Hedda Gabler. In the play Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen chooses to develop his characters slowly, revealing their strengths and weaknesses as the drama unfolds, progressively adding layers to each personage.
In the play Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen chooses to develop his characters slowly, revealing their strengths and weaknesses as the drama unfolds, progressively adding layers to each personage. The first impressions gained of the characters are consistently accurate representations of their natures, while not being whole pictures. Ibsen prefers to allow the continuing character interactions to define each one a little at a time. The dynamic between three characters in particular remains the same throughout the story, but reveals with each successive encounter the particular nature of their relationships, as well as their pasts. Those characters are Hedda Tesman, Ejlert Lövborg, and Mrs. Elvsted, called Thea.In Act II of the play, the first scene where Hedda, Thea and Lövborg meet occurs. Act I revealed Hedda’s arrogant manner through her interactions with her new husband, Jörgen Tesman, and his family, whom she holds in apparent great contempt. Her words to her husband, as well as her refusal to visit his aunts or pay them the least respect, defines one of the key points of her personality: her pride. The way in which Tesman and his aunts seek endlessly to please her shows the esteem in which she is held, and the reputation that she has made for herself as the hard-to-please general’s daughter. Act II is the scene of the revelation of Hedda’s other greatest character trait, that being her desire to dominate and control. When Lövborg declines her offer of a glass of punch, Hedda laughingly replies: “And so I’ve got no power over you at all? Is that it?” (222). Though she laughs to hide her ire,
Hedda is annoyed by the fact that Lövborg refuses her, while he is at the same time being to kind and demurring to Thea, the other person present. The rest of the passage consists of Hedda’s fight for control. She goads Lövborg, telling him that Brack, the judge, “smiled so contemptuously when you didn’t dare to join them in there at the table.” (222). Hedda also recognizes that the reason for Lövborg’s stolid refusal to drink, to remain virtuous, as it were, is the shy Thea, with whom he lived for several months. As the final blow necessary to wrest ...
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Hedda is annoyed by the fact that Lövborg refuses her, while he is at the same time being to kind and demurring to Thea, the other person present. The rest of the passage consists of Hedda’s fight for control. She goads Lövborg, telling him that Brack, the judge, “smiled so contemptuously when you didn’t dare to join them in there at the table.” (222). Hedda also recognizes that the reason for Lövborg’s stolid refusal to drink, to remain virtuous, as it were, is the shy Thea, with whom he lived for several months. As the final blow necessary to wrest Lövborg from Thea’s control and return him to her own, Hedda begins to refer to an earlier conversation with Thea, distorting the words that had actually passed between the two, telling the other woman that Lövborg is “firm as a rock” and “wasn’t that what I said this morning when you came in here in such a state of desperation.” (223), making it seem that Thea had not had faith in Lövborg’s ability to sustain his new habit of not indulging in drink. In the end, Hedda is victorious. Though Lövborg knows of her underhanded nature, he reacts nonetheless to the stimulus provided by Hedda, and takes several long drinks, which Thea protests tearfully. The control which Hedda is able to exact is testament to just how skilled she has become at manipulation. The way in which she is able to direct Lövborg to do as she wishes will have dire consequences later in the play, something which can be intimated from this scene, and the ease with Hedda is able to bend the man to her will.Lövborg himself has just made his first appearance in the play. His return to town was referred to several times in Act I, each recurrence of which made Hedda act strangely, hinting at something between the two that had existed before the time of the play. He comes into her house, and they sit reminiscing. Many things about their previous relationship are revealed, including the fact that they were indeed lovers, and Hedda intimates that she used him for the control and the thrill that it afforded her. Their relationship ended with her threatening to shoot him with one of her pistols which she is so fond of. The conversation leads to Thea, and a discussion of her role in Lövborg’s life. He claims, to Hedda, that they shared nothing, that Thea was beneath him, but when Thea herself enters, it does not seem so, and Hedda herself does not seem to believe it. Lövborg refuses the punch when first offered, but it surprisingly easily persuaded by Hedda to have it after all. The swiftness with which he falls under her control is a betrayal of the attachment still between them. Lövborg is not impervious to the control placed on him by Hedda. Indeed, he seems to fall into it naturally, believing her word over Thea’s, and allowing himself to be manipulated, believing that “that was my companions confident belief in me.” (223). This willingness of his to follow her lead and do as she desires proves to be a strong foreshadowing for later events.Finally, Thea is proven to be a sweet, trusting soul that is far too easily hurt to be having dealings with the likes of Hedda and Lövborg. She is married to a much older man, and ran away from him to find Lövborg once again. Her attachment to him is deep, and her belief in him something that will cause her great pain. Her gullibility leads her to fall victim to Hedda for entirely different reasons than those of Lövborg. She trusts Hedda despite her better judgment, and allows her to hear her deepest confidences. When Hedda betrays in a most unflattering manner her fears about Lövborg, she is crushed by the possibility that someone could be so cruel, and destroyed further by Lövborg’s drinking of the punch. Nevertheless, she is a weak soul, and remains with Hedda once Lövborg has joined Tesman and Brack on their way to Brack’s bachelor party. She is unable to act on her own, depending on the strength of others. It was indeed not her own strength, but her dependence on Lövborg, that led her to leave her husband’s home and seek him in the town. This frailty of spirit will prove to be her greatest weakness in later events.At the end of Act III, many events have transpired which have changed the way Lövborg acts. The one night that has passed, that of the bachelor party, has caused him to have a complete change of heart in regard to the work he had done with Thea, and the life that he intends to lead. The loss of his manuscript, which unknown to him had been recovered by Tesman, was one step in the direction of the disaster that Hedda had been fabricating. His abrupt declaration to Thea that “I have no more use for you any more,” (242), and the subsequent discussion show the way in which he has chosen to live his life, the metaphor of the sinking pieces of the manuscript thrown into the sea, “deeper and deeper. Like I will.” (243) being an perfect representation of where he sees that his life will go. Despite his later confession to Hedda that he had spoken the words only to spare Thea the worst, the metaphor does not lost its relevance. He tells Hedda that he intends to “put an end to it all,” (245), intimating a dire end to his story. Indeed, Lövborg ends badly, and not in the heroic way that Hedda had imagined it. His death is anti-climatic, almost cliché, to Hedda, and thoroughly disappointing. Lövborg fell prey to Hedda and her control. Though he had thrived so well in the presence of Thea, it could not last when he was confronted with his weakness: Hedda Gabler.Thea’s fragility makes the ending of her part in the story a tragic one. Her dependence on Lövborg, revealed in her response to his dismissal of her, “What am I to do with my life, then?” (242), is the conveyance of her inability to act without the direction and support of another person.Hedda, however, is in her best form in this passage, showing her ability to control and manipulate, giving Lövborg a pistol, asking him to end it beautifully. He asks her about vine leaves, the vine leaves that she used to dream of and which spoke to her of glory and beauty, to which she responds that she no longer believes in them. Hedda has realized that an end is drawing near for all of her careful manipulations, and that nothing beautiful will come of them. In the end of the scene, she sits, tearing Lövborg’s manuscript to shreds, saying that she is destroying the child that he made with Thea, the utter ruin of all that he had accomplished.The play ends with Hedda’s suicide, an action forced upon her when her fierce pride was challenged. All of her control came to naught, as another proved more cunning than her, and the ruination which she had brought on the lives of others befell her as well. Hedda Gabler was the proud general’s daughter, but not impervious to her own debilitating actions.