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Essay on Hedda Gabler
In a gallery of startling portraits of female characters, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler nonetheless stands out. Mercurial, attractive, and cursed with frustrated ambition, Hedda is both victim and victimizer. Arguably, no other female character in Ibsen’s pantheon is as cruel or tormented as Hedda. It is precisely this tension at the heart of her character that makes the role of Hedda so challenging for actresses and directors. To audiences she presents a similar challenge, showing us several faces that, while different, are harmonized within the complexity of her character.
Hedda is the casualty of social expectations. She is a classic casebook study in psycho-social repression. She is also Circe, a demonic force. Ibsen, at the height of his dramatic powers when he wrote the play, resists easy explanations for the various catastrophes Hedda engenders. Like Shakespeare, he teases us with too many motives or, alternately, too few. Unlike Shakespeare, who typically confined "motiveless malignity" to male characters like Iago or Richard III, Ibsen found that by 1890 the public could tolerate although just barely a female character as complicated, elusive, and brutal as Hedda Gabler.
There is much in the play to qualify it as a "liberal tragedy," the expression coined by the English Marxist critic Raymond Williams. In these plays, an alienated individual (usually a male) struggles against a stifling bourgeois society, finding himself hamstrung by the ever-tightening ropes of conformity. Ibsen, himself at odds with late nineteenth-century Norwegian culture, perfected this form of social drama and gave us memorable types of the alienated individual in Oswald Alving in Ghosts or Dr. Thomas Stockmann in An Enemy of the People. Although Raymond Williams has a particularly Marxist take on the alienated individual, the annals of drama (and literature, for that matter) are full of disaffected males....
