precious,
irreplaceable manuscript. The seeming innocuousness of the stove parallels Hedda’s own
seeming harmlessness—but of course this is an illusion of which we are disabused over the
course of the play. Just as the stove conceals the fire in its belly, so too does Hedda conceal
within her heart a fantastic, hateful violence. The stove and its fire, then, symbolize destruction
—and how domestication can conceal but not contain destruction’s powers. It should also be
pointed out that when Hedda destroys Lövborg and Thea’s manuscript, she refers to it as their
“child.” The image Ibsen is evoking here is that of child sacrifice, specifically the ancient pagan
practice of making children go into a furnace where they would be burned to death in honor of
the god Moloch. The peoples who practiced this form of sacrifice must have been despairing
indeed, to think that their god was so cruel as to require this act of them—and Hedda, it would
seem, is similarly despairing.

Act 1 Quotes
Berte: I’m really so scared I’ll never give satisfaction to the young mistress.

Miss Tesman: Oh, Heavens…just to begin with of course there might be this and that…

Berte: Because she’s ever so particular.

 Speakers: Berte, Miss Juliane Tesman (Aunt Julle)

 Mentioned or related: Hedda Gabler
 Related themes: Power and Influence, Provincialism
and Patriarchy
Tesman: Oh, Auntie…you’ll never stop sacrificing yourself for me!

Miss Tesman: Isn’t it the only joy I have in the world, to help you along your road, my darling
boy?

 Speakers: Jörgen Tesman , Miss Juliane Tesman (Aunt

Julle)
 Related themes: Provincialism and
Patriarchy, Marriage, Love, Sexuality, and Jealousy
 Tesman: What are you looking at, Hedda?

Hedda: I’m just looking at the leaves on the trees. They’re so yellowed. And so withered.

 Speakers: Hedda Gabler , Jörgen Tesman

 Related themes: Marriage,
Love, Sexuality, and
Jealousy, Beauty, Tragedy, and Farce
Hedda: Frightened? Of me?

Mrs. Elvsted: Oh, dreadfully frightened. When we met on the steps you used to pull my hair.

Hedda: No, did I really?

Mrs. Elvsted: Yes, and once you said you were going to burn it off.

 Speakers: Hedda Gabler , Mrs. Thea Elvsted

 Related themes: Power and Influence, Marriage, Love,
Sexuality, and Jealousy
Hedda: Oh, well…I’ve got one thing at least that I can pass the time with.

Tesman: Oh, thank the good Lord for that! And what might that be, Hedda? Eh?

Hedda: My pistols… Jörgen.

 Speaker: Hedda Gabler

 Mentioned or related: Jörgen Tesman
 Related themes: Power and Influence, Provincialism
and Patriarchy, Modern Society v. the
Individual, Marriage, Love, Sexuality, and Jealousy
 Act 2 Quotes
Hedda: Hullo again, Mr. Brack!

Brack: Good afternoon to you, Mrs. Tesman!

Hedda: I’m going to shoot you sir!

 Speaker: Hedda Gabler

 Mentioned or related: Judge Brack
 Related themes: Power and Influence, Provincialism
and Patriarchy, Modern Society v. the Individual
Brack: But my dearest lady, how could you do such a thing! To that harmless old soul!

Hedda: Oh, you know how it is…these things just suddenly come over me. And then I can’t
resist them. Oh, I don’t know myself how to explain it.

 Speaker: Hedda Gabler

 Mentioned or related: Judge Brack
 Related themes: Power and Influence, Modern Society
v. the Individual
Hedda: I’ve often thought there’s only one thing in the world I’m any good at.

Brack: And what might that be, may I venture to ask?

Hedda: Boring myself to death.

 Speaker: Hedda Gabler

 Mentioned or related: Judge Brack
 Related themes: Provincialism and Patriarchy, Modern
Society v. the Individual
 When I think back to that time, wasn’t there something beautiful, something attractive…
something courageous too, it seems to me…about this…this secret intimacy, this companionship
that no one even dreamed of.

 Speaker: Hedda Gabler

 Related themes: Modern
Society v. the
Individual, Marriage, Love, Sexuality, and
Jealousy, Beauty, Tragedy, and Farce
For once in my life I want to feel that I control a human destiny.

