Critical responses of Hedda Gabler

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Hedda Gabler – Critical responses to         Hedda Gabler              Hedda Gabler was published in December of 1890. This work offended many and puzzled more critics, who, as Hans Heiberg found the main character too monstrous, a “revolting female creature” who “received neither sympathy nor compassion.” Just as the work seemed to lack a message, a corrective purpose, the sort of social critique for which Ibsen had become so famous. Hedda’s character was the target of much of the negative criticism. A Biographer, Alfred Sinding-Larsen called her “a horrid miscarriage of the imagination, a monster in female form to whom no parallel can be found in real life.” A figure as complex as Hedda was not suited to drama and could only be satisfactorily treated in the novel. It was argued that the play only leaves us with a sense of emptiness and betrayal. Some Scandinavian critics suggested that the printed play “should not be
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found on the table of any decent family.” Harald Hansen, reviewing stage productions of 1891, dismissed it in as single sentence as “an ungrateful play which hardly any of the participants will remember with real satisfaction.” Jæger, who had once gone on tour lecturing against another play, had become a pro-Ibsen convert. He saw Hedda as a very realistic, earth-born female, “a tragic character who is destroyed by the conflicting difference in her own character.” “Hedda,” as another person observed has no source of richness in herself and must constantly seek it in others, so that her life becomes a ...

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