Season 3 episode4 " Birds of a Feather" : ( found this intresting)
Hedda Gabler (Norwegian pronunciation: [ˈˈhɛdːɑ ˈɡɑːbləɾ]) is a play written by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Ibsen was present at the world premiere, which took place on 31 January 1891 at the Residenztheater in Munich.[1] It is recognized as a classic of realism, nineteenth century theatre, and world drama.[2][3][4] The title character, Hedda, is considered one of the great dramatic roles in theatre.[5]
Hedda’s married name is Hedda Tesman; Gabler is her maiden name. On the subject of the title, Ibsen wrote: “My intention in giving it this name was to indicate that Hedda as a personality is to be regarded rather as her father’s daughter than her husband’s wife.”[6]
CharactersEdit
Hedda Tesman née Gabler — The main character, newly married and bored with both her marriage and life, seeking to influence a human fate for the first time. She is the daughter of General Gabler.
George (Jørgen) Tesman — Hedda’s husband, an academic who is as interested in research and travel as he is in his wife. Despite George’s presumed rivalry with Eilert over Hedda, he remains a congenial and compassionate host, and even plans to return Eilert’s manuscript after Eilert loses it in a drunken stupor.
Juliana (Juliane) Tesman — George’s loving aunt who has raised him since early childhood. She is also called Aunt Julle in the play, and Aunt Ju-Ju by George.
Thea Elvsted — A younger schoolmate of Hedda and a former acquaintance of George. Nervous and shy, Thea is in an unhappy marriage.
Judge Brack — An unscrupulous family friend.
Eilert Lövborg (Ejlert Løvborg) — George’s former colleague, who now competes with George to achieve publication and a teaching position. Eilert was once in love with Hedda.
Bertha (Berte) — A servant of the Tesmans.
Critical interpretationEdit
Joseph Wood Krutch makes a connection between Hedda Gabler and Freud, whose first work on psychoanalysis was published almost a decade later. In Krutch’s analysis, Gabler is one of the first fully developed neurotic female protagonists of literature.[7] By that, Krutch means that Hedda is neither logical nor insane in the old sense of being random and unaccountable. Her aims and her motives have a secret personal logic of their own. She gets what she wants, but what she wants is not anything that normal people would acknowledge (at least, not publicly) to be desirable. One of the significant things that such a character implies is the premise that there is a secret, sometimes unconscious, world of aims and methods — one might almost say a secret system of values — that is often much more important than the rational one.
Ibsen was interested in the then-embryonic science of mental illness and had a poor understanding by present-day standards. His Ghosts is another example of this. Examples of the troubled 19th-century female might include oppressed, but “normal”, wilful characters; women in abusive or loveless relationships; and those with some type of organic brain disease. Ibsen is content to leave such explanations unsettled. Bernard Paris interprets Gabler’s actions as stemming from her “need for freedom [which is] as compensatory as her craving for power… her desire to shape a man’s destiny.”[8]
0 notes