Hedda Gabler (Characters)

Characters

Berta

Berta is the Tesmans’ middle-aged, maid. She is a loyal family retainer, formerly employed by George Tesman’s maiden aunts but now in the service of George and Hedda at their newly purchased villa. Her closeness to Juliana Tesman makes her a minor threat to Hedda, who intensely dislikes George’s aunt. Early on, Hedda threatens to discharge Berta, partly to discomfort George, but also because she clearly identifies Berta with George’s family and its deeply affectionate binds that Hedda loathes. Although Berta appears often, she has no significant part in the play’s action. She is very protective of George Tesman and his privacy.

Judge Brack

Judge Brack hides his desire for an intimate relationship with Hedda with an outward friendship for George Tesman and a cloak of respectability. He is, in truth, quite sinister and unprincipled, a sophisticated stalker who awaits an opportunity to seduce Hedda, to become the “one cock in the basket.”

Brack is particularly dangerous because he is a fair judge of character, except, finally, in Hedda’s case. He is genuinely shocked by her suicide, something he did not anticipate would result from his success in maneuvering her into a compromising position. He is otherwise a glib and masterful manipulator. At the outset, it is made clear that he has put George Tesman in his debt by arranging the loans for purchasing the villa. George, ingenuous to a fault, sees Brack only as an unselfish friend, one he trusts implicitly. Brack also challenges the hapless Lovborg, inviting him to his party, knowing full well that Eilert might slip again into his former dissolution. Hedda, on the other hand, penetrates Brack’s mask of good will, identifying the leering innuendo in much of his seemingly harmless conversation with her.

It is Brack who forces Hedda into her last desperate act, her self-destruction. He knows that the pistol used by Eilert Lovborg was one of a pair of General Gabler’s pistols in Hedda’s possession. That he can expose her and subject her to scandal gives him the advantage he has sought, but Hedda, unwilling to become his “slave,” elects to escape such a predicament through death.

Mrs. Elvsted

During the course of Hedda Gabler, Thea confesses that she has fled from her loveless and boorish husband, Sheriff Elvsted, and her stepchildren, destroying her reputation to follow Eilert Lovborg to Christiania. For the prior two years, she had both reformed the debauched Lovborg and inspired his new work. Despite her great influence on the brilliant Eilert, her hopes of securing his love are faint. A shadow sits on their relationship: Eilert’s residual feelings for a former lover, who, unbeknownst to Thea, is Hedda Gabler.

Thea and Hedda, like Eilert and George Tesman, are sharply contrasting characters. Thea has courage and hope, selflessness and warmth. She is willing to risk all for love, even the kind of scandal that cowers Hedda, and though she knows her love for Eilert Lovborg is futile, her chief concern is for him, not herself. Hedda, on the other hand, is selfish and severe, incapable of the generosity of spirit necessary to love.

The two women even contrast physically. Thea seems made of softer stuff, rounded, not chiseled like the obdurate, stone-cast Hedda. Both have a kind of beauty, but Thea’s greater beauty lies within. It is reflected in her outer femininity, in her rich and luxuriant hair, particularly. Hedda’s beauty is sharper, more masculine or androgynous.

Above all, Thea is devoted, her desertion of her oafish step-family not withstanding. Her loyalty to Lovborg inspires her to work with George Tesman to reconstruct Eilert’s manuscript, their “child,” which, she believes, Lovborg destroyed before his death. That Hedda is excluded from participating in their work contributes to Hedda’s despair and suicide.

Hedda Gabler

Hedda is a complex character torn by opposing desires that make her both victim and victimizer. Her willfulness completely dominates the play, so much so that the other characters, even the more intriguing ones — Eilert Lovborg and Judge Brack seem to exist primarily to help sculpt her character in high relief.

Hedda is selfish, proud, and cold, cruelly heedless of the pain she inflicts on others in her efforts to satisfy the inner desires that she is unwilling to deal with honestly or directly. Inhibited by her upbringing, she is unwilling to sacrifice her own comfort to satisfy those longings, even though she finds her respectable marriage wearisome and her doting husband contemptible. Instead of dealing openly with her dissatisfaction and her growing fear of drowning in boredom, she becomes desperate, even hysterical, as is revealed in her sometimes treacherous and destructive behavior.

