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Opening night of Hedda Gabler would have been an unforgettable experience. The world premiere was staged on 31 January 1891 in Munich, and whilst the audience may not have come with vine leaves in their hair, a good proportion of them came with a copy of of the play in book form, which was published at the end of the previous year, the lengthy dramatic exposition and stage directions begging for the play to be read almost like a novel. And indeed, despite Ibsen's international renown and despite the popularity of his works in performance, his works were most certainly more popular as read forms of entertainment. And so many theatre goers would have brought a copy of the play with them and they would have had it open in their laps. They were the great dramatist's fans, Henrik Ibsen, who was himself in attendance during that first performance. But there were plenty of theatre goers who most certainly were not a fan of the play that unfolded before them. And they would leave the theatre disgust, shocked and scandalised. Even into the early 20th century, scandal would be attached to Ibsen's plays. One reviewer called Hedda Gabler a hideous nightmare of pessimism, whilst another would label the star role of the show to be a hopeless specimen of degeneracy and a vicious, heartless, cowardly, unmoral, mischief making vixen. And this was very much par for the course when it came to Ibsen's dramas, works that are now second only to Shakespeare's when it comes to the most performed plays. I think of how George Bernard Shaw detailed the reception of Ibsen's Ghosts in London the same year that Hedda Gabler opened in Munich. After the first act, Bernard Shaw wrote, the applause was immense. After the second, a third of the applauders were startled into silence. After the third act, four fifths of the audience were awestruck. Someone cried out, it's too horrible. And the next day the devil was to pay. In the papers, the Daily Telegraph went stark raving mad and compared an Ibsen play to a dirty act done publicly, an open drain and so on, demanding that the independent theatre should be prosecuted, suppressed, fined and the deuce knows what not. Welcome to the fin de siecle, the end of the century, the aesthetic and decadent age and the age of decay and degeneration. The later half of the 19th century was a cloying, claustrophobic, repressed period of history to find oneself in. And the reviews of Ibsen's plays say everything about the era and much less about the great dramatist himself and his creations. As Oscar Wilde would say, Wilde, who was an artist of beautiful decay, Wilde, who would find himself taken up with the image of vine leaves in one's hair. Wilde, who would find himself smitten with Hedda for what she might reflect of him. Wilde, whose own works, and indeed the very soul of the man himself, would face censorship and condemnation for immorality. Wilde would write in his preface to the Picture of Dorian Gray that it is the spectator and not life that arch really mirrors. We might keep in mind another perceptive maxim from that profound preface as we read and watch Hedda Gabler. The maxim is the 19th century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his face in the glass. And Ibsen, frequently and perceptively referred to as the father of realism, sure did know how to turn a mirror onto the ugliness of the century. And audiences would lash out, how dare you show us something so true without gloss? How dare you show the broken pieces of society? And, of course, what is society? Society is in the individual. And whilst the intensely influential Ibsen does not outrage us now, and indeed strong Ibsen night tones course through the veins of our most well received dramas, we now hunger for the darkness today, for the gritty, for the truthful, the real, whilst his plays no longer offend. Were we to find ourselves in the audience of an Ibsen play over a century ago, there's a strong chance that we might feel personally singled out and we might feel as though we were not watching a play, but rather sitting before an. An open sewer, an open drain. And if it was difficult for audiences to swallow the truths presented to them, we might think it was even more difficult for the playwright himself. Ibsen began his career writing verse dramas like Peer Gynt and Brandt, and when he broke away from verse and moved to prose, there wasn't really a precedent. Norway would not become independent until 1905, and until then the playhouses had a thoroughly Danish and international repertoire. Ibsen himself wrote in Danish with Norwegian inflections. And the theatre scene was very heavily French and German influenced. And that meant verse and it often meant romantic tones. It also meant clear, generic delineations. Melodra was melodrama, comedy, comedy, and if it were a tragedy, it were a tragedy. And there were clear markers and conventions that one could follow. Everyone knew where they stood and what to expect, so that didn't really mean tragi. Comedies that cut close to home and delivered uncomfortable, ugly and pessimistic truths on contemporary society. We're used to the Ibsenite today. We can assimilate the Ibsenite. Ibsenite mode, naturally, we take it for granted, it is pretty much the default. And indeed Ibsen would exert a heavy influence upon Chekhov. And our stories today naturally lean towards the Chekhovian. But audiences at that time were not used to the