 Speaker: Hedda Gabler

 Related themes: Power and Influence

Act 3 Quotes
I don’t want to look at sickness and death. I must be free of everything that’s ugly.

 Speaker: Hedda Gabler

 Related themes: Provincialism and Patriarchy, Modern
Society v. the Individual, Beauty, Tragedy, and Farce
Hedda: You’re quite a formidable person…when it comes to the point.

Brack: You think so?

Hedda: Yes, I’m beginning to think so, now. And I’m content…so long as you don’t have any
sort of hold over me.

 Speaker: Hedda Gabler

 Mentioned or related: Judge Brack
 Related themes: Power and Influence, Provincialism
and Patriarchy
I want you to know, Lövborg, what you’ve done to the book…. For the rest of my life it’ll be for
me as though you killed a little child.
 Speaker: Mrs. Thea Elvsted
 Related themes: Marriage,
Love, Sexuality, and
Jealousy, Beauty, Tragedy, and Farce
Hedda: And what are you going to do, then?

Lövborg: Nothing. Just put an end to it all. The sooner the better.

Hedda: Ejlert Lövborg…listen to me…. Couldn’t you let it happen… beautifully?

 Speakers: Ejlert Lövborg, Hedda Gabler

 Related themes: Power and Influence, Modern Society
v. the Individual, Beauty, Tragedy, and Farce
Now I’m burning your child, Thea! With your curly hair! Your child and Ejlert Lövborg’s. I’m
burning…burning your child.

 Speaker: Hedda Gabler

 Mentioned or related: Ejlert Lövborg, Mrs. Thea Elvsted
 Related themes: Power and Influence, Modern Society
v. the Individual, Marriage, Love, Sexuality, and
Jealousy, Beauty, Tragedy, and Farce

Act 4 Quotes
Hedda: Oh, it’ll kill me…it’ll kill me, all this!

Tesman: All what, Hedda? Eh?

Hedda: All this…this farce…Jörgen.

 Speakers: Hedda Gabler , Jörgen Tesman

 Related themes: Provincialism and Patriarchy, Modern
Society v. the Individual, Marriage, Love, Sexuality, and
Jealousy, Beauty, Tragedy, and Farce
 Hedda: He was shot in the breast?

Brack: Yes…as I said.

Hedda: Not in the temple?

Brack: In the breast, Mrs. Tesman.

Hedda: Well…the breast is good, too.

 Speakers: Hedda Gabler , Judge Brack

 Mentioned or related: Ejlert Lövborg
 Related themes: Power and Influence, Beauty, Tragedy,
and Farce
It’s a liberation to know that an act of spontaneous courage is yet possible in this world. An act
that has something of unconditional beauty.

 Speaker: Hedda Gabler

 Mentioned or related: Ejlert Lövborg
 Related themes: Modern
Society v. the
Individual, Beauty, Tragedy, and Farce
Everything I touch seems destined to turn into something mean and farcical.

 Speaker: Hedda Gabler

 Related themes: Modern
Society v. the
Individual, Beauty, Tragedy, and Farce
Hedda: And so I am in your power, Mr. Brack. From now
on I am at your mercy.

Brack: Dearest Hedda…believe me…I shall not abuse the

position.

Hedda: In your power, all the same. Subject to your will

 and your demands. No longer free! No! That’s a thought
that I’ll never endure! Never.

 Speakers: Hedda Gabler , Judge Brack

 Related themes: Power and Influence, Modern Society
v. the Individual, Marriage, Love, Sexuality, and
Jealousy, Beauty, Tragedy, and Farce

Character’s Name:

Hedda Gabler –

Hedda, the daughter of the great General Gabler and the pregnant wife of Jörgen
Tesman, is a beautiful, aristocratic, intelligent woman, loaded with social grace and a steely,
clear, dispassionate charisma. She is 29 years old when the action of the play begins. She has a
fiery lust for life and desires above all else a vision of courage and beauty. That being said, she is
also bored by the world, and is egotistical, nihilistic, and almost demonic in her desire to
influence other people’s fates. She behaves cruelly and destructively toward those around her
while seeking to entertain and satisfy herself, going so far as to drive her comrade from
adolescence, Ejlert Lövborg, to suicide. At the end of the play, to avoid scandal and escape the
pettiness of bourgeois life, Hedda shoots herself with her father’s pistol, an act that she herself
might describe as a beautiful death.

