There have been many desperate women characters in literature including Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Hardy’s Eustacia Vye, Perkins-Gilman’s protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, and Strindberg’s Miss Julie. Usually, they are driven to desperate choices given restrictive contexts they are in with no apparent means of escape short of madness and/or suicide. Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler is memorably desperate, similarly because of her character, her choices, and the flawed men in her life.
Hedda Gabler was written in 1890, 11 years after A Doll’s House about Nora Helmer (the first real liberated modern woman character in literature who abandons her husband and kids to start a new life, happily independent from her limited, repressive husband Torvald). Hedda is an attractive, free-spirited, impulsive, ruthless, untrustworthy, neurotic coquette who smokes and shoots twin pistols that she inherited from her father. Though she has married at the beginning of the play, she is unhappy, bored, restless, and looking to control men in her life. This goes totally against what 19th century expectations were for women of her day.
George Tesman, her simplistic, naive, but moral writer-husband, has no clue about the inner life of the woman he has married. A friend of the couple, Judge Brack, is a witty, clever, vain man who secretly desires to be “the cock of the walk” in their trio; he later uses blackmail to threaten the illicit favors he lusts after in Hedda. Eilert Lovberg, a friend of the trio, is a dissolute writer-friend who was once seriously involved with Hedda. Meeting years later, he fancies they can resume their liaison, but Hedda controls him finally to the point of destruction to quench her own crazy power trip.
A minor character is Hedda’s old schoolmate Thea Elvstad who leaves her husband (much like Nora Helmer) in order to commit to Eilert as an editor-companion. For the two, his manuscript (about to be published) is their ‘baby’. She is tormented by the jealous Hedda who wants Eilert all for herself and her selfish, nefarious purposes. Hedda was nasty to Thea in her youth and still cruelly torments and ‘plays her’.
Things go awry after a men’s club party with the three men. Eilert gets drunk and loses his manuscript which weirdly ends up in Hedda’s possession. When he shows up at her house in complete despair, she gives him a pistol to kill himself, in order to please her whimsical control fixation. “Let it be beautiful” she morbidly tells him.
Of course, this all goes wrong and he dies a pathetic, unglamorous suicide. An investigation is initiated to find the gun’s source and the walls start closing in for Hedda cornering her on several fronts. As she says “Everything I touch becomes ludicrous and despicable.” Suffice to say, that, after that, two characters find resolution, Major Brack’s plans are foiled, and Hedda realizes a tragic poetic-justice end.
Like Ibsen’s other works, this short, fast-moving play revolves around conflicts between reality and illusion, conflicts between men and women in particular, psychological choices, manipulation and control, mental illness, and the dream lives of characters. In some ways, Hedda is a modern woman, who wants to escape and be free of the male-imposed and society-imposed conventions of her day. She tries to be her own person (unsuccessfully) and defiantly goes against the grain. This is ‘her play’ and one of the first significant modern psychological studies in modern literature.
I watched the 1962 BBC tv production, directed by Alex Segal, with veteran Ingrid Bergman as Hedda and a cast of distinguished English actors including Michael Redgrave (George), Ralph Richardson (as the wicked judge), and Trevor Howard (as the dissolute Eilert). Bergman’s natural Swedish accent gave a nice Scandinavian underpinning to the production and she was perfectly cast. She had played neurotic roles before in several movies and she convincingly brings out Hedda’s boredom, restlessness, and treachery.
If you are an Ibsen fan, this is a tragic must-see/read. If you are interested in the evolution of women characters in modern literature or psychological studies, this is, likewise, a must see/read.