This research examines the leading female characters in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and Tramblay's Les Belles Soeurs. The plan is to compare and contrast the respective responses of Hedda and Germaine to the cultural mandate that women are guardians of the sanctity of the family, with a view toward showing the degree to which they adhere to or depart from the social role prescribed for them by custom and practice.
Both Hedda Gabler and Les Belles Soeurs present portraits of women who are recognizable "types" in the scheme of bourgeois culture. Although the social position of Hedda, daughter of General Gabler, is at the aristocratic end of the bourgeois social spectrum and that of Germaine, one among many working-class women in what is presumably Montreal, what the characters share is a situation of socially sanctioned confinement and a profound level of discontent with their living situation. Hedda's education and background position her as socially gifted and self-possessed, increasingly self-aware, and emotionally sterile individual whose desperation and insight grow over the course of the play. Germaine lacks Hedda's education and social sophistication, which may have contributed to a narrow emotional range that moves chiefly from anger to anger but that also entails social envy of the kind induced by borderline poverty and the pious certainties of received wisdom, which betray contempt and fear of anything that smacks of social unconventionality.
Germaine and the other middle-aged women in Les Belles Soeurs do what they can to relieve their own sense of confinement, but they do so in a way that actually entraps them in a culture that values acquisition above fellow feeling. Germaine is emboldened by the dream of acquiring a houseful of new furniture, appliances, and accessories: "You won't believe all the lovely things they've got. And I'm getting them all," she says, bragging about what she will buy with the trading stamps, "the wo...