Hedda Gabler (Style)

Style

Setting

While it is important, the physical setting of Hedda Gabler — the Tesmans’ newly purchased villa in Christiania, Norway — is of less importance than the social environment of the time and place. The comfortably furnished house reflects both the class status of the Tesmans and their future expectations. In the first act, Hedda makes it clear that they plan to move beyond mere comfort to new levels of luxury. Her old piano, unsuited for the drawing room decor, must be moved into another room, to be replaced by a second, more elegant piano — at best a frivolous and impractical expense. Hedda wants both the security of respectability and the extravagant lifestyle of the wealthy, something threatened by Lovborg’s arrival.

There is a price to be paid, though, a price that makes the villa a kind of prison. Against her innermost desires, Hedda must act like a proper wife, deferring to her husband’s authority. She attempts to feign that role, but she finds it extremely boring. She grows desperate, especially when George warns that his appointment is no certainty. Fearing the loss of comfort as much as the loss of respectability, Hedda destroys Eilert’s manuscript and bamboozles George into believing that she did it out of love for him. Hedda will not live in such a cage unless it is extremely well-appointed and all her material needs are met. She is simply that selfish and abusive of others.

Structure

Hedda Gabler, a four-act play, has what at the time was probably the most common formal pattern of dividing full-length plays into discrete segments. Works from earlier eras are usually divided into five acts, while more modern plays are generally divided into either three acts or, as is the case with many contemporary plays, into two acts. As is also traditional, the acts of Hedda Gabler mark divisions in time, segments in which significant action occurs over the course of two days. The plot is linear in its progression, strictly adhering to a straight-forward, chronological order.

Equally important, each act reaches a climactic moment when something decisive or irreversible is said or done. These are memorable moments, when, for example, at the end of the second act, Hedda burns Eilert’s manuscript or, at the end of the play, kills herself with one of her father’s pistols. Each act has the classic dramatic structure characterizing the play as a whole, and the warp and woof of each is a rising action that takes the whole to a new plateau of tension. In short, Hedda Gabler, provides an excellent example of what constitutes “a well-made play.”

Realism

Like the other social-problem or thesis plays of Ibsen, Hedda Gabler follows the tenets of realism prevalent in late nineteenth-century Europe. Principal among these was the idea that the writer should render life both objectively and faithfully, concentrating on fairly ordinary people who face problems that can only be resolved in a manner that is true to life. In his realistic works, Ibsen sought to capture a sense of reality by using the characteristics of ordinary conversation, unencumbered with ornate diction and insistent poetic effects. In their cadences and diction his characters speak like real people, if, from dramatic necessity, somewhat more effortlessly and pointedly, and, in Norwegian at least, somewhat more sonorously.

Generally, too, characters in such works have discernible and valid motives for their behavior, even if they are complex, as they are in Hedda’s case. If they are not clear, they must at least have verisimilitude, that quality that allows the viewer to conclude that even very puzzling characters are true to life and have validity. Ibsen allows his audience glimpses into Hedda’s deeper motives, those things which do not wholly surface in the play’s verbal matrix but are suggested, for example, both in persistent symbols and in her actions.

It is in Hedda Gabler that Ibsen takes his realism in drama to his limits. It has been described as the dramatist’s most objective work, almost clinical in its coldness and distance. His plot driver, Hedda, is a vicious, petty, and extremely selfish woman, for whom, in Ibsen’s time, few could find an iota of sympathy. Perhaps to underscore her brusque incivility and abrupt mood changes, Ibsen experimented with a new technique, eliminating long speeches altogether. He also used insistent words and phrases to reveal and even encapsulate his characters, a prime example being the “fancy that” of George Tesman.

Foil

An important device used by Ibsen in Hedda Gabler is the character foil. Contrasting figures help define their counterparts, providing a heightened sense of each character’s personality. Hedda has two principal foils: Thea Elvsted and Juliana Tesman. Both women are very unselfish and at peace with life, willing to sacrifice themselves for others, even though, in Thea’s case, it will destroy her reputation. Hedda’s paralyzing fear of losing respectability stands in sharp contrast.

George Tesman and Eilert Lovborg are also foils. Tesman is “correctness” itself, a dull but steady plodder with a very limited imagination. His principal interest as scholar lies in rooting through the relics of the past, taking and organizing notes about the domestic industries of medieval Brabant. Lovborg, in contrast, is an erratic genius, prone to excess and easily drawn to hedonistic pleasures. As a visionary scholar, he is much more interested in the past for what it may reveal about the future, the unknown. He is, however, arrogant, self-destructive, and, at the last, somewhat pathetic.

Symbol

Ibsen makes it impossible to ignore some important symbols in Hedda Gabler. Primary are the pistols, Thea Elvsted’s hair, and Eilert’s manuscript. Because of the association made by both Hedda and Thea, the most obvious of these is Lovborg’s manuscript. In the minds of both, the work is Eilert and Thea’s “child,” born of their love and affection for each other. It is partly from her intense jealousy that Hedda destroys it and sets out to break the bond between Thea and Lovborg.

Less open in symbolic significance is Thea’s luxurious and abundant hair, especially as it contrasts with Hedda’s own. Thea’s hair is a point of fixation for Hedda, something that she despised in Thea when the two were schoolgirls; it continues to annoy her during the course of the play. Thea’s hair seems to embody those qualities in Thea’s character that Hedda lacks, including an engaging femininity that Hedda envies, perhaps even a sensuality that Hedda hates because she represses it in herself.

The pistols, on the other hand, suggest masculinity, and have long been identified as phallic symbols. It is noteworthy that both George Tesman and Judge Brack are appalled by the fact that Hedda plays with them. As extensions of Hedda’s character, the guns suggest a masculinity, a hardening that has resulted from her repressed femininity. They represent the freedom that Hedda longs for but must sacrifice to respectability.