The play Hedda Gabler was published in 1890. The uniqueness of this play is that Ibsen portrays hardship and life troubles faced by women during 19th century. The main character, Hedda Gabler dominates the play and is portrayed as a feminist and real fighter who tries to achieve personal freedom and identity. Ibsen underlines that society imposed values and gender roles on women, so society affects her mind and determines her thought and action. Feminist ideas are expressed in themes of struggle and liberation and portrayed through a unique symbol of guns.
Ibsen reconstructs the common culture of ordinary women, as distinct from that of the low classes. Whereas elite women have left a rich variety of writings, little has remained of the mental or material culture of ordinary women. The difficulties are increased by the fact that social distinction played less part in female culture than in early modern culture generally. While elite men exerted a dominance in the culture of their society, the hegemonic power of elite women among their own gender was limited. Ibsen portrays that Hedda belongs to this culture and values its principles and norms. Central to the female world was the woman with knowledge. “Think of the sort of life she was accustomed to in her father’s time. Don’t you remember how we used to see her riding down the road along with the General?” (Ibsen). Ibsen portrays that Hedda is limited by social norms and principles which prevent her to express unique self-identity and find happiness (Arup 4).
Feminist ideas are evident in Ibsens’ description of women’s culture. Women are not an isolated group; they always have diverse kinds of social relationships to men. Women who are educated shared in many aspects of elite culture, which is focused on literature. Elite women like Hedda also have access to popular culture, while for the most part ordinary women have access to popular culture alone. This culture creates an iron cage for Hedda and forces her to escape from life troubles and problems (Egan 92). This theme is often seen by critics as negative comment on social problems and gender inequality. The main character refuses to discover herself, so her disaster are the result of this refusal. Hedda long for life and is afraid of this life. Hedda refuses to admit this terror and convert the energy into action (James 76).
Feminist ideas and themes are expressed through the them of male authority and power. All her life, Hedda is influenced by her father and husband unable to make her own decisions and find happiness. Ibsen’s realism is in the first place a matter of having chosen situations from the life of contemporary society, from the newspapers in certain cases (James 76). Given that women ideally belonged to the household, and men claimed public space as their own, both elite and popular cultures recognized that women as women had concerns of their own. Ibsen writes: “When I used to come to your father’s in the afternoon–and the General sat over at the window reading his papers–with his back towards us” (Ibsen). If the household was the proper place for women, then the household could sometimes become a female space. In this chapter we explore women’s relationship to the spaces of early modern society, the places where they associated together, and where only women were likely to be found. Furthermore, we show how society encouraged women to spend time with each other. Yet although, since women were perceived as sexually unstable, men regarded them as being at risk in mixed company, men were also suspicious of women in all male company, fearing their opportunities for gossip (James 76).
Ibsen specifically says in his notes that she wants to live fully as a man. In the play these masculine tendencies are symbolized by the guns she plays with, offers to Lovborg for his supposedly glorious suicide, and finally turns on herself. It is a mark of Hedda’s cowardice that although she possesses guns she does not really use them until her suicide, and even this act has been provoked by the threat of male will. Hedda is an otherworldly being longing for a place in the real world. Hedda plays woman’s traditional role, but she has refrained from demonstrating her potential power to use guns as she could. Her concealment of strength is a gesture acknowledging her willingness to play her husband’s game with his rules. Hedda Gabler’s failure is to more than toy with her guns indicates not conciliation but cowardice. That she might have used guns to impose her will on the men in her life is revealed in an exchange between Hedda and Lovborg, during which they reminisce about their past and about a relationship that seems never to have advanced beyond teasing provocation (Lowenthal 52).
- Lovborg: Oh, why didn’t you play it out! Why didn’t you shoot me down, as you threatened!
- Hedda: I’m too much afraid of a scandal (Insen).
This theme portrays that Hedda responds to life troubles by indicating a reluctance to abandon her traditional role. This is also true when Hedda later confesses that another, softer emotion had staid her hand. In the end, Ibsen characteristically provides his traditional themes with a twist of their own (Lowenthal 52). Judge Brack “uses” the gun against Hedda as he had earlier taken it away from her by in effect capturing his woman with a gun. “With a pistol in his breast-pocket, discharged. The ball had lodged in a vital part”. There is one point more, Mrs. Hedda–another disagreeable feature in the affair” (Ibsen). But instead of using the weapon back against the aggressive male, Hedda turns her gun against herself. Yet, symbolically, it is his—Brack’s—hands that can be imagined as holding the weapon, and his finger as pulling the trigger. Ibsen symbolically portrays that social distinction, age, and geographical location all played a part in shaping women’s bonds. Nevertheless, across these divisions there were aspects of a common culture which women shared (Mayerson 151). Their cultures and values connected them to fundamental concerns: giving birth, childrearing, and sustaining life. From women’s own perspective, they preserved a culture with important life-enhancing values. In comparison, men appeared to be preoccupied with politics, authority, and their masculine vanity and virility. At the end of the play, Hedda “Shot herself in the temple! Fancy that!” (Ibsen). The death was the only way out for Hedda to stop suffering and become really free. it is possible to say that it is the only possible way for her to escape her own culture and false ideals (Mayerson 151).
