This post is part of the 2013 Feminist Reads Challenge. To learn more about the challenge or join in, click here

by Michelle Lee

When I first read the play Hedda Gabler last year, it was for a literature class. In introducing the book to us, my favorite teacher said something that struck me – she said that when she first read the play at 17, she thought Hedda was heroic. Yet when she read it again, twenty years later and from an older perspective, she couldn’t see Hedda as anything but a coward. This debate – whether Hedda was a hero or a coward, someone to be revered for her idealism or someone flawed by her delusions – consumed our class discussions for the rest of the year, and it remains one of my favorite things about the play. Hedda is dark, fascinating, and one of the most complex characters I’ve ever read about. She’s the sort of character you could spend twenty years trying to understand without coming to a conclusion, and one who I’m still (more than a year later) trying to figure out.

Henrik Ibsen, the Norwegian playwright who published Hedda Gabler in 1890, was an ardent supporter of women’s rights (which he insisted was merely the support of humanity) and created many flawed, complex heroines throughout his plays. His most famous play and the one that elicited the most scandal, A Doll’s House, was published in 1879. Nora, the play’s heroine, is a devoted housewife whose life revolves around her husband and children – but by the play’s end, with the artificial pretense of her domestic “doll house” revealed and her true unhappiness uncovered, she walks out and leaves her family behind to discover who she really is. The door she slams shut behind her at the end of the play caused so much shock that it was called “the slammed door heard around the world.” In the 19th century, the impact of the play was huge – critics were divided, with some supporting Ibsen’s criticism of society’s treatment of women, and others calling Nora a “monster.” Ibsen himself stated outright that his purpose in writing A Doll’s House was to criticize the prejudice he saw in “an exclusively male society, with laws made by men and with prosecutors and judges who assess feminine conduct from a masculine standpoint.”

These radical themes were carried through into many of his other plays, including Hedda Gabler. Hedda is a fresh young bride, newly married to homely academic George Tesman. Everyone around her expects her to be blissfully happy, or at least to pretend to be. Instead, Hedda is deeply restless and dissatisfied and makes no attempt to hide it. Throughout the play, she expresses a feeling of being suffocated by society’s expectations of her to play the role of housewife and mother, and by the powerlessness brought by the passive role society expects of her. This deep frustration, and a yearning to somehow express her will, leads her to have one motive: to “once in [her] life to have power to mold a human destiny.” To do so, she manipulates the lives of people around her; since society dictates she cannot shape her own destiny, she wants nothing more than to mold others’. When the alcoholic writer who once loved her in their youth returns to town, she first pushes him relentlessly to relapse into drinking, exploiting his insecurities along the way. She then steals his unpublished masterpiece and burns it – causing Ejlert to tell his lover, a woman called Thea whom Hedda despises, that he burnt the manuscript himself rather than admit he lost what had been their lives’ work. After causing his suicide and breaking Thea’s heart, Hedda then turns to find more targets to manipulate. However, the sinister Judge Brack reveals his knowledge of her part in the suicide, hinting that he will use his knowledge to blackmail her in the future. Unable to stand the thought of being controlled by yet another man, Hedda brings one of her father’s pistols into the study and shoots herself offstage.

Hedda is fascinating because she is flawed. Her actions cannot be described in any way as moral, or justifiable. But even though her actions are monstrous, there is a constant strain of yearning for something better that runs through her and makes her darkness sympathetic. Hedda makes multiple allusions to classical mythology, hinting that even as she twists the allusions through her vicious actions, she is searching for some grand narrative, something pure and meaningful, to give her stifled life some worth. Even though she is a narcissist, her self-love gives her no solace, and there is the sense that her self-love is only outweighed by her self-loathing. As monstrous as she is, as awful as her actions are, Hedda is ultimately a tragic heroine – a woman whose flaws have been added to by a society that in no way allows her to find meaning in her life or to take action to change it. When she shoots herself offstage, the final irony is the last line of the play – “Good God, people don’t do such things!” To the very end, Hedda’s life was dictated by what others said she should, or should not do – it was this constricting control which pushed her to manipulate others in the first place, and which eventually made her take her own life.

So, is Hedda a heroine or a coward for committing suicide? By the end of the play, she’s faced with two choices: to kill herself and thus free herself from society’s confines, or to change herself to fit into society, and thus “kill herself” in a way. The people in my class who considered her a heroine (who were usually the most idealistic) thought her heroic for refusing to capitulate. But others thought her a coward for exactly the opposite reason: by killing herself, she capitulated to society’s conventions that dictated that someone like her could not exist. On the side that considers Hedda a coward, an interesting point to bring in here would be the character of Thea.

In the play, Hedda thinks of Thea as merely a “pretty little fool.” Blonde-haired and docile, Thea is in every way the ideal 19th century Norwegian wife (except for the fact that she runs away from her husband to be with Ejlert). Thea is someone who outwardly conforms to society’s ideals of femininity and meekness, but she manages to break every convention of society far more successfully than Hedda does. Even though she admits that she is sometimes afraid, Thea acts far more courageously than the ultimately passive and spiteful Hedda. Thea changes lives positively, helping Ejlert kick his alcoholism, in comparison to Hedda who gets him addicted again. While it is true that Thea’s life does revolve around the lives of men, such as how she plays the role of muse and assistant to first Ejlert and then Tesman, she still manages to quietly subvert society’s expectations in pursuit of her own happiness. At the end of the play, even when Hedda is drowned by despair, it’s Thea, still hopeful and alive, who continues on. It could be argued that it is Thea who is the true feminist heroine here – even though Hedda is the arrestingly tragic heroine, Ibsen offers us Thea as a more “normal” role model, one who manages to keep surviving day by day.

Ibsen named his play Hedda Gabler–not “Hedda Tesman” after her married name instead. In using Hedda’s maiden name, he’s presenting his audience with the “truest” form of Hedda as her own person, separate from her marriage to Tesman or her role as a housewife or mother. It’s this image of Hedda that’s stuck with me – a deeply flawed woman trying futilely to somehow find her way in life. I’m still fascinated by Hedda. Personally, when I first read the play, I idealistically thought she was a heroine – but that could still change. Hopefully, twenty years down the road, I’ll pick it up again, and be surprised by how differently I see her; and perhaps, how my perspective on life, and heroism, has changed.