44 pages • 1 hour read
Henrik IbsenHedda Gabler
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1890A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Henrik Ibsen
Content Warning: This section contains discussion of death by suicide.
Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) was a Norwegian playwright. Hedda Gabler is one of his most famous works, alongside A Doll’s House and Peer Gynt. In his early career, Ibsen wrote primarily in verse. He later switched to prose plays. Some of Ibsen’s plays, including Hedda Gabler, initially generated scandal. At the time, it was relatively uncommon to include characters like Hedda: a female protagonist who had premarital sex, pushed back against the social constraints of her life, and died by suicide. Though Hedda Gabler was initially controversial, it remains a focal point of Ibsen’s legacy. It is widely considered to be not just one of his best plays, but one of the most influential plays ever written. Ibsen wrote Hedda Gabler quite late in his career. He was in the theater on the night of the first performance, though he remained backstage.
Though Ibsen was born in Norway, he lived in other countries for much of his life. As a young man, he failed his university entrance exams and turned to writing as his new career. He worked at a Norwegian theater in the 1850s, but moved to Rome in 1864 after the theater closed down. Ibsen wrote many of his best-known plays in Rome, Dresden, and later Munich. He wrote Hedda Gabler in 1890 and returned to Norway the following year, when the play was first performed. Ibsen remained in Norway for the rest of his life, writing several plays about unhappy marriages and domestic tragedy. He died in 1906 after having several strokes. Ibsen is strongly associated with the realist and modernist movements in theater.
Genre Context: Tragedy and Aristotelian Conventions
In the introduction to his translation, Kenneth McLeish points out that Hedda Gabler is formally very similar to an ancient Greek tragedy. Aristotle wrote extensively on what makes an ideal tragedy. He suggested that a tragic play ought to have unity of time and space, meaning that action should take place in a single location and ideally over the course of a single day. Hedda Gabler has just one setting, and it takes place over roughly a day and a half. Greek tragedies usually had most of their action take place off-stage, which is also the case in Hedda Gabler. Structurally, Aristotle said, a tragedy should have four parts, all of which must come together to create the desired emotional response in the audience. These elements are called hamartia, peripeteia, anagnorisis, and catharsis.
The term hamartia is often translated as a “fatal flaw,” but that translation is not quite accurate. Hamartia was originally an archery term meaning “missing the mark.” It is more appropriate to translate hamartia as “fatal mistake.” In a tragedy, characters make some kind of mistake that seals their fate. Hedda’s mistake is marrying Tesman when she knows that she cannot be happy with him; all of her other misfortunes stem from that choice. The peripeteia is a swift and sudden reversal of fortune—a major turning point in a tragedy. In Hedda Gabler, the turning point is the burning of the manuscript. From that point on, there is no way back. The anagnorisis is a moment of recognition of the tragedy. It should happen almost simultaneously with the catharsis, or the purgation of emotion that comes with a tragic ending. The final moments of Hedda Gabler when the other characters find Hedda’s body and realize what she has done are the anagnorisis and catharsis of the play.
Literary Context: Translating Hedda Gabler
Hedda Gabler was originally written in Norwegian, but it has been translated into English and other languages. Translators have to make difficult decisions when working with a play. They have to render dialogue in a way that sounds natural in the new language without sacrificing the meaning or tone of the original language. In a play like Hedda Gabler, where so much is implied or left unsaid, this is a particular challenge. McLeish notes that in the original Norwegian, small nuances in forms of address and formality give audiences a hint about how the characters feel about each other. These nuances are often lost in English, which does not have such subtle forms of address.
Hedda Gabler was also written over a hundred years ago. Translators have to choose whether they want the characters to sound of their time or more contemporary. As a result, English translations of the same play can sound drastically different. Characters’ personality traits might be more or less obvious, implications may be more or less vague, and even stage directions might be included or elided. McLeish’s version of the play is just one rendition of Ibsen’s original vision. Those who want to fully understand the play and its nuances may wish to read multiple translations to get a more complete picture of who Hedda really is. McLeish sometimes uses English versions of the characters’ names; he refers to Juliane as Julia and Berthe as Berta. Many other versions refer to Jørgen as George. This guide uses the original Norwegian names for all characters.
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