"Oh, Hedda Gabler"
What do you make of Hedda Gabler? Which of the other protagonists we have studied this semester is she most like? How can we classify her--in relation to Nora and Helene and in relation to the other women in literature since Antigone?
posted by Dr. Battles at 10:02 PM
7 Comments:
Hedda reminds me very much of Emma. In classifying her with Nora and Helene she chose not to be strong and leave or suck it up and stay but rather to kill herself. Maybe she thought if she couldn't control her life or someone else's in real life maybe she could do so in her death. I think that there was really nothing that would have made her happy. Of all the women so far I find Hedda the most annoying and one of the most evil.
I think Hedda is most like Emma Bovary. Like Emma, Hedda is selfish, spoiled, and determined to get her own way. Hedda doesn’t really care what others are going through, so long as she gets what she wants, which mostly includes material things. Emma and Hedda both seem unconcerned with the debt their husbands gain just trying to keep them happy.
Like Helene, Hedda seems obsessed with what society thinks of her: she is deathly afraid of scandal and will do anything to aviod it. At other times though, Hedda seems more concerned with getting exactly what she wants, regardless of the consequences. Like Nora, Hedda claims she has never really lived and that she will never be free in her current situation. While Nora decided leaving her husband was the answer, Hedda decided death was her only way out.
Hedda seems to lack the “feminine” quality of motherhood. She doesn’t even want to acknowledge that she’s pregnant and she states that she doesn’t want to be responsible for anyone else.
I also agree that Hedda is like Emma. Both women like to control the situations. Hedda is very slick in her ways in controling. But once she realized that the situation was out of her hands , she took the cheap way out and killed herself. I'm not fond of her actions, whch made her a very evil person. She staged everything, from being around on the couch after the guys got home, to giving a drunk a gun, and burning the manuscript. Not a happy person even thuogh she had everything
Hedda reminds me of Nora in alot of ways as well as Emma. Compared with Nora they are manipulative to get what they want, although they do so in opposite ways: Nora play's the dumb, naive, board housewife to have Torvald shelter her and give her the life that she wants, although she really doesn't want it. While Hedda manipulates people while literally taking charge she also can't be happy with her life either.
Although Emma doesn't seem to be that manipulative she, definately has no problem exploiting her husband to satisfy herself, in which both of their lives end with their suicide because they were never able to find happiness.
Both Monnica and Shelley call Hedda evil, but I think that assessment is a little harsh. I would call Hedda selfish and I do think she let herself be ruled by jealousy to some extent. She burned the manuscript in part because it was better than something her husband could create, but also because Lovborg (a man who once loved her) wrote it with the help of another woman.
When compared to the evil things some of the other women we have read about, like Medea for example, I find it hard to call Hedda evil.
I disagree with Britabeth that Hedda isn't evil. when a person, regardless of Jealousy, acts in the manner that Hedda did, then in my opinion, they are evil. Jealousy is no excuse. I also agree with Renee' that Emma and hedda are similar, to the degree that they both were manipulative in their own way. Because they lost control of the situations they were in, they killed themselves.
Brittany,
Yes compared to Medea she is not as evil as Medea merely because she didn't go killing her children, however, she did practically kill Loveborg by giving him the gun, just so she could have control over someone else's life because clearly she couldn't very well control her own.
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