kinds of dramas that Ibsen was presenting them with. It's actually quite difficult to try to engage with that first reader or that first theater goer and truly feel just how radical, how subversive his dramas would have been. And so audiences would have been intensely uncomfortable with the domestic subject matter. With unhappy middle class bourgeois families like those we see in Ibsen, audiences would have been more comfortable with stories about kings and queens like those of William Shakespeare's. But having said that, the 19th century as an era had already firmly shown its preference for delusion and illusion in its attitude to Shakespeare. King Lear, for example, was still not being performed with its original, emotionally overwhelming tragic ending. English theatre particularly, was stiflingly repressed. At least French and German theatre could stand an unhappy ending. English theatre, or the theatre goers patronising the playhouses in Lond, London, didn't seem capable of stomaching an unhappy ending. So it really is no wonder why London was so outraged when Ibsen came to town. The formula for the kind of Ibsenite drama that enraged the Age of Degeneration was essentially stick some unhappy characters in a room, a room in a house, very similar to the kind of house that theatre goers would have left that evening, put them in a domestic setting and let's watch their lives fall apart for a couple of hours. Sounds simple, but Ibsen declared that writing prose drama and writing realism was infinitely more difficult than verse. And we might think, well, that makes sense. You're not working from preset character types. Indeed, you are tightrope walking between what you can and can't say, whilst also putting your finger on the uncomfortable truths of contemporary society and the human experience. And you're trying to take this mimesis, this illusion, as close to the condition of real life as possible. You're trying to make it pass for reality. And you are at the forefront of this endeavor. Thanks to Ibsen, we do start to see a shift in public sentiment towards the end of the 19th century. And theatre goes from middle class escapist entertainment or high poetry and grand performance to an almost scientific endeavor. The field of study was life, and the characters are held up on a slide for our examination. And perhaps in the reflection of the slide, we see something of ourselves and our society. We get to the 1890s and we see that the function of drama is no longer to make the audience feel good, but to explore the kinds of sociological concerns that many would have rather kept swept under the rug. And that meant depicting ugliness. That meant taking aspects of day to day life that were unmentionable in polite society and throwing a spotlight on them. Now this had already been simmering in literary circles for a little while, but taking it to the stage was really shoving it in everybody's faces. In France, a few decades before the dramas of Ibsen, we see Charles Baudelaire's the Flowers of Evil causing quite a stir. And by quite a stir we mean his publisher's door was kicked in and half a dozen sexually suggestive poems were banned. Theophile Gaultier would say that Baudelaire's Sickly Leaves had a gangrenous style. And Arthur Symons would refer to the decadent movement as a beautiful and interesting disease. And this language goes some way towards helping expand our understanding of where this countercultural movement, one that is essentially kicking back against sexual repression and embracing what society deemed depra. Where that sprang from, we can see, for example in the uk the Contagious Diseases act, which gave what was still a newly formed police force license to apprehend women on the streets and force examine them for diseases like syphilis. This is also the age in which we see the emergence of sexuality's alignment with identity. And when a society sees sex as being synonymous with disease, impulses of course do not disappear, but rather need to go underground. So towards the end of the century we get a profusion of dark narratives and the shadow archetype really makes itself known in literature. The exploration of hidden secret lives, like in the Gothic tales of Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, as we've mentioned, but also in the stories of Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Bram Stoker's Dracula. Stories filled with mist and about the danger lurking within the mist. In the literature of the age we see a desire to know the secret self, the self that society would rather deny. And indeed it is quite fitting that Sigmund Freud's the Interpretation of Dreams, which wrangled with what the symbols we see when we close our eyes, might mean it's quite fitting that that was first published in the original German in the last year of the century, 1899. And we could call that the last great gothic work of the century. The word that we return to again and again when we speak of the late 19th century is decay, Decay and degeneration. And Max Nordau would point to some of our most revered thinkers, writers and artists. He would point to some of my personal favourite figures of the century, and he would highlight them as exemplars for a degenerating culture, a culture in decline in his work by the title Degeneration. Nietzsche, Wagner, Wilde are three that are held up as symbols for cultural decay. And Henrik Ibsen is another. Nordau didn't doubt that Ibsen was a highly accomplished