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Henrik Ibsen - Hedda Gabler
Henrik Ibsen - Hedda Gabler
Henrik Ibsen - Hedda Gabler
Realism
Plutarch, Moralia: ‘Sophocles used to say that having played through the
magniloquence of Aeschylus, and the sharp artificiality of his own manner, he turned
finally to the style of ordinary speech [lexis], the best and most expressive of
character.’
At the end of the nineteenth century, from about 1870 onwards, a movement
emerged across Europe which expressly aimed to create dramas that:
•demanded a new type of actor, one who spoke and moved naturally.
Around the same time novelists – Balzac, Flaubert, Henry James, Tolstoy – were
attempting much the same thing.
Realism and Modernism
* In Letters and Speeches, ed. and trans. Evert Sprinchorn (New York: Hill, 1964), p. 222.
Realism and Naturalism: Spot the difference?
“Naturalism”: a term first used by Émile Zola in his essay “Naturalism in the Theatre”
(1881):
•“Naturalism, in literature … is the return to nature and to man, direct observation,
correct anatomy, the acceptance and depiction of that which is.”
“Naturalism” and “realism” often used interchangeably, which can cause some
confusion.
Thomas Postlewait, “Realism and Reality,” in The Oxford Companion of Theatre and
Performance, ed. Dennis Kennedy (OUP, 2003).
“Naturalist drama, such as Hauptmann's The Weavers (1892) and Gorky's The Lower
Depths (1902), tended to represent the economic and environmental forces that
controlled, even determined, the characters' behaviour. By contrast, realistic drama,
such as Ibsen's Hedda Gabler (1890) and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (1904),
located the suffering of the characters in their social values and psychological self-
deceptions, though a strain of economic, social, and hereditary determinism may
operate in these plays as well.”
The “well-made” play
Pioneered by French playwright Eugene Scribe and perfected by Victorien Sardou.
•Play centres around a secret or dilemma known only to one or two characters (and
the audience).
•Tripartite structure: 1) initial exposition 2) Characters experience discovery,
intrigue, evasions, ups and downs in fortunes 3) the scène à faire (the “obligatory
scene”) in which the characters confront each other.
• The chains of events and the denouement must all be logical and plausible. The
overall structure should be repeated in each act.
Such plays were much derided for their superficiality and formulaic nature. They
privileged structure over content. George Bernard Shaw dismissed them as
“Sardoodledum”.
The late nineteenth-century realists – Ibsen not least – rejected the “well-made”
play. They wanted to confront social and political problems and favoured ambiguity
to neatness and formula.
BUT … the tight structure of works like Hedda Gabler bear the trace of the “well-
made” play even as they turn away from its values.
Ibsen
REALISM
These works reenergize the “problem play” (as practised in England by Henry Arthur Jones
and A. W. Pinero), but Ibsen avoids the contrivance and preachiness that often characterizes
it.
Rather, Ibsen’s plays focus in an intense and relentless fashion on a highly particularized
situation and set of characters. It is only through the particular that general crisis (ideology,
class, gender) is glimpsed.
Hedda Gabler: a Greek tragedy?
Published in 1890 and first performed in January 1891 at the Königliches Residenz-
Theater , Munich. Its English premiere followed in April the same year.
But Ibsen’s is a fiercely secular drama. There is no God, only the impossibly powerful
force of social convention. The Gods are replaced by the ideologies of class and
gender.
In Hedda Gabler the central agon is not between the free will and Fate but rather
between the individual – struggling for freedom – and society.
The structure of Hedda Gabler
Four acts, each shorter than the last: sense of increasing acceleration towards the
inevitable catastrophe. Each act a self-contained unit.
Act 4: Death
•The ugly suicide of Løvborg reported. Thea and Jørgen unite to reconstruct the manuscript.
•Hedda is ensnared by Brack and no longer needed by Jørgen. She kills herself.
The structure of Hedda Gabler
Four acts, each shorter than the last: sense of increasing acceleration towards the
inevitable catastrophe. Each act a self-contained unit.
Act 4: Death
Hedda comes to recognize that the more she has sort control and freedom the more she
has ensnared herself.
The realism of Hedda Gabler: scenography
A smart, spacious living room, stylishly decorated in dark colours. Upstage, a wide
double-doorway, with its curtains drawn back, leads leads into a smaller room,
decorated in the same style. Right, exit to the hall. Opposite left, through a glass
screen door curtains also drawn back, can be seen part of a raised verandah and a
garden. Centre stage, dining chairs and an oval table covered with a cloth.
