Hedda Gabler
Henrik Ibsen(1891)
Extract
People don't do such things!
A general's daughter returns from her honeymoon already suffocating, trapped in a house she despises with a husband she finds tedious and a future that offers nothing but the predictable comforts of bourgeois respectability. Written in 1891 as a study of a soul with no outlet for its fierce, destructive vitality, the play presents a woman who craves beauty and daring but can only manipulate the lives of others because she has been given no legitimate arena for her own will. She burns a manuscript. She loads a pistol. Every gesture is at once aristocratic and desperate. The first audiences could not forgive a heroine who refused to be sympathetic, but thwarted power does not vanish; it turns inward and ignites.
If you loved this
Ibsen's other trapped wife, but Nora finds a door where Hedda finds only a pistol.
Flaubert's Emma suffocates in the same provincial cage, and the arsenic does what the pistol does.
Plath writes the same claustrophobia a century later, and the bell jar is Hedda's drawing room made invisible.