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The woman is the daughter of a General (does she have violent proclivities?). In an early A wants B, but C. formula, the reader can extrapolate that George wants honor and recognition (prestige), but something is in his way. What is that something? Is it Hedda? Or is it something/someone else? Like lady Macbeth, is Hedda a destructive force (of course, in this particular play, Hedda takes a more prominent role than Lady Macbeth does in Macbeth)?
As the reader reads on, "Cs" begin to emerge within the first act. Money is a big "C." It's apparent that Hedda has expensive tastes, the marriage/honeymoon. Also the dialogue over living arrangements, "But expensive my dear George, It will be expensive...
is introduced: Ejlert Lovborg and the equation starts to make more sense. There are several ways to formulate it. For example, George wants the professor job and fame as an author but Lovborg stands in his way. Hedda wants opulence and luxury but George's ability to obtain those things is in jeopardy. George wants Hedda to respect his family, but Hedda only respects money.
There are more combinations (obviously Hedda's appearance suggests she's pregnant) but in Act 1 the play does a swell job of setting the table for some major drama to unfold in later acts.
Hedda Gabler and Madame Bovary Nineteenth century literature from Europe is lined with exploration of the nature of human existence and one area of particular interest to literalists had been the female gender. It had been a period of the beginning of the feminist movement and the society's appreciation of women's existence. For this reason authors such as Flaubert, Ibsen and Henry James make up female characters to express their concerns
..He smiled so scornfully when you didn't dare to go with them to the table in there (Ibsen, Act 2, pg. 60). Later, when Lovborg thinks he has lost his manuscript due to being drunk, she offers him a gun to shoot himself with, and privately burns the manuscript. Although on the surface, Stella Kowalski is a more honest person than Hedda Gabler, the two women share the characteristic of dishonesty when
He alone knew that with the consciousness of the injustices done him, with his wife's incessant nagging, and with the debts he had contracted by living beyond his means, his position was far from normal." (Tolstoy, Chapter III). Not everyone thinks Ivan Ilyich's salary is meager, and he chooses to live beyond his means, thus although he is ordinary, his world is not absent of examples of how it
The characters in all of the literary works discussed here experience the elation of rising above whatever ails them on earth, but then being forced to fall back down to the harsh reality that they can never seem to fully escape. Additionally, in each of the works discussed here, ignorant bliss is portrayed is preferable to stark clarity. The primary difference between the poems and Keyes' novel, however, is
Ibsen's Nora Although it is difficult to know exactly how audiences watching Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House felt about the content of the play when it was first performed, it is difficult for us reading or watching it in the 21st century to see it as anything but a strongly feminist statement. What is especially striking about the powerful feminism of the play - other than the year in which it was