Jörgen Tesman –

Tesman is Hedda’s husband and the holder of a University Fellowship in cultural history:
he specializes in medieval domestic crafts. He is a slightly plump, bearded, and bespectacled
man of 33. Tesman is a hard worker and an amiable fellow, and he is considered an outstanding
member of his society, one destined to attain the highest social distinction. For all that, however,
he is also conventional, boring, mediocre, and sometimes even ridiculous. He talks constantly
about the mundane details of his studies, he is sappily sentimental, and he is an anxious climber
of the career ladder. He does not create anything on his own, but instead merely studies the
creations of others, as when at the end of the play he resolves to reconstruct Lövborg’s partially
destroyed manuscript. Tesman might be read in part as Ibsen’s sketch of the conventional
bourgeois man in modern society.
Ejlert Lövborg –

Tesman’s rival for a prestigious professorship, Ejlert Lövborg is a visionary historian

and sociologist. He is also, like Hedda herself, ill-adapted to modern life—in his case, he is
unable todrink in moderation. The despairing thing about Lövborg, as Ibsen has noted, is that he
wants to control the world by seeing into its future, but he can’t even control himself. During
their adolescence, Lövborg and Hedda were intimate confidants and comrades, but Hedda
violently broke the relationship off when it threatened to become sexual. When Lövborg comes
back into her life during the action of the play, Lövborg’s relationship with Mrs. Elvsted, his
helpmate and muse, so inflames Hedda’s jealousy that she at last sets about effecting Lövborg’s
destruction.

Mrs. Thea Elvsted –

Mrs. Elvsted is a slight woman with soft attractive features, large blue eyes that tend to
protrude with a scared, questioning expression, and almost whitish-yellow hair that is unusually
rich and wavy. She is a couple years younger than her old schoolmate Hedda, and was once
romantically involved with Jörgen Tesman. After Ejlert Lövborg’s fall from social grace, Mrs.
Elvstedand her husband, a sheriff, welcomed Lövborg into their home as a tutor for their
children. During that time, Mrs. Elvsted served as Lövborg’s helpmate and muse, and also
seemed to fall in love with him, committing herself to him, body and soul. When Lövborg
returns to the city where the Tesmans live, Mrs. Elvsted follows him without her husband’s
permission (she is repelled by her husband) in order to deliver him from his temptation to drink.
She is as conventional as Tesman, in her way, and somewhat timid, but Mrs. Elvsted also has a
capacity for passionate, courageous commitment that is rare in Ibsen’s world—even Hedda is
afraid of scandal—and this makes her, however quietly, somewhat heroic.

Judge Brack –

Judge Brack is a shrewd and respected man in society, a cynical old bachelor, and a
regular guest at the Tesmans’ villa. He is a gentleman of 45, stocky and elastic in his movements,
with short, almost black hair and lively, playful eyes. He takes pleasure in having a hand in other
people’s business, as when he arranges the Tesmans’ finances and delivers professional news
to Tesman himself. However, it is the mistress of the house, Hedda, with whom Brack
especially seeks intimacy. The two deviously gossip together, but underneath their
superficialities a campaign of control is being waged: Brack again and again obliquely
propositions Hedda, and she again and again evades him. Their games of sexual innuendo, veiled
threats, and a shared world-weariness provide both with a reprieve from the stale monotony of
their lives. In the end, however, Judge Brack at last gets the upper hand over Hedda—but Hedda
surprises him by doing the unthinkable.

Miss Juliane Tesman (Aunt Julle) –

Jörgen Tesman’s paternal aunt, Juliane Tesman is a good-looking, conventional, chatty

woman who cared for her nephew after his parents’ deaths. Though Jörgen is an adult when the
play begins, his Aunt Julle, some 65 years old, still dotes on him, lending him money, bringing
him sentimental gifts, and showering him with praise and encouragement. She looks forward to
the day when he and his wife Hedda will bring a child into the world. Though Hedda can be
cruel to Miss Tesman, Aunt Julle withstands her with a pinched dignity. Miss Tesman lives with
another of Jörgen’s aunts, Aunt Rina, who is an invalid. Aunt Julle would be just as bored as
Hedda, the play implies, if she didn’t have someone like Aunt Rina to constantly care for and
tend to.

