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Updated: May 27, 2025
With the publication of Hedda Gabler Ibsen passed into what we may call his final glory. Almost insensibly, and to an accompaniment of his own growls of indignation, he had taken his place, not merely as the most eminent imaginative writer of the three Scandinavian countries, but as the type there of what literature should be and the prophet of what it would become.
What I principally wanted to do was to depict human beings, human emotions and human destinies, upon a groundwork of certain of the social conditions and principles of the present day." It was a proof of the immense growth of Ibsen's celebrity that editions of Hedda Gabler were called for almost simultaneously, in the winter of 1890, in London, New York, St.
The nature of the revolution, exercised by the subject of this memoir between 1880 and 1890, that is to say from Ghosts to Hedda Gabler, was destructive before it was constructive. The poetry, fiction and drama of the three Northern nations had become stagnant with commonplace and conventional matter, lumbered with the recognized, inevitable and sacrosanct forms of composition.
But I, for one, cannot help finding Hedda inconsistent artistically, as tho she was a composite photograph of irreconcilable figures. For example, she shrinks from scandal, yet she burns Eilert's manuscript, she gives him one of her pistols, and finally she commits suicide herself, than which nothing could more certainly provoke talk.
"Why, it appears that after the explosion, when everyone was crushing toward the doors, some man in the audience took the words of Hedda and steadied the crowd with them, as men and women struggled in the darkness.... 'Now's the time for vine-leaves! he called out. An unknown wasn't he lovely?"
Her father succumbed to it, else would he have permitted her to sit in corners with poet Eiljert Lövborg and not only hold hands but listen to far from edifying discourses? Not a nice trait in Hedda though a human, therefore not a rare one is her curiosity concerning forbidden themes. She was sly. She was morbid. Last of all she was cowardly.
And another device, that of the catchword, which he took over from Scribe and the younger Dumas, and which, even in his hands, remains a mere trick in the early 'League of Youth, is so delicately utilized in certain of the later plays witness, the "vine-leaves in his hair" of 'Hedda Gabler' and the "white horses" in 'Rosmersholm' that these recurrent phrases are transformed into a prose equivalent of Wagner's leading-motives.
But with the growth of the Drama of Illusion, produced within a picture-frame proscenium, actors have come to recognise and apply the maxim, "Actions speak louder than words." What an actor does is now considered more important than what he says. The most powerful moment in Mrs. Fiske's performance of Hedda Gabler was the minute or more in the last act when she remained absolutely silent.
John Gabriel Borkman dies of heart seizure, resulting from sudden exposure to extreme cold. In the case of Solness and Borkman, death is a quite natural and probable result of the antecedent conditions; and in the case of Eyolf, it is not a way out of the action, but rather the way into it. There remain the three cases of suicide: Rebecca and Rosmer, Hedda Gabler, and Hedvig.
The spectators would stop to ask themselves how he happened to have the weapon by him without their knowing it; and this self-muttered question would deaden the effect of the scene. The dénouement of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler requires that the two chief characters, Eilert Lövborg and Hedda Tesman, should die of pistol wounds.
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