Hedda Gabler involves theme, situational and character parallels, and the linear structure of the action: the first preoccupied with establishing and maintaining order, acting in terms of regimen and duty, and amassing possessions and power; the second with the free and spontaneous search for pleasure and the cultivation of personal honor based on heroic action. Thea reclaims Lovborg for the social order but cannot hold him. The failure of Hedda results not only from her seeking pleasures frowned on by the controlling social order, but also, and more emphatically, from the way in which the action of Ibsen’s play matches that of feminist ideas. Lovborg is called upon to affirm his world’s values through suicide but, also botches the job leaving Hedda alone. The heroine is, thus, left during the final act at the mercy of the chance with responsibility of affirming her world’s values by herself, if they are to be affirmed at all (Mayerson 151). Hedda’s response is an elaborately staged suicide. Ibsen symbolically portrays that from their own viewpoint, women enacted a mapping of space that was different from the normative strictures decreed by men. The sole context in which women deliberately cloistered themselves within the household was for the rites of childbirth, when they cordoned off an interior space to keep men and girls out, not to shut themselves in. But even in daily life, the household was a female-dominated milieu but not for Hedda. She is unable to find, a secure yet flexible base of operations for her forays into the outside world. Unlike Ă©lite advice books, popular culture affirmed women’s right to control household space, applying the derogatory term ‘cotquean’ to men who meddled with domestic concerns. Both the flexibility and liminal ambiguity of feminized household boundaries were embodied in women’s habit of posting themselves at their doorsteps (Postlewait 23).
Religious and neighbourly or charitable occasions also offered women opportunities to construct feminine spheres of social dominance. Visits to the sick and dying were women’s special concern because of their nursing expertise. As records of testamentary disputes confirm, the deathbed was a ‘feminized’ locale. Church was another setting where women demarcated their own spatial and sociable terrain. Women’s quarrels about ‘place’ were generally confined to their own sector of the church; only rarely did, they publicly question their segregation from men (Egan 43). Yet while worshipping in the established church, they did not passively accept the places appointed for them by the clergy and churchwardens. Yet, Hedda rejects these values and social norms (Postlewait 28). The higher a woman’s social position, the less likely she was to share or invade male physical or psychological space. At the top of the social ladder, access was restricted by both class and gender. Women had many practical reasons for demarcating separate spaces in a society in which work and life-stages were both strongly differentiated by sex, and the gender order was enforced by the threat of violence (Egan 66). But women also gathered together among their own kind for social or ‘cultural’ reasons. Within their own milieu, female collectivities sustained a rich heritage of oral and material traditions. This realism incorporated into its enterprise what might be, and were, regarded as “issues.” If psychological criticism scants formal values for the sake of clinical findings, pure textual criticism proceeds as though the art had been created in an inhuman zone of aesthetic autonomy. “Realizations he had been holding at arm’s length had come steadily closer, crowding his self-knowledge; he is growing old, the stern and amazingly disciplined practice of his art has cost him human warmth, a fullness of actual life” (Postlewait 29).
In sum, Hedda Gabler is a feminist character who fights for freedom and self-identity. Unable to find happiness and life, she kills herself and escapes false social traditions and values imposed by the society. The play portrays that culture and social values determined life of women and their destiny, happiness and family relations.
Works Cited
Arup, Jens. “On Hedda Gabler,” Orbis Litterarum XII:1 ( 1957): 4-37.
Egan, M. Henrik Ibsen: The Critical Heritage. Routledge, 1997.
Ibsen, H. Hedda Gabler. Web.
James, H. “Hedda Gabler,” “The Master Builder,” “Little Eyolf,” “John Gabriel Borkman,” The Scenic Art. Ed., Allan Wade. New York: Hill and Wang, 1957.
Lowenthal, Leo. “Henrik Ibsen,” Literature and the Image of Man. Boston: Beracon Press, 1957.
Mayerson, Caroline W. “Thematic Symbols in Hedda Gabler,” Scandinavian Studies 22:4 (1950): 151-160.
Postlewait, Th. William Archer on Ibsen: The Major Essays, 1889-1919. Greenwood Press, 1984.