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.

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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,
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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 ...

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