Hedda, bored and pregnant, trapped in a marriage to a pedantic academic, manipulates everyone around her toward destruction. Ibsen wrote this late in his career, and Hedda is his most enigmatic creation: we never fully understand her, which is part of her power. She longs for beauty and courage but possesses neither; she wants control and achieves it only through death. The play ends with a pistol shot that Judge Brack calls unimaginable. People do not do such things. But Hedda does. She always was going to.