artist, even if his art gave expression only to hatred, rage and displeasure. He thought that no writer gave life to such vivid characters since Shakespeare and Cervantes. But he would lambast those who pretended Ibsen to be, before all things, exemplary in truthfulness. He would actually see Ibsen's poetical imagination as revolving around three unconscious Christian axioms original sin, confession and self sacrifice or redemption. But, of course, why can't there be both in Ibsen's work? It's simultaneously crisply realistic and powerfully symbolic. And what a great way to ensure his works endure, because symbols resonate through the ages and have his dramas reflective of the time. If you want to write a work that sits within the wider canon, you need to pen something that forces itself onto a shelf alongside the Bible and the works of Shakespeare. When Dostoevsky, for example, gives us the Grand Inquisitor in the Brothers Karamazov, he is doing exactly that. And Ibsen most certainly read Shakespeare and the Bible. But Ibsen's a curious writer, one who is an extraordinary example of Harold Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence. And Bloom himself, as we have discussed, wrote very compellingly on Hedda Gabler and thought Hedda to be one of the dramatic heroines he most cherished. Ibsen is prime example of the anxiety of influence. Because Ibsen denied reading basically everybody, keep in mind that the greater the rider, the stronger the denial, the greater the anxiety of influence. Tolstoy famously railed against everybody from Shakespeare to Beethoven. We see the influences in Ibsen's work, but he denies them. And the more contemporary, the more fierce the denial he denies. Reading, for example, the incredibly popular contemporary French novelist Emile Zola, father of realism, denies awareness of one of the pioneers of naturalism. In 1873, two decades prior to Hedda Gabler, the novelist of the Rugon Makar series, wrote that drama is dying of its extravagances, its lies and its platitudes. The time has come to create works of truth. There must be no more schools, no more formulae there is just life itself, an immense field where everybody can explore and create to his heart's content. Ibsen apparently didn't read Zola, and in fact the playwright who had no real formal education, who was a product of a rather broken home and an alcoholic father, he was a man who suffered through an unhappy marriage and forced himself into exile abroad. Ibsen had no books in his house besides the Bible, and anything he did manage to chance across, he would protest. He didn't understand. So he didn't understand Kant or Kierkegaard, he didn't understand Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, and yet his works are strangely soaked with an intense awareness of their philosophy, although he very clearly read and knew all about his literary and theatrical rival August Strindberg. But Ibsen's anxiety of influence manifests not in denial but in attack, as the Swedish playwright and novelist manifests in Hedda Gabler as the character Eilat Lovberg, literary rival of George Teasman. Strindberg would write on the basic principles of naturalism in the theatre in a preface to his 1888 play Miss Julie. Asserting his pleasure when it comes to characters who have a multiplicity of motives, Strindberg would write, I do not believe in simple theatrical characters and an author's summary judgments of people. This man is stupid, that one brutal, this jealous, that stingy and so forth should be challenged by naturalists who know the richness of the soul complex and realize that vice has a reverse side, very much like virtue on his representation. As Lovberg in Hedegabler, by the way, Strindberg would say, it seems to me that Ibsen realizes that I shall inherit the crown when he is finished. He hates me mentally. And now the decrepit old troll seems to hand me the revolver. I shall survive him and many others. And the Day the Father. That's a naturalistic tragedy by Strindberg, which was enjoying a run of performances just half a decade after Hedda Gabler. The Day the Father Kills Hedda Gabler I shall Stick the Gun in the Old Troll's neck. So Ibsen would have liked for all to believe his problem plays to be wholly his own. But seismic shifts in any artistic realm do not occur in a vacuum. And when we say problem plays, by the way, we don't mean that in the Shakespearean sense. With Shakespeare, there are two kinds of problem play. There is the play that is problematic to us today due to its themes, or there is the play that poses a problem when it comes to designating its genre. We frequently call those kinds of problem plays tragi comedies. Ibsen's problem plays dealt with societal problems, women's rights and class privilege being at the forefront. And we see that in Hedda Gabler, one of the Ibsen plays that like A Doll's House before it, really put the actress on the map. Compelling theatrical female representation and examination of the psychology and the societal problems faced by women begins significantly with Shakespeare and then continues on with Ibsen. No wonder we see strong elements of the Shakespearean and the Ibsenite in both Henry James and Oscar Wilde. Despite his works being called problem plays, Ibsen wrote that it wasn't really his intention to deal in Hedda Gabler with so called problems. What he principally wanted to do was to depict human beings, human emotions and human destinies upon a