‘Oh I just stand here and shoot into the blue…’
(The insouciant, impulsive and aloof Hedda Gabler, p.199)

‘Hedda Gabler’ is significantly longer than ‘The Doll’s House’ and ‘Ghosts/The Revenants’, four acts instead of three.

Hedda (29) is a brilliant character, an attractive, wilful woman who likes twisting men round her little finger, bored bored bored with the married life she finds herself in, given to sudden unpredictable whims.

She’s the daughter of local notable, General Gabler, who spoiled his little girl. After flirting with most of the eligible men in town she eventually got tired, began to realise her carefree days were over, and let herself be wooed and won by bumbling, naive academic, Jørgen Tesman, partly because it looked like he was about to get an academic position i.e a regular income which would fund her dream lifestyle, but also because he was ‘so pathetically eager to be allowed to support me’ (p.203).

Act 1

The play opens with Tesman and Hedda arriving ‘home’ after a 6-month honeymoon. Sounds great but only a little into the play Hedda confesses to a friend that she was bored off her face the whole time, stuck in small cabins and hotel rooms with an academic whose idea of a good time was visiting local historical archives day after day (p.201).

The ‘happy couple’ are welcomed home by Tesman’s Aunt Julia (his mother and father both being dead) who dotes on Tesman (the only son of her sainted brother Joachim), and by the old family retainer, Berte, who nursed Tesman as a boy.

The house they arrive at has, in fact, only recently been purchased for them while they were away. Tesman and Hedda used to walk past it on the way back from various parties and, for something to fill the boring silence, she told Tesman how much she would like to live there (p.207). Like everything else she says, we later learn she didn’t mean it and in fact loathes it, thinks it smells.

The arrival home scene allows Aunt Julia to share with the audience several bits of backstory. First, the house they’ve bought (and the entire play is set in) used to belong to a Lady Falk. It was purchased by her and her invalid sister, Auntie Rina taking out a mortgage on their annuity. Tesman, the simple honest mug, is overcome with gratitude to them while Hedda couldn’t give a stuff. And all the financials were arranged by family friend, Mr Brack, aged 45.

Lastly, we learn that the reason Tesman was rummaging about in all these archives abroad was to borrow the sources he needs to write his Big Book, on ‘the domestic crafts of medieval Brabant’. Aunt Julia and Berte are everso impressed, Hedda can barely stifle her yawns.

When the aunt and servant agree that Hedda has brought an awful lot of boxes back with her, I thought it might be another story about a spendthrift women like Nora Helmer but although her extravagant dreams are part of her character they’re far from being all of it and the play develops into something entirely different. Hedda is the spider at the centre of a web she’s helped to spin to entrap three men, each of them thinking she loves them, or at least has a special relationship with them.

The play suggests there are two kinds of people: the naive and simple souls who live on the surface of things, who believe in society’s values and morality, and the cynics and manipulators who have seen right through the social conventions to a layer of reality beneath, and act and speak to each other accordingly.

Enter Mrs Thea Elvsted. She is a slight, scared woman. She lives in a house outside of town (on a hill, I think). Hedda intimidates and scares Thea who she used to bully at school – on one famous occasion Hedda threatened to burn young Thea’s hair off.

Now a complicated picture emerges: Thea went up to live at the house on the hill to act as housekeeper for Mr Elvsted some five years ago. Elvsted’s first wife was very poorly and in due course died. In the way of these things, Elvsted then proposed to his housekeeper and Thea married him. Now, in dialogue with Hedda, it emerges that it’s been an empty marriage. Mr E is 20 years older than Thea and they have nothing in common. In fact, Thea reveals that she has run away from her husband, for good.

But there’s more. For the last three years a man named Ejlert Lövborg has been lodging up at Elvert’s. Lövborg was a notorious drunk and ne’er-do-well but after a number of shameful events, he made an effort to reform and ended up boarding at Elvsted’s. Here he has recovered his vocation as a gifted historian and has been working for those three years to write a history book which has just been published to good reviews. Thea was closely involved in helping him write the book and, since her husband was often away (carrying out his duties as the regional administrator), Thea fell in love with the charismatic Lövborg.