First of all, she rejects George’s efforts to bring her closer to his family. In fact, from the start, she seems bent on ruining George’s ties to his past. She refuses to address his Aunt Juliana with the familiar form of the pronoun “you” and, instead, treats her rudely. She also threatens to dismiss Berta, the loyal family servant. But her calculated coldness towards the Tesmans is most pronounced in her total lack of concern for George’s Aunt Rina, whose death seems to affect Hedda not at all.

Secondly, Hedda responds only negatively to her new role as wife. Most particularly, she refuses to accept her own pregnancy, something in which she is unable to take any joy at all. She seems to sense that a child will forever bind her to a life of suffocating boredom. At best, marriage seems only to offer her a sort of sanctuary from a far more exciting but dangerous world beyond, the world of Eilert Lovborg, a world that she perceives as romantic and beautiful but also terrifying. She does not love George, and she deeply resents having to rely on him for security, but she has almost a parasitical need for his respectability.

Thirdly, Hedda attempts to manipulate others, either from spite or to satisfy her needs vicariously. The doting George is an easy pawn in Hedda’s cruel games. So is Thea Elvsted, a woman too trusting of Hedda’s seeming good will. Hedda’s jealousy of Thea, a feeling that extends back into their school days, makes her betray the woman’s confidence, setting in motion the tragedy that at the last will destroy both Lovborg and Hedda. It particularly goads Hedda that Thea has played a major role in Eilert’s reclamation, corralling his free spirit and directing his energies in a way she herself was unable or unwilling to do. Her dislike of Thea goes yet deeper, however. Thea, as her appearance suggests, is warm and engaging, even sensual, whereas Hedda, though attractive, is steely and distant. Thea’s large, blue eyes are fixed with “an inquiring expression,” while Hedda’s “steel-grey eyes express a cold, unruffled repose.” Most especially, Hedda is obsessed with Thea’s luxuriant and abundant hair, which she treats like a hated thing to be destroyed, almost as if it were a reminder of the passion that, from fear, she represses in herself. Her own hair is described by Ibsen as “not particularly abundant.”

As long as Hedda is able to manipulate others, she can deal with her dangerous passions, including her sexuality. She had once driven Eilert off, threatening him with her father’s pistols, and she threatens Brack in the same way. However, her options run out when Brack gets her in a compromising position, one in which she can be manipulated, something that she will not endure. Her only alternative is to take her own life.

While it is impossible to excuse Hedda’s selfish and destructive character, at least some of the blame for her behavior rests with external influences, particularly her upbringing and the social dictates of her age. As the daughter of a general, she had learned to shoot and ride — hard, masculine activities that did not fit a respectable woman’s role. That she is unable to make a mature adjustment to a feminine role, surrendering her freedom, is not entirely her fault.

Aunt Julia

See Miss Juliana Tesman

Eilert Lovborg

Eilert Lovborg is George Tesman’s potential nemesis. Unlike Tesman, he is both a visionary and genius, but he is cursed with an inability to moderate his behavior. He carries disreputability on his back, luggage from a past in which he ruined his reputation by unspecified but dissolute conduct. However, when he first appears, he has renewed hopes. He has been inspired by Thea Elvsted, who has both prompted his reformation and been his able assistant in his scholarship and writing. He has also published a successful book and is close to finishing its more brilliant sequel.

Newly arrived in Christiania, Lovborg hopes to befriend George and interest him in his work, even though he is a threat to Tesman. He also attempts to refrain from any activity that might lead to a lapse into scandalous activity. However, his reformation proves both fragile and tragic when Hedda, his old love, reveals to him that Thea lacks sufficient faith in his self-control. He begins drinking, then goes off to Judge Brack’s party. In the early morning, after heavy imbibing, he carelessly drops his manuscript on the street, where Tesman picks it up. It is later destroyed by Hedda, leading to Eilert’s death and her own.

Lovborg offers a sharp contrast to Tesman. He is a disreputable and somewhat jaded genius, whereas George is a totally respectable and ingenuous plodder. Eilert has a creative, moody, and somewhat arrogant spirit; Tesman is unimaginative but steady and diligent. Hedda finds the latter boring but safe, and the former exciting but threatening.

