Hedda_Gabler

Hedda Gabler In Henrik Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler, the main character, Hedda Tesman represents a manipulative and powerful young woman seeking to control the lives of those around her. Although Hedda lives in the Victorian era where the women are to live in the shadow of the men, she defines herself negatively. Hedda destroys the things which she cannot accept. The critic John Northam defends Hedda’s character when he states in Ibsen: A Critical Study, “Hedda is caught in the contradiction of being simultaneously a person whose deepest urges are towards a poetry of living—defined at least approximately by her recurrent use of key terms—but whose social position has educated her to accept [. . .] the restraints demanded by society. The basic conflict is between the self and society (180). Though Hedda lives in a society that suppresses restraints on the women, it gives her no right to be an unworthy, detestable, repulsive, despicable human being. In Act I, it demonstrates a pathological quality of Hedda’s personality early on. Hedda cruelly insults Aunt Julia by complaining that the servant left her bonnet lying in the chair, “Look there! She has left hedda, gabler, lovborg, thea, power, now, control, brack, over, social, child, act, thought, tesman, position, hedda’s, cannot, am, in, time, tell, society, slave, old, manuscript, lovborg’s, lives, live, life, left, friendship, end, chair, burning, bonnet, being