Berte –

Berte is a plain, kindly, dedicated maid of a “somewhat countrified exterior” who served
inJuliane Tesman’s household before transferring into the service of Jörgen and Hedda. Miss
Tesman and her nephew are very fond of Berte, but Hedda decidedly is not. She is very severe
with the maid, who fears she won’t be able to accommodate Hedda’s grand, aristocratic ways.

Aunt Rina –

One of Jörgen Tesman’s aunts, Aunt Rina is an invalid who never appears onstage and
who passes away quietly toward the end of the play. She is cared for and tended to by Aunt
Julle.

Mr. Elvsted –

Mr. Elvsted is a sheriff who lives north of town, and is the husband of Mrs. Thea
Elvsted. Mrs. Elvsted claims to have nothing in common with her husband—he treats her like
useful and cheap property, she claims. Mr. Elvsted never appears onstage.

Mademoiselle Diana –
 Named for a Greek goddess of hunting and (ironically) chastity, Mademoiselle Diana is a
redheaded singer and the madam, or procuress, of a brothel in town. She never appears onstage.
During his wild drunken debauched days, Ejlert Lövborg was an ardent champion of hers.
During the action of the play, however, after accusing Mademoiselle or one of her prostitutes of
robbing him of his manuscript, Lövborg causes a fight to break out in her salon. Hedda seems to
be vaguely jealous of Mademoiselle Diana’s prominence in Lövborg’s sex life.

General Gabler –

Hedda’s father, a famous general. He provided Hedda with an aristocratic upbringing,

but she is unable to maintain this lifestyle given the state of Jörgen Tesman’s finances. Hedda
still has her father’s pistols, and she enjoys holding and shooting them.
Context
Further Study Context

Henrik Ibsen is one of the world's greatest dramatists. He was the leading figure of an artistic
renaissance that took place in Norway around the end of the nineteenth century, in which the
work of the artist Edward Munch also played a part. Ibsen lived from 1828 to 1906. He grew up
in poverty, studied medicine for a while, and then abandoned that to write plays. In 1858, he
published his first play, The Vikings at Helgeland, and married Susannah Thoresen, the daughter
of a pastor.
Ibsen obtained a scholarship to travel to Italy, where he wrote the plays that would establish his
reputation, Brand and Peer Gynt. These were long, historical verse-plays. He lived most of the
rest of his life in Italy and in Germany. Starting in 1869, he began to write prose plays, giving up
the verse form. In 1877, he began what would become a series of five plays in which he
examines the moral faults of modern society. The group includes A Doll's House and The Wild
Duck. In many ways, Hedda Gabler, a later play completed in 1890, belongs to this group. It
presents a detailed picture of society, sketching class differences between the aristocratic and
bourgeois worlds.
Like all of Ibsen's plays, Hedda Gabler was originally written in Norwegian and is full of
untranslatable wordplay. James Joyce admired Ibsen so much that as a youth he attempted to
teach himself Norwegian in order to read Ibsen in the original
Critical Essays General Analysis of Hedda Gabler

Written in 1890, Hedda Gabler is a high point in Ibsen's creative life.

Although the "social dramas" of his prose period depict full-bodied and
believable characters, Ibsen achieved a psychological depth in Hedda
Gabler that his later works never surpassed. Having investigated the
feminine character in a male-oriented society in A Doll's House, Ibsen
enlarged his scrutiny to encompass the full pathology of the social
female. Although Hedda Gabler is an example of perverted femininity,
her situation illuminates what Ibsen considered to be a depraved
society, intent on sacrificing to its own self-interest the freedom and
individual expression of its most gifted members.

The problem of Hedda Gabler illuminates the universal problem of

woman in a society built by men. Like Mrs. Alving and Nora Helmer,
Hedda must make an independent decision about her life. Women,
however, in all but the most progressive societies, are barred from
participating in the world outside their households and are not
equipped for independence outside their families. Thus, Hedda Gabler,
despite a profound craving for independence, has no personal
resources with which to realize self-responsibility.

