Essay On Hedda Gabler

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Recommended: Hedda gabler themes and issues

Jackie Andersen
Professor Hutchison
English 125A
April 4, 2014
Hedda Gabler
In the 19th century, women’s rights were viewed as inferior to men intellectually, emotionally, physically, psychologically, and socially. Women were not believed to have the same desires and abilities as men. In “Hedda Gabler” by Ibsen, Hedda provides many examples of going against social limitations on women in the 19th century, through: self-liberation vs. self-renunciation, boredom, and expectation on woman.
In this play, a major problem Hedda faces is self-liberation vs. self-renunciation. At first, Hedda challenges herself to convince Lovborg to die a “beautiful death” and hands him her gun for him to commit suicide. This is a perfect example of her cruel behavior she expresses due to her social limitations. In Hedda’s eyes, the control of determining how a person dies is the best freedom to have and is the only true power a person can have in their life. A little while later in the play, Lovborg accidentally gets shot in the groin and ends up dying. After that, Hedda recognizes that she still has the power to kill herself, which she ends up doing later on in the play. “No one does that,” said Brack at the very end of the play. This quote illustrates that during that time period committing suicide wasn’t likely to happen. With that being said, freedom and satisfaction is hard for her and other women of her social class and time period to reach and understand. Two main reasons behind this are: she’s a woman and she’s a member of an extremely high class. During this time women weren’t allowed to be their own person, they were wives and mothers. Hedda hated that idea and she wasn’t afraid to express it.
“The term "New Woman" had emerged to describe "wo...

... middle of paper ...

...self is right before she kills herself, she plays the piano to gain peace with herself and be free before she’s gone. On the other hand, Tesman is too scared to be himself and ends up steeling Lovborg’s thoughts and ideas and taking all the credit for it.
Hedda is worthless and damaging because she only cares about her own feelings and lives her life hating the boring standards women had during the 19th century. This causes her to express cruel behavior to people she surrounds herself with. Throughout the play Hedda shows a lot of cruel behavior as an expression of her inward frustrations at the social limitations imposed on women in the 19th century.

Work Cited

Lyon, Charles. Hedda Gabler: Gender, Role and World. London: Twayne Publishers, 1991.
"Henrik Ibsen's 'Hedda Gabler'." 2006-09-13. .

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