groundwork of certain social conditions and principles of the present day. So at the heart of the drama we have, of course, the fin de siecle femme fatale of the dark, narcissistic, neurotic, fatally flawed heroine, or indeed anti heroine, who gives her name to the play's title, her name and her father's name, because indeed, as Ibsen himself emphasized, she is her father's daughter and not her husband's wife. We have before us a role that the greatest actresses really want to play. Hedda Gabler is one of those roles of a lifetime, and many a great actress has gifted the world their unique interpretation. The first actress to play the role was the suffragette novelist Elizabeth Robbins, who, seeing the importance of the role and the feminist issues the role, gave voice to the exploration of the new woman, pawned her possessions and formed a theatre company with Marion Lee to bring Hedda Gabler to the stage. And since then, anyone who wants to find an abundance of great actresses whose body of work makes for rewarding exploration would be well served to simply see who played Hedda. Indeed, a contemporary theatre critic, one of the critics who didn't slam Ibsen, would call Hedda Gabler Ibsen's greatest play and Hedda the most interesting woman that he has created. Whilst another critic would revere Ibsen's skill of subtle misrepresentation and would say that his powers of persuasion were so fatal that for a moment we believe Hedda Gabler to be a noble heroine and not a fiend. And there certainly is a great deal of the fatal and the fatalistic and the subtle when it comes to this character. Now, indeed, we could see Hedda as sharing some of the same DNA as Cleopatra, the Queen of the Nile. There certainly are some similarities there, but I don't think she has quite the infinite variety of Shakespeare's Cleopatra. But then again, that really is a tall order to demand something of the inexhaustible. That's how A.C. bradley, in his lectures on Shakespearean tragedy, would refer to Cleopatra and also Falstaff, Hamlet and Iago. The comparison between Hedda and the Prince of Denmark has also been made. But I think of Nietzsche, who said that Hamlet's problem was not that he thinks too much, but that he thinks much too well. I don't think we could say quite the same thing about Hedda, but when it comes to Iago, I think there are significant parallels and one could certainly very compelling theatrical double bill with Othello and Hedda Gabler perform Othello on one evening and then with the same actors and actresses perform Hedda the following evening, I definitely see a generous heaping of Shakespeare's Machiavellian web spinner who ensnares the characters around him for his own amusement. When it comes to Hedda, Iaga, like Hedda, is a character who wants to set the world alight and watch it burn for his own delight. Now, Maya Angelou said that when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. But when it comes to ironists like Iago and like Hedda, because irony is most certainly one of her gifts, it is one of the narcissist's blessings. When it comes to Hedda, we could that adage and say when someone does not show you who they are, believe them. From the start of the play we learn what wounds Hedda from what she inflicts upon others. She is deathly afraid of scandal and condemnation. And we see that in the faux pas involving her husband's Aunt Julie's hat in act one, poor Aunt Julie has bought this hat so that Hedda shouldn't be ashamed of her if they happen to walk together in the street. And we take it that Hedda has married below her class and is keen to take that frustration out on the very ones she has deigned to grace with her slightly higher status. A few lines after Aunt Julie says this, and when she says this, what she's actually saying, of course, is she wants to be accepted and she wants to establish a loving, familial relationship with George's new wife. A few lines later, Hedda strides on stage, complaints dropping from her lips, and says that the maid has left her old hat lying around. My goodness, somebody might see it it now we're always learning to read between the lines in books and in life. And if we feel ourselves recoil or blush or laugh out of embarrassment, it is because we are already attuned to the ironical mode. We're attuned to farce and blunder, and we know how to read between the lines. And we have most likely felt ourselves mortified in making such a graceless mistake ourselves. Freud would say that there is much in our ostensible mistakes, but this, we learn, was no mistake. And we find that Hedda knew the hat to be Aunt Julie's. We can assume that she knew she bought it so that Hedda shouldn't be ashamed of her. And she turns this woman's fear, which is also her own fear, the fear of being socially shunned, onto her, and she KN her down a couple of rungs on the social ladder, an old hat fit for a maid. And in that attack we learn what Hedda herself fears. If, upon our first viewing or reading of this play, we were taken in by the deception, and if we believed this faux pas to be a real mistake until the truth was revealed, then who is to say we could see through a Hedda Gabler in real society? Another interesting note regarding first viewings is even if we go in blind, we know how things are going to go, don't we? Or we sense it. We intuit it. Fate looms over the play from the start. We need no Romeo and Juliet style prologue that tells us the lead will take her life. It's in