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Essay, 2500 words

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The Eternal Power of ‘Hedda Gabler’

Feminism has been a popular issue for years. Henrik Ibsen, a playwright who wrote a few plays related to feminism, finished Hedda Gabler in 1890. This essay aims to discuss the values which made Hedda Gabler a script that has been running on stage for so many years by referring to several productions in the UK and the books describing Hedda Gabler. My motivation for choosing this script is my interest in the way the characters were potrayed. Many classic plays have been famous for their strong characters who committed suicide, such as <Romeo and Juliet>, <The Seagull> and <Antigone>. Their death has always given the audiences a strong concept.

No matter what has inspired Ibsen to write the play, once a script has been done it becomes a piece of literature. While the performance may alter and change as time goes by, words and text could preserve the story in the era it was made. The text may freeze the story in a particular era, but the performance is “alive”, and so is the immediate reactions from the audience. A playwright could write either something he knows already or something he could do research on, but he, by himself, could not make a play last for eternity.

“The most convenient object for a person to do a character research on is himself.” There is a saying that the relationship between Ibsen and Emilie Bardach, a young lady he met in Gossensass, Tyrol, had influenced the design of the characters in Hedda Gabler. “A new poem begins to dawn in me. I will execute it this winter, and try to transfer to it the bright atmosphere of the summer. But I feel that it will end in sadness – such is my nature,” Ibsen wrote in a letter for Emilie. The record related to their brief friendship shows a bleak, pessimistic feeling. Thus, it’s not hard to link Ejlert Løvborg to Ibsen himself, full of creativity and were able to dominate society but somehow couldn’t control themselves. But as opposed, women in 19th century have no influence on public affairs, so they want to influence individuals spiritually.

Take the birth of Hedda Gabler as an example, women has always sacrificed themselves in the 19th Century. The labour division assigned the artistic creativity to men, but childbearing to women. This assignment shaped the stereotype of women: doesn’t need to be strong, doesn’t care about self-fulfillment, has responsibility to raise children, be physically beautiful, and always rely on the husband on every single decision; in contrary, women who is physically vigorous, athletic, well-educated, and independent became the “New women” at that period of time. These women usually remain single due to the difficulty of combining equality with marriage. However, it was still hard for women to be wholly identified with individual feature. Ibsen had observed that a woman cannot be herself in a contemporary society, it is an exclusively male society with prospective, actual, foster and metaphorical motherhood. The myth of maternity as women’s destiny is so powerful that they appropriate its language in compensatory fashion to describe their artistic midwifery.

My understanding of Hedda Gabler is that Ibsen tried to depict an unlikable character, to illuminate the human qualities, the panic of living a banal and stifling life. Neither Hedda nor Thea is perfect. Hedda is a woman who born with gorgeous appearance, power of entice but decides to trap herself while Thea is an artistic muse but physically normal. There is no perfect ending for Hedda Gabler, she could never be satisfied. Her death could have been in her control or could have been an accident, but either way she would never die beautifully because she is not a perfect person, none of us are. People seldom feel satisfied with life and always compared and envied one another, these emotions make our life as distressed as Hedda’s. However, the audiences shouldn’t sympathize her tragic death instead celebrate her actions; she sacrificed her life to tell us: Don’t trap yourself. Be as brave as you can.

In my opinion, the message the playwright wants to express should touch the hearts of the audiences through an appropriate live performance. In the 2016/17 production directed by Ivo Van Hove in the National Theatre was set in a modern period of time, so the language they used was pretty much close to our daily life, and the characters had been modified a little bit to make more sense to nowadays. George Tesman was no longer just a silly book lover, he seemed to be more childish, impulsive and careless than the original script translated into English. These features would definitely make a new-married women in contemporary society feel frustrated. Besides, the scenography was clean and simple. Every single item on the stage has its function and meaning. For example, there wasn’t a portrait of General Gabler but a fire extinguisher displayed in a cabinet. Although the fire extinguisher had a cool silver colour and fitted into the room, for the audience who understood Hedda would probably consider it a symbol of poverty or danger.