Hedda Gabler Summary: Ibsen's Portrait of a Woman with Nowhere to Go
What it is about
Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler was published in 1890 and premiered on 31 January 1891 at the Residenztheater in Munich. Ibsen was there on the night, though he stayed backstage. The first reviews were negative. The play is now treated as a masterpiece of literary realism and one of the central works of nineteenth century theatre.
The setup is small and domestic. Hedda, the daughter of a general, has just come back from her honeymoon to a villa in Kristiania (now Oslo). Her husband is George Tesman, a serious young academic who spent much of the honeymoon doing research. Hedda does not love him. She seems to have married him because she decided her years of freedom were finished and this was the sensible next step. The house is more than they can afford. The marriage is a room she cannot leave.
What breaks the quiet is the return of Eilert Løvborg, a writer who wasted his talent for years and is now recovering. He has stopped drinking. He has published a bestseller in George's own field. He has a new manuscript he considers his masterpiece. He also has Thea Elvsted beside him, Hedda's old schoolmate, who is leaving her husband for him and who helped shape the new book. Eilert is suddenly a rival for the professorship George was counting on. He is also, as a private conversation reveals, Hedda's former lover.
Everything that follows comes from Hedda interfering with other people's lives because she has no life of her own to direct.
The main characters
Hedda is one of the great roles in theatre and has been described as a female variation of Hamlet. She is clever, bored, cruel and frightened of scandal. Ibsen was deliberate about the title. He wrote that he called the play Hedda Gabler rather than Hedda Tesman "to indicate that Hedda as a personality is to be regarded rather as her father's daughter than her husband's wife". Her married name never takes.
George Tesman is decent, dull and absorbed in his work. He is not a villain. That is part of the problem. There is nothing in him for Hedda to fight, only something to endure.
Eilert Løvborg is talent and ruin in one person. His rehabilitation is real but fragile, and it depends on other people holding him steady.
Thea Elvsted is the woman who did what Hedda would not. She left a marriage, attached herself to a man's work and made herself necessary to it. Hedda's jealousy of Thea is not simply romantic. Thea has influence, and influence is the thing Hedda cannot get.
Judge Brack is the family friend who circles the household looking for an opening. He is the most dangerous person in the play and the last to show his hand.
The themes
Power is the engine. Hedda has no money of her own, no profession, no outlet. The only power available to her is over other people's choices, so that is where she spends herself. She encourages, withholds, says nothing when a word would help. Her weapons are her father's pistols and other people's weaknesses.
Identity runs through the title itself. Hedda is a general's daughter in a scholar's house, and she cannot make the two fit. Class sits alongside it. The couple are financially overstretched, and George has to tell Hedda that the entertaining and the household she expected are not possible. Her social position is a costume she can no longer afford.
Freedom is the theme Hedda talks about most and has least of. She has an idea of a death that is "beautiful and free", a gesture made on one's own terms. The play tests that idea against reality and finds it childish.
Reputation ties it all together. Hedda will do almost anything rather than be the subject of gossip. That fear is the lever by which she can be moved.
How it ends
Skip this section if you want the play unspoiled.
George comes home from a drunken party at dawn with the only copy of Eilert's new manuscript, which Eilert lost. Called away, he leaves it with Hedda. When Eilert tells Hedda and Thea he has lost it, Hedda says nothing to reassure them. After Thea goes, Hedda urges Eilert towards suicide and gives him one of her father's pistols. Then she burns the manuscript, and tells George she did it to secure their future.
News arrives that Eilert is dead. George and Thea set about reconstructing the lost book from notes Thea kept. Then Judge Brack tells Hedda the truth: the death was messy, apparently in a brothel, and probably accidental, nothing like the beautiful end she imagined. Brack also knows whose pistol it was. He makes clear he could raise a scandal, and that he now holds permanent power over her, with the implication that he will use it to force her into a relationship. Hedda goes into the next room and shoots herself in the head. The others hear the shot and assume she is simply firing for amusement. They find the body. Brack's closing line is "But people do not do such things!"
Why it still matters
The play survives because Hedda is not explained away. Ibsen gives her no speech of justification and no tidy motive. She is intelligent, destructive, trapped and complicit in her own trap, and audiences have argued about her for well over a century. The role remains one of the most sought after in the theatre.
It also works as a study of how small a life can be made. Nothing supernatural happens. A marriage, a job, a manuscript, a party and a pair of pistols are enough. Brack's final line, spoken in shock, is the sound of a society that has no language for what it just produced.