Having the desire, but not the ability, for a constructive effort at self
determination, Hedda becomes a modern Medea, expressing her
frustration in destructive attempts at self-realization. Not having any
positive influence in the world, Hedda Gabler can only define herself
negatively: she destroys what she cannot accept. Undermining her
husband with her coldness, denying her pregnancy, destroying Thea's
life-work, burning Lövborg's creative product, ruining the child-
manuscript, and finally, committing suicide are all perverted attempts
to satisfy her "craving for life." By depicting the pathology of a
frustrated woman in Hedda Gabler, Ibsen declares his most powerful
protest against the double standard society.

Critical Essays Characterization of Hedda Gabler

Placed in similar crises as previous Ibsen heroines, Hedda Gabler

faces an impasse in her life. Sharing Nora's craving for freedom and
Mrs. Alving's compliance with social conventions, Hedda finds no
outlet for her personal demands; she is constantly torn between her
aimless desire for freedom and her commitment to standards of social
appearance. Refusing to submit to her womanly destiny, Hedda has
such an unsatisfied craving for life that she is incapable of being
emotionally involved with others.

When Nora Helmer recognized her own unsatisfied needs, she left her
husband and children. Considering her most "sacred duty" was to find
herself, she left home to discover her personal worth through facing
life's experiences before being able to relate to others. Like Nora,
Hedda Gabler is a stranger to herself. However, lacking Nora's daring
and defiance of conventions, she is unable to undergo the trials of self-
evaluation and becomes a morbidly self-vindictive, destructive virago,
capable only to strike out against the successful socially conforming
individuals who represent an implicit reproach to her uninformed
cravings. In the play, Ibsen provides enough information to show how
Hedda's problem is the product of her special background.

Raised by her military father, Hedda must have grown up in an

atmosphere of strict discipline and conformity to rules. Becoming a
beautiful sought-after young woman, she attended many social affairs
but never found anyone to marry; probably she was not rich enough to
interest the eligible bachelors of high social standing.

As a product of the nineteenth century, when women were destined to

become either respectable old maids like George's aunts or humble
housekeepers like Mrs. Elvsted, Hedda is an anomaly. Instead of
preparing his daughter for wifehood or motherhood, General Gabler
taught her to ride and shoot, skills symbolic of the military mystique
which became for Hedda the basis of her fascination with the violent
and the romantic. Inheriting from her father, whose forbidding portrait
hangs in the Tesman's drawing room, his pride and coldness as well as
his imperious commanding attitude toward others of a lower rank,
Hedda lacks compassion for weak and submissive creatures like Thea
and Aunt Julia but has a respect for power and independence,
qualities she finds in Brack and Lövborg.

Since it was unthinkable at the time for a woman to receive either an

intellectual or a professional education, Hedda's intelligence remained
stultified. Unable to recognize the demands of her individuality, she
remains enslaved to a standard of social conventionality and can only
admire from afar the forbidden world where there is freedom of
expression and an uninhibited exuberance of life. Eilert Lövborg
provides Hedda with the vicarious experience of an individual who
enjoys an unfettered creative life. She drew sustenance from his soul's
outpourings as he told her of his dreams, his work, and his excessive
way of life. At the same time, Hedda was too ignorant and
inexperienced to accurately evaluate Lövborg's character; she
regarded him not as a creature of reality, but as the person — and
realization — of her adolescent quest for the romantic. When Lövborg
made serious demands on her, Hedda rejected him. Stultified at the
emotional level of an adolescent and repelled by his unconventionality,
she could no longer tolerate the intensity of an actual relationship and
shrank from responding to his demands.

George Tesman, on the other hand, is an acceptable husband

especially because he makes no demands on Hedda's emotional
incapacity. Posing no threat to her internal security, he is able to
provide her with material security and to indulge her tastes for luxury
and an active social life. Besides being sincerely fond of his bride,
George satisfies Hedda's conventional standards (he is "correctness
itself") and leaves her imagination free to indulge her demand for
independence and courage.

Having thus married to inure herself from any internal threats, Hedda
coldly plans to base her life on the enjoyment of external advantages.
The drama begins at this point and develops characters and events
which swiftly undermine Hedda's system of values. Her pregnancy is
the first disturbance to her calculated system of inner protection.
Hedda then learns that George's appointment may be deferred, a
situation which deprives her of luxury and active social entertainment.

