Hedda Gabler

July 2018

Hedda Gabler 

Ibsen, Henrik. Hedda Gabler. 1890. Translated by Jens Arup. Four Major Plays. Oxford World's Classics, 2008.

Hedda Gabler highlights the complexity of human motivation by creating a character that does not have clear motives. The play is an unsettling look at a woman’s lack of control in the 1800’s. Hedda is a complex character that is still hard to interpret 100 or so years after the play was first written. She returns home from her honeymoon with a man she barely tolerates, confides in an ex-lover that she seems to hate and ruins the life of the man that she used to love, who she is possibly still in love with.  Her lack of clear motives and her complexity as a character was a huge step forward for Realism as a theatre movement. In Hedda Gabler, Ibsen is clearly saying that people are not as simple as they had before been represented on stage, and that the world is not so black and white. Hedda Gabler is a powerful play that offers a window into the mind of a complicated woman and speaks to the dangers of suppression and societal expectations on someone who wants nothing but to be free of them.