the very mechanics of the narrative. In a trope now known as Chekhov's gun. Anton Chekhov, another master of dramatic form towards the end of the 19th century into the early 20th century, gave us a dramatic principle that can be best expressed like if a writer puts a gun in the first act, it must go off the final act. Simply put, every element must be necessary to the story. Don't make promises you don't intend to keep. Now, Ernest Hemingway disagreed and he would introduce extraneous details into his stories, knowing full well that readers would erroneously infer their own meaning, their own interpretation. And indeed, modern storytelling is a hybrid of the Chekhovian, which is also thoroughly Stanislavskian. It is a hybrid that contains also the Hemingway esque and of course, the Shakespearean daring storytellers will frequently subvert this established trope. Chekhov's gun. They might introduce a gun and we use gun as a stand in. It can be anything that results in a payoff later in the narrative. So it's not necessarily a gun, but daring storytellers might introduce a gun and not have it go off. And we don't get that in Hedda Gabler, a tragedy in which a sense of fatalism shrouds the stage. We have the gun, two of them, in fact, introduced early, we have them returned to. So the audience is constantly being reminded of these guns, and then we have it go off, set up, payoff. It's not a question of if, but when. And we wait for it, we anticipate it. We know in our gut that this is how it has to be. And we might find it rewarding to think about how the story would change if there were no guns seeded at the start. What if a random gun just went off right at the end and we had no reference to it throughout? And indeed, we might think, how would the story change if the guns were presented, referred to, but ultimately never involved in the dramatic climax? What if we were denied the fulfillment of that expectation? Answering the question of what the effect would be in an alternative telling is very instructive when it comes to understanding the story before us. If the gun doesn't go off in the end, if Hedda doesn't shoot herself, the story would be significantly changed and the societal commentary would also be significantly altered. And in addition to that, if the gun did not go off, the fatalistic theme, the sense of fatalism would be refuted rather than reinforced. And so we get the guns early on. Thea refers to Lovberg's ex partner in Act 1, whom she doesn't know is Hedda, though we intuit it before it's confirmed, and she says that when they parted, she threatened to shoot him with a pistol. Nonsense, says Hedda. No one even has any pistols around here. Cue the end of Act 1. When Hedda's pistols emerge, it's comic fulfillment. They emerge and they confirm her her as ex lover of Lovberg. And we have George begging her not to touch those dangerous contraptions. And at the open of Act 2, we see Hedda aiming and pointing the pistols at the despicable Judge Brack. I'm going to shoot you, sir, she says. And he replies, what the devil do you still play at that game? What are you shooting at? Oh, Hedda says, I just stand here and shoot into the blue. She likes to go outside and fire into the blue infinity above. And perhaps one thinks of the tribal men detailed in Frazer's Golden Bough who aimed their arrows at the sun, imploring the heavens to bless their crops. Headers shooting into the blue is a shooting into an infinity that seems to exercise control over her? Is her nihilistic firing akin to Captain Ahab in Melville's Moby Dick, raising his fist aloft and threatening to strike the sun if it offends him? Is it an appeal to her father, General Gabler in the sky, to save her? Is it a troubling of death, heaven with bootless cries? Or is her shooting game and infantile acting out as well as the pistols containing within them the foreshadowed denouement Chekhov wrote about? As symbols, the pistols are also charged with the two drives that, if we're continuing to be Freudian and Ibsen surely would have delighted in Freudian readings of his works, though of course one cannot reduce truly great characters to psychoanalytical readings. The two drives that run through life are there in the pistols Sex or Eros and death or Thanatos. Sex, death, power, control. All of these things are wrapped up in these symbols. And Hedda wants to be the one holding the gun, pointing the gun, firing the gun. But that desire points to her fear, her fear of being controlled. And so she longs for death, a beautiful kind of death. She yearns for it. Lovberg asks Hedda, why didn't you shoot me down as you threatened? And Hedda replies, I'm too much afraid of a scandal. Life cannot flourish in a sexually repressed, class conscious society. Yes, Hedda, Lovberg says, at bottom you're a coward. And she knows this, she fears this. And later in the play, she muses upon the idea of if only one had courage, then life might be livable in spite of everything. What does she mean by everything? And she says much the same thing when referring to her unhappy marriage. The most unbearable thing of all to Hedda is the prospect of everlastingly having to be together with the self, same person. And that word everlastingly makes us understand Max Nordau's writings on the religious elements in Ibsen. Because it takes on a decidedly Christian connotation. It also points to Hedda's black and white thinking. She also catastrophises, and as cognitive behavioural