Now enters Mr Brack who helped them buy the house, and who tells Hedda and Tesman that Lövborg is a serious rival for the professorship which Tesman had been counting on winning. In other words, Tesman got married and bought the house and borrowed large sums of money on the virtual assurance of the professorship and all this is now thrown into jeopardy. Brack exists, leaving the ‘happy’ couple to process this disastrous news, Tesman trying to be upbeat, Hedda now seeing that she’ll never have the footman and the horse and the social life she was looking forward to but instead will be condemned to a life of unspeakable boredom.

Act 2

A few hours later the Telsman household is visited by Mr Brack. He enters in an unorthodox way by coming up through the garden but he is greeted in an even more unorthodox way because Hedda is standing at the French windows randomly firing off the pistols she inherited from her father (the General) (p.199).

First of all there’s a scene with just Hedda and Brack in which he makes it clear that he has a soft spot for her and she agrees they are in a sort of triangular relationship, the third one being her husband. Every time Tesman steps out of the room Hedda and Brack they start talking about being in a love triangle (Tesman being the third). But in fact we are soon to learn Hedda is at the centre of a triangle whose three points are her dim husband, the predatory operator Brack and her earnest old flame Lövborg.

This is the scene where Hedda explains to Brack how she married Telsman out of boredom, how she lied about liking Lady Falk’s house, but how excruciatingly dull she finds him and his historical researches; in which she says:

I’ve often thought there’s only one thing in the world I’m any good at…Boring myself to death.’ (p.209)

So, less than halfway through the play we have a lot of complicated relationships, histories and cross-currents. The succeeding acts and scenes work through the consequences of all this.

Next thing to happen is that Lövborg himself arrives, entering the scene with Hedda and Brack. He tells them he is a reformed character and also about his next book which is going to be much better than the one just published: it’s going to be about ‘the future course of civilisation’ (p.212). He has brought the manuscript of the book along with a view to maybe reading some excerpts to Tesman.

He also announces that he has no intention of competing against Tesman for the professorship, to the latter’s great relief.

Brack announces that he is holding a bachelor party that evening. Tesman is coming and he invites Lövborg. The latter declines saying he is a reformed character and doesn’t want to be tempted.

Brack and Tesman go into the back room for a little cold punch to prepare for the evening ahead and this leaves Lövborg and Hedda alone for the former to marvel that she’s married such a nincompoop, to remember the days of their (sexless) affair when he used to call round the General’s house. Hedda reveals to Lövborg that she never considered herself ‘in love’ with him; what she saw in him was his stories about a world of debauchery – he was a gateway into a world which she, as a young woman, wasn’t even meant to know about.

Although Hedda indulges this talk it’s only up to a point: as with Brack she is firm that she is not flirting and not going to be unfaithful – ‘No kind of unfaithfulness, I’ll have none of that’ (p.217).

But then she broke it off, she ended their friendship. Why? Because there was danger that talk of debauchery might lead into action. And now we learn that the breakup escalated into an argument during which Hedda got out one of her father (the General)’s pistols and waved it at Lövborg. Lövborg had told the story of the pistols a few times while staying up the hill at Elvsted’s but never named the woman in question and Mrs Elvstead assumed it was a well-known red-haired sex worker in town who Lövborg had a relationship with in his debauched days.

Mrs Elvstead arrives and Hedda tells Lövborg that she’s run away from her husband. Although Mrs Elvstead is a mousey timid figure, Hedda is actually profoundly jealous of her because of her courage (‘Oh if only you knew how destitute I am and you’re allowed to be so rich’, p.227). The word courage is repeated like a motif.

