Of The Greek God Dionysus In Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler

This essay will discuss whether Ejlert Lovborg is a reflection of the Greek God Dionysus in Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. Ejlert is a complex protagonist who greatly influences Hedda’s decisions and therefore has an important impact on the play. Through the parallels between the play’s character and the Olympian god, Ibsen challenges the idea of the quest for redemption, self-hood and writers and the 19th Century Norwegian society’s views on morals.

Inspiration for Ejlert Lovborg

To begin with, although Hedda Gabler has been named “the most fatally local and Norwegian of all Ibsen’s plays” (Edmund Gosse, Henrik Ibsen, 1908: 177), critics like James Macfarlane argue that Ibsen does not only write about national identity and “is not a myth-maker,

“Dionysus is a god of cycles.” (Bramshaw, 2013: 194) He undergoes three stages of development, just like Lovborg. In their first stage, both men are irresponsible, and where Dionysus (then called Zagreus) gets killed due to his superficiality, Lovborg “’s been and dished himself” (Ibsen, 2008:195). In their second stage both search for redemption and achiev their full potential: Dionysus becoming one of the most important gods due to his powers and coming to be known as “ [the one who] embodies the primal emotions that drive us and make us who we are” (Bramshaw, 2013: 12), and Lovborg “leaves off his old ways” of debauchery (Ibsen, 2008: 190) and writes a “a big new book, dealing with cultural development” (Ibsen, 2008: 183). But, strangely, the two follow different paths for their last cycle: where Dionysus (now known as Iacchus) is the torchbearer for the Elusinian Mysteries, and is “associated with harvest grain” (Bramshaw, 2013: 70), Lovborg becomes “quite beyond hope of reform” (Ibsen, 2008: 232). He has “quite a few drinks inside him” (p. 233), “just gone along and dropped [the manuscript]” (Ibsen, 2008: 233) and in his drunken desperation to find it, becomes reckless and is “[accidentally] shot in the abdomen” (Ibsen, 2008: 259). Therefore, where Iacchus regains and maintains society’s respect, Ejlert loses the respect of the society, where men were categorized as worthy in light of their career achievements and reputation. Their three different stages of life prove that although Ibsen might have shaped Ejlert similar to the god, he did not intend to simply rewrite a 19th century version of him. “He was, [however,] […], clear in his own mind that national identity must be based in history” (Macfarlane, 2012: 14) and therefore “chose to paint a ‘west Christiania’ of 1860” (Gosse, 1908: 177) “[focusing on] an individual’s quest for selfhood” (Macfarlane, 2012: 135) and