psychologist Beck would say, she makes everything, essentially all or nothing, all or nothing thinking. And in addition to all of this, she has this desperate need for societal approval. And perhaps if she had courage, she would not be afraid of a scandal and perhaps could live. And living indeed would have been a burden for a woman in the 19th century who found herself in an unhappy marriage. Divorce was no easy thing to grant, and the idea of being together everlastingly. That seems to imply an underlying belief that their union would necessarily survive such a fracturing anyway. And Blake, William Blake, would write of mind forged manacles in the previous century, a phrase that often makes me think that no matter the shackles imposed upon us by society, we can still be free in our minds if we place our happiness and meaning within. When we habitually externalize and make our freedom contingent upon the world around us, we find ourselves in chains and our minds cease to be our own. We look out to others, and our state is so frequently conditional, dependent upon how those around us think and feel, or, to put it more accurately, how we think they might think or feel. And we place ourselves erroneously at the center. The fact of the matter is, we are not in the center of the universe, and the minds of others are often elsewhere. George's mind at the opening of the play is on his academic work, as we're told it has been during his honeymoon. The George Hedda relationship is rather evocative of the Anna Alexei relationship in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, and also the Dorothea Casaubon relationship in George Eliot's Middlemarch, though Hedda seems to be more in simpatico with Anna than Dorothea. Certainly. And if your mind is on one thing, it cannot be on another. We follow trains of thought, and though fragments of different thoughts vie for our attention throughout the day, if we look back over the last couple of years, we could whittle our focus down to one main thought. We have an aim and a direction, and it can typically be summed up in a single word. And whilst George is researching and engaging in his academic agonistic wrestling with a thinly disguised Strindberg, he is not thinking about sexual union with his new wife. When Aunt Julie, in the first act, says that George will soon find a use for the extra rooms in the house when the time comes, we know what she means. George's reply, however, you've got something there. As I gradually add to my collection of books. So the loudest lines in great theatre are those unsaid and dramatic offspring of Ibsens like Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter certainly knew this. The unsaid in this exchange is that George's aunt is talking about having a baby. Yeah. What's on his mind? However, his book is on his mind. His book on the account of the domestic crafts of medieval Brabant. Very dry stuff indeed. Now, personally, I'd still read it, but one has to admit that that's rather dry subject matter. And what is his Literary rival writing about. Well, Lovberg is writing a big new book on cultural development. Hint, hint, everybody, that's what this play is about. And Lovberg's book, we're told, deals with the future. With the future. George exclaims, but ye gods, we don't know anything about that. It wouldn't enter my mind to write about anything like that. And Hedda simply murmurs no, in agreement. So her yes is a no. Or indeed her no is a yes. Her denial is an affirmation. Think about that. And her husband, who either lacks sexual vitality completely or he lacks it for her, or indeed he sublimates it into his work, does not know how to write the future. He is not in control of his destiny. At least we take it that that's what Hedda might think, because that's her one thought. Destiny and control, control of one's destiny, control of the destinies of those around her. It's not about sex. It's about destiny and control. And sex is a means to get that. For her, sex is one potential avenue, and when that fails, one always has death. And sex, as control, is everywhere in Hedda Gabler. And perhaps this is one reason why a popular socialite of the time, when sending out her dinner party invites, explicitly warned guests that no discussion of Mr. Ibsen's latest play would be tolerated. We think that there is no sex or very little sex between George and Hedda. And yet she still controls him, still can manipulate him, and as a narcissist, seems to have an intuitive understanding of what Goethe meant when he said that to be loved for what one is is the greater exception, and the great majority love in another, only what they lend him their own selves, their version of him. She burns his rival's manuscript for him, she says, and he replies, I never knew you loved me so much. And so the spider ensnares and makes her husband complicit. But indeed, how much sex is there in that relationship? Did George find at least one moment to break off from his academic research on the honeymoon to have sex with his new wife? At the very least, Hedda is pregnant because she's had sex with. With somebody. Sex, control and class anxiety is also present in the relationship between Hedda and Thea, too. We see sexual longing expressed in Hedda's obsession with the younger woman's hair. She pulls it and she threatens to burn it off. Critics have made much of Hedda's pyromania. She is obsessed with burning fire, as we might think from our reading of Prometheus, Bound