It is difficult to decide how to view Hedda as this is an unbiased play, as the structure of the play does not reveal Ibsen's point of view. What I mean by the play's not revealing Ibsen's point of view can be explained by referring to Hamlet. Hamlet is unquestionably an honorable man with upstanding qualities whom the audience is expected to admire. It is not so clear how we are to view Hedda. At one point I fell that Hedda should be condemned for her selfishness and destructiveness, then later I admired for her courage and determination. It is then hard to decide if she is she both admirable and despicable.
The role of the other characters in the play is for dramatic function. The way Hedda reacts to the characters reveals insight to a woman who is normally confined within herself. Tessman naivety and ignorance frustrates Hedda, a woman who is very observant and educated. She takes full advantage of him when it comes to money and shows no concern when they find out they have little left and the threat of Lovborg taking Tessmans place as a professor she sees as a ‘sporting event’.
Through Mrs Elvsted it is revealed that Hedda has been manipulative and vicious all her life, as even at school she had threatened to burn Mrs Elvsteds hair. Her hair is symbolic in the play as they are juxtaposed to one another; Heddas is flat, plain and lacks interest or life whereas Mrs Elvsteds is big, curly and full of life and bounce, both of which reflects character and the threat shows Heddas jealously of her.
The constant theme throughout the play, which is imminent from the start, is the sense of tragedy. Tragedy usually focuses on figures of stature whose fall implicates others; a family, an entire group, or even a whole society, and typically the tragic protagonist becomes isolated from his or her society, and often ends with death. This is exactly the case with Hedda. It fits well with Aristotle’s quote on tragedy, they ‘fall not through device or depravity’ but in the ‘error of judgment’. The effect of tragedy on the audience provokes fear, pity or pathos.
In tragedy, unlike comedy, the end tends to be catastrophic, it is perceived as the concluding phase of a downward movement. In comedy, the change of fortune is upward; the happy ending prevails as obstacles are dispelled and the hero and/or heroine are happily incorporated into society or form the nucleus of a new and better society.
To the audience of a tragedy, the catastrophe will seem finally, to be inevitable. Although tragedy can not simply be identified with uncontrollable disasters, such as an incurable disease or an earthquake, still there is the feeling that the protagonist is inevitably caught by operating forces which are beyond his control (sometimes like destiny, visible only in their effects). Whether grounded in fate or doom, accident or chance, or in a causal sequence set going through some action or decision initiated by the tragic protagonist herself, in Heddas case, the operating forces assume the function of a distant and impersonal power.
Ultimately perhaps, all the instances that we find in tragedy of powerlessness, of undeniable human limitations, derive from the tragic perception of human existence itself, which seems to be terrifyingly vulnerable. Tragedy often presents situations that emphasize vulnerability, situations in which both physical and spiritual security and comforts are undermined, and in which the characters are pressed to the utmost limits, such as overwhelming odds, impossible choices, demonic forces within or without (or both). In Heddas case she finds her self in a situation where she is being blackmailed by Mr Brack into becoming part of a ‘triangle’ which is completely against her morals. She didn’t help the situation though as she enjoyed taking part in an undeniably sexual conversation with Brack. Against the tragic protagonist, Hedda, are the powers that be, which are in her case human, governed outside of her limitations. The more elevated, apparently secure and privileged the character's initial situation, the greater is our sense of the fall, and the greater our sense of his or her suffering.
Hedda Gabler is an act of self renunciation, in a dark and ironic sense, through which Hedda rings down her life; she does not die for another person, and she does not live for another person, she dies for herself as she had lived for herself. In that she dies, she proves herself to be among those free born, untamed creatures; for in the necessity of her death, there first is revealed the whole tragedy of the uncanny contradiction of Hedda Gabler: the tragic aspect is that Hedda may only prove to herself the true existence of her inner freedom by cancelling herself out. She extinguishes the life of the tame and false Hedda, caught in the meshes of her own weakness, who while still living would not have found bearable the verdict now intoned by Counselor Brack over the deceased: "People don't do such things!"