Mrs. Rysing

See Mrs. Elvsted

George Tesman

George Tesman is a well-intentioned young man on his way to becoming a harmless drudge. He is a research scholar whose chief abilities, “collecting and arranging,” are more clerical than insightful. He also seems more devoted to the minutia of history, the domestic industries of medieval Brabant, than he is to his wife, Hedda, around whom he usually seems doltish and imperceptive. He is unaware, for example, that she is pregnant, a fact that does not escape his Aunt Juliana. He also seems insensitive to Hedda’s incivility and sarcasm, as well as her obvious discontent and bitterness.

On the other hand, George is devoted to his aunts, especially Juliana, who has been like a surrogate mother to him. He cares for her deeply, and he is upset that Hedda finds herself unable to develop a familiar relationship with her. To Hedda, Juliana is too much a busybody and too cloying in her affection.

Although professionally ambitious, Tesman is also essentially honest and fair. He recognizes in Lovborg the visionary genius that he utterly lacks, knowing, for example, that he could never make projections about the future the way Eilert has done in his manuscript sequel to his successful book. At the end of the play, he is willing to put aside his own work to collaborate with Mrs. Elvsted in an effort to reconstruct Lovborg’s destroyed manuscript.

Tesman both bores and annoys Hedda. He treats life like his work, unimaginatively. At times he acts like a nincompoop, especially in his habit of responding to the most serious turn of events with the same inane enthusiasm accorded matters of no consequence. His tag expression, “fancy that,” registers his apparently equal astonishment at the fact that his aunt has bought a new bonnet as, at the end, the fact that Hedda has shot and killed herself.

Hedda Tesman

See Hedda Gabler

Miss Juliana Tesman

Juliana Tesman, George Tesman’s maiden aunt, has a deep affection for her nephew, who regards her with equal fondness. She is, in fact, a parental figure for Tesman, who calls her “father and mother in one” to him.

Juliana, who is sixty-five, is also devoted to her sister, George’s Aunt Rina, who is an invalid. Juliana selflessly cares for her, and when she dies, Juliana immediately starts thinking about taking in an invalid boarder whom she might nurse. Her life, in short, is given over to ministering to the needs of others. She is the quintessential nurse, willing to sacrifice herself for others. Only in that does she find much meaning in life. In this respect, and in most others, she is a stark contrast to Hedda, who detests her.

Thea

See Mrs. Elvsted

Media Adaptations

• By the time film became commercially viable, Ibsen’s reputation as one of the world’s greatest dramatists was secure. In Europe and the United States, many early film directors tried their hand at adapting Ibsen’s plays to the early cinema. Hedda Gabler was adapted to the silent screen at least three times: in the United States in 1917, by Frank Powell; in Italy in 1919, by Giovanni Pastrone; and in Germany in 1924, by Franz Eckstein.
• A 1963 British television version of Hedda Gabler, directed by Alex Segal, cast major film stars Ingrid Bergman as Hedda, Trevor Howard as Lovborg, Michael Redgrave as Tesman, and Ralph Richardson as Judge (Assesor) Brack.
• Another television version of the play was produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC-TV) in 1972. Directed by Waris Hussein, its cast includes Tom Bell, Ian McKellen, and Janet Suzman. A video version is available from Time-Life Multimedia in the United States.
• A film version of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s stage production was released in the U. K. in 1975 under the title Hedda. Directed by Trevor Nunn, it features Glenda Jackson, Peter Eyre, Timothy West, Jennie Linden, and Patrick Stewart. It is generally available on video.
• In 1976, Films for the Humanities issued an educational film entitled The Theatre of Social Problems: Ibsen, Hedda, featuring an abridged version of the play, which, with commentary, runs 60 minutes. Produced by Harold Mantell, directed by Philip Hedley, and narrated by Irene Worth, its cast includes Darlene Johnson, Brian Protheroe, Rhys McConnochie, Sam Kelley, and Sara Stephenson. It is available in both video and 16 mm. formats from Films for the Humanities.
• Another British television version, directed by Deborah Warner, was first aired in 1993. The cast includes Fiona Shaw as Hedda, Nicholas Woodeson as Jorgen Tesman, Donal McCann as Judge Brack, Stephen Rea as Eilert Lovborg, Brid Brenan as Mrs. Elvsted, and Susan Colverd as Berte.