Ibsen's Hedda Gabbler

"Ibsen's Hedda Gabbler: A Seeker of Beauty"

In his 1890 play, Hedda Gabbler, Henrik Ibsen portrays Gabbler, the central character, as a doomed seeker of beauty. Her life is rooted in unsustainable illusion and deceptions. Presented as a misguided heroine, Gabbler is revealed to be a woman whose deep frustrations and thwarted ambition eventually leads to the play's catastrophic conclusion. By the dramatic ending, Hedda Gabbler and Eilert Lovborg have both died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds. Ibsen represents these deaths as the consequence of their indiscriminate pursuit of beauty. Gabbler and Lovborg are depicted as individuals unable to accept life's routine pettiness and circumstantial monotony. Instead, they choose to embrace death as an alternative means of obtaining the peace denied in their daily lives. Death is substituted for life and is dangerously misvalued as what ultimately brings beauty. Moments before her own death, Gabbler expresses her reverential admiration for Lovborg's suicide when she tells Judge Brack:

It gives me a sense of freedom to know that a deed of deliberate courage is still possible in the world, -- a deed of spontaneous beauty. (Ibsen 67)

Gabbler's diminished view of life leads her to exaggerate the importance of beauty. Beauty, understood as what remains untouched by the mundane or ugly, is what must be pursued without consideration of cost. Ibsen showcases Gabbler's death as dramatic evidence for how delusion operates with ma

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s depiction of the neat, orderly world into which she has now entered and as a new wife is expected to maintain. Tesman's own professional status is uncertain. Yet Gabbler's needs coerce Tesman's aunts to rent and furnish expensive lodgings for the newly married couple. Gabbler had often told Tesman during their courtship that "she would never care to live anywhere but in Secretary Falk's Villa." (Ibsen 6) Tesman has not yet been granted a permanent academic post, yet Gabbler's tastes dictates that the couple live as if he were already well established. Gabbler has chosen for her residency the former home of the window of a cabinet minister. Image is everything to Gabbler. She wants desperately to appear to have already arrived socially. Yet almost at once she recognizes that this new marriage and lifestyle will not satisfy her. She is unable to feel content within any given moment, but is always scheming towards her future aggrandizement. The evening that Tesman's aunt dies, Gabbler cannot contain herself from playing dance songs at the piano. It is not her loss and so she feels nothing. Tesman is a bit appalled by her inappropriate behavior, false gaiety, and lack of restraint and asks her to honor the newly deceased

Category: Literature - I