Downstage right, against the wall, a dark tiled stove, a wing chair, an upholstered
footstool and two stools. Upstage right, a corner seat and a small table. Downstage
left, a little out from the wall, a sofa. Upstage of the screen door, a piano. On either
side of the main double-doorway, whatnots displaying artefacts of terracotta and
majolica. In the inner room can be seen a sofa, a table and two chairs. Over the sofa
hangs the portrait of a handsome elderly man in general's uniform. Over the table, a
hanging lamp with a pearled glass shade. All round the main room are vases and
glass containers full of cut flowers; other bouquets lie on the tables. Thick carpets in
both rooms. Sunlight streams in through the screen door. (Act 1; p. 165)
The realism of Hedda Gabler
•This room – or rooms – remains the setting for the entire play. It is the only space
the audience see.
In Greek drama we are never taken inside (though we may see into an interior space
when the doors of the skene open). Everything is played out in a public space, in
fictional as well as actual terms.
•Ibsen pays special attention to modes of address. Brack privately calls Hedda
“Hedda Gabler” but here addresses her as a married woman.
•Hedda addresses her husband as Jørgen (rather than Tesman) only a few times –
when she wants something.
The symbolism of Hedda Gabler
Hedda Gabler written during a period (the 1880s-90s) when Ibsen was integrating
realism with some of the techniques of symbolism.
The set and carefully arranged stage space take on symbolic value:
•The doors suggest “fresh sir” and escape.
•The packed room is oppressive; Hedda finds the flowers “dreadful” in their
overabundance (173).
•Hedda feels that the “old piano” doesn’t “look right here”. It’s out of place, like
Hedda herself.
•The portrait of General Gabler: a constant reminder that Hedda Tesman was Hedda
Gabler – and of the violence that is Hedda’s inheritance (literally, with the guns).
The language here is colloquial, yet the word “time” – spoken three times by three
different characters and given special emphasis by Hedda – marks this word as one
of the key themes of the play.
Hedda struggles against the constraints of the respectable femininity – and the roles
of wife and mother – that she is expected to embody. She yearns for the freedom
and control that the men around her seem to possess:
LØVBORG: … When I confessed, didn’t you want to absolve me, to wash away my
sins?
HEDDA: Not exactly.
LØVBORG: What, then?
HEDDA: You really don’t know? A young girl … without anybody knowing … her
chance …
LØVBORG: Chance?
HEDDA: To glimpse a world that …
LØVBORG: That – ?
HEDDA: That she’d no business to know existed. (Act 2; pp. 213-4)
Hedda Gabler: women
Ibsen often regarded as a feminist playwright.
Hedda struggles against the constraints of the respectable femininity – and the roles
of wife and mother – that she is expected to embody. She yearns for the freedom
and control that the men around her seem to possess:
BRACK: So, gentleman, the carnival begins! I hope it’ll be … ‘jolly’, as a certain
charming lady puts it.
HEDDA: I wish a certain charming lady could be there, invisible – (Act 2, p. 220)
As she tells Thea: “For once in my life, I want to control another human being’s fate.”
(Act 2; p. 221)
Hedda Gabler: the female Hamlet?
Claims to be founded on the sanctity of freedom, social and political. But what was
dynamic and revolutionary at the beginning of the nineteenth century (the era of a
French Revolution) had for Ibsen become sterile and repressive.
The paradox: the bourgeoisie have betrayed their own values. They purport to
cherish freedom but fear and repress any force or individual that might threaten the
status quo.
Brack: a judge, who is supposed to stand up for law and freedom but who works to
subvert justice and use his position to engage in sexual blackmail.
Hedda encourages Løvborg to drink but so too do Jørgen and Brack. All seem to
wish his destruction, though from very different motives.
Hedda is caught between a compulsion to rebel against the dictates of this society
and an equally strong need to obey them. She admit to Løvborg that she’s afraid of
“scandal” (Act 2; p. 214)
The conflict that destroys Hedda is the tension that inheres within bourgeois society
itself: the imperatives of autonomy and beauty are irreconcilable with those of
respectability and wealth.
Such a view is predicated on the notion that no individual can alter the course of
human history.