is both blessing and curse, gift and damnation, forging and undoing. It's the spark of creation, but it's also a great destructive force. How does one write the future? Well, if you were to ask Hedda, she might say, by burning the past. How is this all going to end? Thea laments at the close of Act 2. But we, of course, like Hedda, know how it's going to end. Inevitability runs through Ibsen's universe. And I find it interesting that in reference to Lovberg's lost manuscript, Hedda asks, can't a thing like that, that be rewritten over again? I mean, and George says, no, it's about inspiration, you see. But we might think that what she's really asking is, can't we rewrite the future? Can we not burn what's already written about our destinies? Let's burn down the past that predetermines our future now. I'm burning your child, Thea. Hedda cries, with your curly hair, your child. And Eilat Loveberg's child. I'm burning. I'm burning your child, she says. And the irony here is that it is, of course, strongly implied throughout that she herself is with child. So is she really burning their child? And what if our impulse to burn and destroy is not our own? What if we are mistaken in that? In discussing making a love triangle with Brack and having a third on the trip, Hedda says that the journey will be a long one. A long one. Yet I've just come to a stopping place on the line, and Brack says she might as well jump out and stretch her legs. And Hedda replies, I'll never jump. So that's interesting. This is just a stopping point on a longer journey, perhaps an everlasting one. And Hedda sees herself as part of a greater fabric, or journeying towards something. And she says she will never jump. And if we're thinking about fate and free will, we might ask, then, is she pushing? Yeah. If she will never jump, is she ultimately pushed? And if she is pushed, then by what Hedda says at the end of Act 2, for once in my life, I want to feel that I control a human destiny. And this is Iago's desire too. And like Iago, this control culminates in destruction. When Hedda realizes that Judge Brack has power over her, or power to cause a scandal. And it certainly would be quite a scandal if it came out that Hedda ceded the idea for Lovberg to kill himself when she discovers that if she were to go on living as a coward, afraid of scandal, she would be subject to his will. She is no longer free and she cannot endure that. And when we talk of will, we think of our individual will powers. But in the 19th century that term is also coloured with Kantian and Schopenhauerian terms. Schopenhauer was an incredible influence on many of the century's most impactful writers, from Tolstoy to Thomas Hardy. And the idea of will is a central one. Kant told us that we exist in the phenomenal world where we ourselves and the things around us, the details that compose our reality, are defined by virtue of how they appear distinctly in time and space. Beyond the phenomenal world, the world of our everyday sense impressions, exists another realm that is difficult to conceptualize. And Kant himself found it difficult to conceptualize. And we see this because his books are dense and he needed to rewrite them for the layman in simpler terms. And still we struggle to get our heads around his philosophy. But essentially there is another realm, the noumenal domain, which exists outside of time and space we cannot see. But Schopenhauer would call this domain will, not in the sense of personal will, drive, direction, aim or motivation, but more like an all encompassing force that connects us all. Pessimists would have a sense that free will is a delusion and that we are locked into a series of events beyond our control. Returning to this idea of individual will, however, I like what the distant relative of General Gabler's daughter Iago has to say. He would compare our individual wills to gardeners. He said that our bodies are our gardens to the which our wills are gardeners. So that if we will plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up, tire, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many, either to have it sterile with idleness or manured with industry. Why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills. Added to this, we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts. Now, it doesn't seem to me that Hedda has the capacity to cool her raging motions, but to the extent that she might have free will, and we could definitely, after reading Othello, contest whether Iago himself ultimately has much of that, if we were to extend that gardening metaphor, we might wonder about what Hedda chooses to plant. She tries to sow poisonous seeds, seeds of despair in everyone around her. And she also takes a strange obsession with the vegetative world in decay, the death in the life, so to speak. The end of the cycle. At the opening of the play, she's gazing at the yellow flowers outside, isn't she? I'm just looking at the leaves on the trees, she says. They're so yellow and so withered. Well, George says, it is September, it's the time of year Thou mayst in me behold when yellow leaves or none or few do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang. Hedda is obsessed with sickly petals and she is terrified of how close she is to taking her own life. Her refusal to accompany her husband to his aunt's deathbed I think is very telling. I don't want to look at sickness and death, she says. I must be free of everything that's