Hedda Gabler

Overview

Hedda Gabler is four acts and about a hundred pages, published in 1890 and first performed in Munich in 1891 to reviews that were largely hostile. Critics complained that the heroine was unmotivated, unpleasant and unbelievable, and Ibsen was unmoved.

The title is deliberate and he explained it. The character is married and he does not call her Hedda Tesman. He wanted to indicate that she is to be regarded as her father’s daughter rather than as her husband’s wife, and the only things she has brought to the marriage are a piano, a portrait of the general, and his pistols.

Technically this is the tightest thing Ibsen wrote. One room, thirty-six hours, seven characters, no soliloquies, no confidants, no exposition delivered to the audience. Everything a spectator learns arrives in conversation that has some other purpose, and the pistols are established in the first act and fired in the last.

There is also no obvious social thesis, which separates it from A Doll’s House and Ghosts. Nobody in it is arguing for anything. It is a character study conducted at close range, and the character is opaque on purpose.

What happens

Act I. Jørgen Tesman and his wife return from a six-month honeymoon that was in fact a research trip through European libraries. He is an academic specialising in the domestic crafts of medieval Brabant, amiable, dull, and expecting a professorship. His aunt Juliane has mortgaged her annuity to furnish the villa Hedda wanted, on the assumption she will soon need a nursery.

Hedda is immediately, visibly wrong in it. She insults the aunt’s new hat by pretending to mistake it for a servant’s, opens windows, complains about the smell of flowers, and handles her father’s pistols.

Then the news that unsettles everything. Ejlert Løvborg, who was ruined by drink and is Tesman’s rival, has published a brilliant book, has stopped drinking, and has written a second manuscript that is said to be better. And Thea Elvsted arrives, a former schoolfellow of Hedda’s, who has left her husband and followed Løvborg to town.

Act II. Hedda gets Thea’s story: she has been Løvborg’s companion and collaborator, the manuscript is the work they did together, and she calls it their child.

Judge Brack proposes himself as the third party in a triangle, and Hedda is not shocked by the suggestion, only bored. She tells him she has only one talent, which is for boring herself to death, and that she married Tesman because she had danced herself tired and her time was up.

Løvborg arrives and refuses the punch, and he and Hedda look at honeymoon photographs while conducting, under the pictures, a conversation about their past. Then Hedda begins to work. She needles him about his abstinence, implies that Thea does not trust him, and gets him to take a drink. He leaves for Brack’s party with the manuscript in his pocket.

Act III. Tesman comes home at dawn with the manuscript: Løvborg dropped it in the street, drunk, and Tesman picked it up. Hedda takes it and locks it away.

Løvborg arrives, wrecked. He tells Thea he has torn the manuscript to pieces, which is a lie to spare her, and then tells Hedda the truth, that he lost it and that it is worse than killing a child. Hedda does not give it back. She gives him one of her pistols and tells him to do it beautifully.

Then, alone, she feeds the manuscript into the stove page by page, talking to it: now I am burning your child, Thea.

Act IV. Løvborg is dead. But not as Hedda arranged it. He did not die beautifully; he was shot in the bowels, in a brothel, probably by accident during a scuffle over the missing manuscript, and he took some hours to die.

Worse, Brack recognises the pistol. He does not threaten; he simply explains that he knows whose it is, that the scandal would be considerable if it came out, and that he is now the only person who can keep it quiet. Hedda understands exactly what has happened: she is in his power, and there is nothing she can do about it.

Meanwhile Tesman and Thea have discovered that Thea kept the notes from which the manuscript was written, and the two of them sit down at the table to reconstruct it together, absorbed and happy, which will take months and give them a life.

Hedda goes into the inner room, plays a wild dance on the piano, is told to stop because of the mourning, says goodnight, closes the curtains, and shoots herself in the temple. Tesman screams. Brack, collapsing into a chair, says that people do not do such things.

How to read it

Watch what Hedda cannot do rather than what she does. She cannot work, cannot study, cannot travel alone, cannot ride, cannot manage her own money, cannot leave, and is pregnant, which is mentioned obliquely four times and which she refuses to discuss. The destruction she causes is what is left once everything else is closed.

Read the second act closely. Everything that happens afterwards is set up there, in a conversation about photographs.

Track the pistols. They are her father’s, they are the only thing of her own in the house, and she uses one to kill a man’s reputation and the other to kill herself.

Notice what happens to Thea. The mousy woman with beautiful hair, whom Hedda bullied at school and threatened to burn, ends the play sitting beside Hedda’s husband reconstructing a book, which is exactly the productive partnership Hedda has never had and could not tolerate anyone else having.

Resist the urge to diagnose her. Ibsen refuses to supply a motive and the play is much stronger for it. Whether she is a frustrated woman of real capacity, a coward, a sadist, or simply someone with nothing to do is the question every production has to answer and none can settle from the text.

Read it after A Doll’s House. Nora leaves and the door closes. Hedda cannot imagine leaving, is terrified of scandal above everything, and the only exit she can see is the one she takes.

Questions it raises

• Why does Hedda destroy the manuscript? She gives no reason, and the moment is the centre of the play.
• She wants power over a human destiny once in her life. Is that ambition, malice, or the only form of agency available to her?
• Hedda is terrified of scandal and behaves recklessly throughout. Is the fear a constraint or a cover?
• Løvborg’s death is squalid rather than beautiful, and that is what finishes her. What did she actually believe about beauty in death?
• Thea and Tesman end the play working together on the reconstruction. Is that a consolation, an irony, or the play’s verdict?
• Brack’s last line is that people do not do such things. Is he stupid, or is he saying something true about the world Hedda could not leave?