HEDDA: Oh courage, if only one had that…Then life might be liveable, in spite of everything. (p.221)

For her amoral enjoyment of the power, and because she is bored beyond belief, Hedda now takes malicious pleasure in telling Lövborg what Mrs Elvsted, at their earlier meeting, was terrified that Lövborg would start drinking again. Thea is horrified that Hedda has revealed this and Lövborg is upset that she has so little faith in him. Stung, he fills the glass he has up till now left empty and drains it in one. Thea is horrified (p.223).

At this point Brack and Tesman re-enter. Brack renews his invitation to his bachelor party. Earlier Lövborg had refused their kind invitation and said he’d remain her with the two ladies (Hedda and Mrs E) but now he changes his mind and says he will go with them after all. This decision sets in motion the wheels of tragedy.

Hedda and Mrs E say they’ll wait up till Lövborg returns from their drinks and escorts Mrs E to her lodgings (the ones she’s moved into after leaving her husband). After the menfolk exit to their party, the two women are left alone and Hedda explains that, ‘For once in my life I want to feel that I control a human destiny’ (p.226).

In a confused kind of way she imagines that Lövborg will master himself, control himself, and return to them with, as she keeps saying in an oddly haunting phrase, ‘with ‘vine leaves in his hair’ (p.227)

Act 3

Hedda and Thea wake up having fallen asleep on the sofa and chair respectively, to discover that it’s nearly dawn and the menfolk never returned from the party. Thea is petrified that her beloved Lövborg has fallen off the wagon.

Tesman reels in and tells Hedda what happened i.e. they stayed up all night drinking before staggering off to some bar. He tells her that Lövborg’s book is a masterpiece. Then he tells her that in their drunken staggering round town Lövborg dropped his manuscript. Following a bit behind Tesman found it, picked it up and decided not to return it to Lövborg when he was in such a state.

Now two things happen. A letter had arrived a little earlier for Tesman and it’s from Aunt Julle telling him that Aunt Rine is at death’s door. He reads it and decides he has to go straightaway. He’s just getting ready to go out when Brack arrives. In the kerfuffle Hedda takes the famous manuscripts and hides it in her husband’s desk.

Brack tells Hedda about the part of the evening’s shenanigans Tesman doesn’t know about. This is that Lövborg went onto the house of the red-haired demi-monde Mademoiselle Diana. Here he got into a fight because he drunkenly accused them of stealing his manuscript. the police were called and Lövborg was foolish enough to assault some of them. So he’s now in a cell awaiting trial. He has fallen right back to where he came from. he will be persona non grata all over town including in Hedda’s house. Brack admits that this pleases him because he hadn’t wanted Lövborg to insert himself into what he still thinks of as his nice little triangle with Hedda. Hedda smiles: ‘So you want to be the only cock of the yard, is that it?’ With this understanding between them, Brack takes his leave.

And who should walk through the front door or rather force himself than Lövborg himself. Thea had been dozing in the back room and now comes through to greet him with relief. But Lövborg explains that all is lost, he’s been arrested, news of his drunkenness will be all over town etc etc.

But now he is cruel to Thea. She loves him but he announces that he has no more need for her. She was useful to him as amanuensis writing his book but now he has no further need for her. But her life will be empty without her! He brutally tells her she should go back to her husband but she angrily refuses.

Their relationship centred on the book which is a joint venture but now Lövborg lies and says that last night he tore it to pieces and threw it in the fjord. But it was like her child, Mrs Elvsted wails and then, distraught, puts her coat on and staggers out, not knowing where she’ll go.

Nonetheless, when Lövborg says that Thea has broken his courage and his resolve, Hedda is jealous again. It’s Thea who controlled the destiny of a man, not her. Once again the slighter woman has beaten her.

Left alone Lövborg explains that he didn’t destroy the manuscript (and we and Hedda know this) but said he did something worse – he lost it! He is just as distraught as Mrs Elvsted, in fact he rather melodramatically declares he’s just going to put an end to it all (p.245).