ugly. The enduring symbol of this play is the vine leaves. Wearing vine leaves in one's hair. And when I think of the vine, I think of Bacchus, Dionysus, the patron saint of drunken revelry losing control, and also the patron saint essentially, of tragic drama, the theatre. When I think of vine leaves, I think of a plant that desperately claws its way to life. Vine leaves fill up any space they can find, desperate for growth. And Hedda's own desperation for growth, for freedom, for control, for mastery over herself and others, culminates in the shot we were waiting for. Throughout being fired and ending the play like an exclamation point, Heather encourages Lovberg to take his own life and to let it happen beautifully. And she says, I don't believe in vine leaves anymore, but let it happen beautifully all the same. And when she learns that he shot himself in the breast, she couldn't be happier. A really courageous act, she says. I say that there is beauty in this deed, but of course, this is an illusion. Hedda, perhaps, like the outraged members of the late 19th century audience, would have much preferred a drama, a tragic drama, in which a character shoots themselves through the heart. It's symbolic, it is romantic, it's overtly dramatic and unrealistic. It is an illusion, essentially. And Hedda has that illusion shattered for her. And we can imagine that much of the outrage in the early audiences of Ibsen's dramas stemmed from them having their own illusions shattered. Loevburg was actually shot accidentally in the abdomen, not through the breast, and he was shot whilst at a brothel. And what is left for Hedda to do when she is denied another's beautiful death? She seeded the idea, but it didn't go the way she wanted it to go. Because ultimately, when it comes to others, our will is not that strong. What about when it comes to ourselves though? How much will do we have there? Do we jump or are we pushed? And she says, everything I touch seems destined to turn into something mean and farcical. And this is the tragic lament. Another irony too. The irony is we take ourselves so seriously, and in taking ourselves so seriously we become not tragic figures, but comic figures. True tragedy is comic, and indeed comedy as a genre doesn't mean jokes, but rather points to narrative trajectory and it points to how the play ends. A comedy, tragedy is a tragedy all the way up until the end, but the positive note of marriage, redemption and life makes it comic. A tragedy is a comedy until the end, and if the stage becomes awash with blood, it is a tragedy. Othello and A Midsummer Night's Dream are interchangeable plays, structurally speaking at the beginning and could go either way. Othello is a common comedy to start with and then descends into darkness. And so does Hedda Gabler end on a triumphant note? Does it end with a beautiful, defiant, courageous act in which the heroine finds her freedom in death? Or is her assertion that everything she touches turns to farce a moment of sublime self awareness trapped in a play? She's playing a role and she has her role determined for her. And this is not a dignified, noble, romantic role in a tragic production, but rather a complete farce. And so those are some of my thoughts off the back of my most recent re engagement with this splendid drama. I find every time I return to this work I get new insights, news, avenues of appreciation open up to me. So I would love to know what you make of this work of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler. And if you would like to discover what fellow like minded lovers of literature have to say about this play, then we have a bookish discussion around it over at the Hardcore Literature Book Club where readers have weighed in with their insights, their appreciations, their responses. And we also have an extensive back catalogue of lectures and deep read throughs for some of the greatest and most rewarding works of literature of all time that are available for you to stream on demand right now@patreon.com hardcore literature we've got lecture series for novels by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Virginia Woolf, John Steinbeck, Ralph Ellison. We have a deep read through for George Eliot's Middlemarch, James Joyce's Ulysses, Herman Melville's Moby Dick and many more. At time of recording we are reading through the complete works of William Shakespeare together and we are currently wrapping up our latest big read which is Lady Murasaki's the Tale of Genji and that's been a really captivating experience. We've also just had a special lecture on the essays of Michel de Montaigne. We've read the poetry of Walt Whitman together, one of my personal favourite poets of all time. And we will very soon launch into our next big read which is David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. And I'm personally really excited about this one. Later this year we will be reading Thomas Hardy far from the Madding crowd. Together we will read Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. At the book club we will read Dante's Inferno and much more. If you're looking for a great group to share your love of literature with, then join the adventure. Let's journey through the great books together. You'll be very warmly welcomed and again, that's@patreon.com hardcore literature and thank you so much for listening today. I really appreciate you and I hope you have a wonderful day. Happy reading and bye bye for now.