Hedda Gabler

Hedda Gabler was a play my Acting II class worked on last semester with some difficulty. The text felt at times foreign, and the characters too mature for us to grasp. The themes seemed muddy, and the character of Hedda seemed nearly impossible to understand or sympathize with. However coming back to this play the text seemed to become a little clearer and things I never saw before while reading began to emerge. For the first time I was finally able to sympathize with Hedda. Before all I saw was whiny, bratty woman who had been given everything in life and had very little to complain about. She seemed to have nothing more than a mean streak going on and enjoyed making other suffer for her own enjoyment. This time around I began to see that Hedda did not feel bored, she felt trapped. Hedda became stuck in the life she found herself in. She did not love her husband or their life together. He wanted a family while she did not, and when that may have to started to become a reality, she panicked. It is easy to look at Hedda and see her simply as crazy, but actually she is a fully developed neurotic woman whose life is spinning out of control and she has no idea what to do. Hedda seems to have impossible standards for her life, which makes it unfeasible for her to ever be happy. Hedda is rarely sympathetic to any other characters in the play and seems to use them as puppets as a result of the power she has over the rest of the characters. Hedda’s eventual suicide at first to me seemed out of the blue, but after a deeper analysis of the rest of the play it makes perfect sense. Hedda was trapped in a prison in her new life and saw no other way to escape.