Continuing her barely comprehensible theme about wanting to have a significant part in a man’s destiny, and following on from her obsessive vision of Lövborg returning from the party with vine leaves in his hair – Hedda now picks up on his mood and his intention but tells him to do it beautifully.

And she goes to the drawer and gets out one of the pistols, which we’ve seen her brandishing earlier in the play. He recognises it as the one she waved at him when they broke up and miserably says she should have shot him then, all those years ago. To which Hedda is explicit:

HEDDA: Use it now.
LÖVBORG: [Puts the pistol in his breast pocket.] Thank you.
HEDDA: And beautifully, Ejlert Lövborg. Promise me that!

So Ejlert Lövborg leaves with suicide on his mind and Hedda’s gun in his pocket. You’d have thought that would be quite enough for one scene, wouldn’t you? But the act ends with another shocker. For, left by herself, Hedda goes to the desk, takes out Lövborg’s manuscript, opens the door of the stove, and one by one burns all the sheets of the manuscript. All the time muttering that she is burning Lövborg and Thea’s child, burning burning their child.

It reminds us of the memory of Hedda threatening to burn Thea’s hair when they were at school. But it is also disturbingly destructive but, like all fire, eerily compelling at the same time. At a moment like this Ibsen’s imagination, on the face of it entirely realistic, rises to another level of intensity, feels like it breaks through some kind of barrier into a deeper understanding of human nature.

Act 4

It’s the evening of the same day and Hedda is alone. Then Miss Tesman arrives, Jörgen’s aunt, with news of Aunt Rina’s death, soon joined by Jörgen himself. A couple of pages as they process the old lady’s death and Miss Tesman, for a moment, seems to be implying how lovely if she could move in with them and they could all be one family together…

Miss Tesman leaves and Hedda amazes Jörgen by telling him that she’s burnt Lövbor’s manuscript. He can’t understand why she would do such a fantastic thing but she explains she did it for him – it was he who said the book would outshine and outrank him, now it’s gone.

She also seems, I think, in a highly elliptical way, to tell him that she’s pregnant and so now more than ever they need to be sure of his career. Jörgen is delighted and fusses about telling Aunt Julia but Hedda is just disgusted. For a moment she gives way to her conviction that she has fallen into a ghastly farce, wailing that it’s kill her, it’ll kill her (p.251).

In the middle of all this excitement Mrs Elvsted arrives with disconcerting news from her lodgings. Everyone is talking about Lövborg being in some kind of accident. While they’re all wondering how to confirm these rumours enter Mr Brack looking very serious. At first Jörgen, in his simplicity, thinks it must be because he’s heard about his Aunt Rina.

But in fact Brack has come to tell everyone that Lövborg has shot himself and is in hospital. He is not expected to live. The three people he tells all have their different responses. Mrs Elvert is absolutely distraught, beside herself. Jörgen has the ordinary common sense reactions, Oh my goodness, what a terrible thing etc. But Hedda nearly gives away that she knew he intended to kill himself. When she first hears the news she involuntarily says, ‘So soon!’ When Brack says Lövborg shot himself in the chest, instead of being horrified she says, ‘Not the temple? Well, it’s nearly as good’ which puzzles the others though they only half hear her.

Clearly she wants Lövborg to live up to his promise and to die ‘beautifully’ in order to demonstrate that she has some influence over the destiny of others. Now she defiantly tells the others that she admires Lövborg because he had the courage to do something, to ‘settle accounts with himself’ (p.256).

They’re lamenting that his book will be lost forever when Mrs Elvsted surprises them by pulling out of her skirts a notebook. Turns out she kept all the notes for the book she worked on with Lövborg. Jörgen is inspired, partly feeling guilty at 1) taking the manuscript then 2) not handing it back and then 3) that his mad wife burned it – all this makes him tell Mrs Elvsted that they can work together to recreate the book. She is overjoyed as we saw how losing the book had left her bereft as if she’s lost a child. Jörgen for his part grandly announces that he will put his own work in hold while he recreates the great work of his colleague – saying so with a knowing look at Hedda as a rebuke for her action.

