FROM A JOURNEY OF INNER STRUGGLE TO A CATASTROPHE: ^ HENRIK IBSEN’S HEDDA GABLER
Öz
In a cultural
framework shaped by patriarchal ideology, Ibsen’s 1890 play Hedda Gabler explores women’s two major
roles within the family, daughter and mother/wife and examines how the title
character’s resistance to these female roles, as the play unfolds, is
characteristic of her rebellion against the conventional turn-of-the-century view
of woman’s place. The play portrays the reduction of the woman to her status as
female, and this adds to the hopelessness of Hedda’s situation and, undeniably,
brings about her catastrophic end. Her being a member of a declining
aristocratic class and the fear of ending up as a spinster make Hedda see
marriage into a respectable middle class/academic family as the only means of
escape. Nevertheless, she becomes oppressed by the narrow conventions and
conformity of a petit-bourgeois society that imprison her in conventional
expectations of female roles. Despite the hints that she should have a baby,
Hedda resists the maternal role throughout the play, which is commonly
considered to be a woman’s sole and inevitable vocation in life.
It is within
this framework that this paper aims at discussing how Hedda’s refusal to fit
into the accepted female roles of wife and mother results in her victimization
and downfall: she kills herself with a pistol immediately after she plays a
“frenzied dance melody on the piano” through which she metaphorically cries for
help raising her voice because she recognizes that she is confined to her
feminine role.
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