It is significant that Lövborg, Hedda's romantic ideal of the free and

life-intoxicated hero, becomes George's professional rival. According
to her conception, Eilert's free spirit must have somehow been
conquered, or she must have deceived herself as to his true nature. In
either case, Hedda is deprived of her favorite ideal and must try to
reinstate the old Lövborg in order to maintain an equilibrium between
fantasy and reality. When she discovers that Thea Elvsted has
preempted her former power over Eilert, now temperate, hard-working,
and successful, she overrides Thea to gain the desired influence over
Lövborg. This too backfires, for his liberation from Thea's steadying
influence becomes a sordid debauchery that ends with Eilert's ignoble
death. Thus, all Hedda's expectations dissolve into a vulgar residue
that she cannot accept.

Brack administers the final blow to her dream of independence when

he threatens her with blackmail. After all her efforts at manipulating
others so that she can remain free of fettering responsibilities and
slavish domestic attachments, Hedda learns that she is forever at
Brack's "beck and call" if she wishes to avoid being involved in a
sordid scandal. With this final disillusion, Hedda no longer has a life
worth facing. In a tragic attempt to "do it beautifully," she puts a bullet
through her temple.

Critical Essays Characterization of Secondary Characters

As usual in Ibsen's tightly constructed dramas, each character

provides, by comparison, insight into every other character. The
characterizations of Thea Elvsted and Miss Juliana Tesman, unlike
Hedda, depict women who submit to their socially imposed feminine
roles and derive satisfaction from their lives: they devote themselves
to the unselfish tasks of raising children and serving to inspire
masculine creativity. Julia, for instance, has raised George Tesman,
who became a promising academician, and now that the nephew has
grown up, she takes care of her invalid sister. Thea, after having
married an unloving elderly man in order to care for his household, has
found a satisfying life assisting and inspiring the work of a creative
and brilliant writer. Through her devotion, Lövborg has been able to
channel his undisciplined energies to produce according to his
potential. His masterpiece, the product of their mutual inspiration, is
the natural child, which, through love, Thea and Eilert have conceived.

Compared to Aunt Julia and Mrs. Elvsted, Hedda seems an unnatural

woman. Refusing to relinquish her freedom, she regards childbearing
as loathsome and destroys the manuscript conceived by Thea and
Lövborg as if she were murdering her own child. Degrading Aunt Julia
by insulting her new bonnet, Hedda expresses hostility toward her
husband as well as his relatives.

Hedda's emotional sterility is countered 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 power over someone for love which
he is unable to give.

George's bumbling ordinariness contrasts vividly and humorously with

Lövborg's flamboyant and creative brilliance. Where George writes
about the "domestic industries of Brabant in the middle ages," Eilert
works on a book dealing with the "civilizing forces" of humanity in the
future. George delights in researching among old manuscripts; Lövborg
considers the problems of the future.

Seeing only an inexperienced bride, the husband admires Hedda for

her qualities of beauty and poise and expects that she will learn to
love him at some future time. Hedda's former lover, on the other hand,
is fascinated by her "craving for life" and has insight into her cowardly
retreat to convention. George is eager for his professional
appointment, which will guarantee his ability to support his household,
while Lövborg looks forward to the "moral victory" he will achieve from
delivering his scheduled lectures. Solicitous to his aunts, George
cherishes sentimental reminders of the love and care he received as a
child (as shown by his delight at receiving an old pair of slippers Rina
embroidered for him); Lövborg, recognizing that the past is
irreclaimable, breaks with Thea when he loses the manuscript they
have written together.

Ibsen sets the brilliant writer as an exact counterpart to the medieval

scholar in many ways. Where one is erratic, the other is steady; one
deals with abstract and philosophical problems, the other concerns
himself with concrete and detailed minutiae. Because of these
qualities, however, Lövborg, a representation of the discontinuity in
living a free life, cannot carry on his work. George, on the other hand,
representing the continuity of living a structured life, is able to take up
Lövborg's work and eventually fulfill the writer's promise of greatness.
With this situation, Ibsen seems to imply a balance of human forces:
the erratic genius is necessary to provide the impelling idea, but the
character who is gifted with less imagination and an ability to work
hard at concrete details is the one able to realize the idea.