So Jörgen takes Mrs Elvsted into the inner room for them to arrange and start poring over the notes, the same inner room Brack and Jörgen had retired to in Act 2, a handy way of leaving the other characters to have a tete-a-tete. In this case it’s Hedda and Brack. Hedda is full of irrational joy that Lövborg lived up to his promise, saying how good it is to know that an act of courage is still possible in this world.

However, Brack swiftly disillusions her. It turns out that the account he’s just given is wrong in lots of ways. For a start Lövborg isn’t in hospital in a critical condition, he’s dead. Second, he didn’t shoot himself at his lodgings but at Mademoiselle Diana’s boudoir. He’d gone back to the scene of his drunken affray, rambling something which none of them understood about them stealing his child, but which the audience understands as a reference to his lost manuscript. Thirdly he wasn’t even shot in the chest, but in the belly.

At all this news Hedda slumps in her chair. So Lövborg’s death was neither noble nor beautiful but ignoble and ugly. Everything she hoped would be beautiful has turned into meanness and farce.

But things get worse. Brack lets Hedda know that he recognised the gun that killed Lövborg. It’s one of hers. There is a risk the police will trace it back to her and she will be taken to court as an accessory. Unless, that is…he keeps quiet. Unless, that is…she makes it worth his while to keep quiet.

HEDDA: And so I am in your power, Mr Brack. From now on I am at your mercy…No, that’s a thought I’ll never endure, never! (p.262)

Hedda goes up and goes over to where (rather improbsbly) Jörgen and Thea are hard at work over the manuscript. They have (conveniently) come out of the second room, claiming it was too dark to work there. So the final passage of Hedda and Brack’s dialogue had been carried out in whispers.

Now Hedda gets up and walks over to Jörgen and Thea. She strokes Thea’s hair in the patronising and possessive way she’s done throughout the play and asks them if they’re getting on. Thea says, yes, it’s almost like the way she used to sit with dear Lövborg. Hedda drily remarks that yes, she can see them developing much the same relationship.

Hedda says she’s feeling tired and her husband absent-mindedly tells her to go into the inner room and have a rest on the sofa. Hedda goes into the room but, on a last impulse, plays a mad piece of music on the piano. Jörgen immediately leaps up and goes and asks her to stop; think of poor Aunt Rina. And Lövborg. ‘And’, Hedda wearily replies, ‘all the rest of them.’

Clearly this was a last mad burst of freedom and self expression but Jörgen’s telling her to be quiet is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. In fact there’s more straws. Tesman cheerfully tells Thea that he’ll get her installed in Aunt Julia’s newly vacant spare room, then he can come over every night and they can work together. There’s no hint of sex in this, Jörgen is too simple and too innocent. But Hedda hears him and calls from the inner room to ask what she’s meant to do left all alone night after night?

Jörgen in his innocence replies that no doubt Mr Brack will be all too happy to come round and keep her company and predatory Brack leans back in his armchair with a big grin and says, Oh yes, only too pleased to keep her company. The walls can hardly have closed in any tighter around Hedda. Her entire future looks like a hell of loneliness and exploitation.

There’s a pistol shot and the others run into the back room to discover that Hedda has shot herself (in the temple, a small but significant detail). Left with no power over others, reduced to a puppet and slave of other people’s wishes (her husband’s to devote himself to his books, Brack’s to blackmail her into God knows what compromises) Hedda asserts her agency one last time in the only way left to her, making for herself the ‘beautiful’ death Lövborg so signally failed to deliver.

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Related links

• Hedda Gabler online

Ibsen reviews

• The Doll’s House (1879)
• Ghosts (1881)
• An Enemy of the People (1882)
• The Wild Duck (1884)
• Rosmersholm (1886)
• Hedda Gabler (1890)
• The Master Builder (1892)

Play reviews

• Play reviews