hedda gabler

Hedda Gabler is a tale about a small group of friends, rather a small group of people. The main character, Hedda, is unhappy in the most serious sense. She has every reason to be happy, but for some reason, she is never satisfied. Hedda claims to live a life devoid of passion, so she ends up acting in an extreme manner towards another character, Eilert Lovborg. Eilert has a known problem of drinking too much and becoming “passionate,” which Hedda admires of him. She likes to picture Eilert with “vines in his hair,”  a sort of unrealistic vision to have of what passion means. She craves passion in her life, but the way she chooses to be passionate is by destroying others. She burns Eilerts manuscript while muttering something about his child dying, and then claims that she burned it because she loves her husband so much. Throughout the play, it is insinuated that Hedda might be with child. At the end of the play, by taking her own life, she might as well have taken the life of her unborn child, which is an ultimate act of selfishness. For somebody to have craved passion so much, that they result to murder and suicide, is a sad thing.