Is Hedda Gabler a Tragedy?
Lou Salome believes Hedda Gabler's death is tragic and that Hedda
Gabler
is a tragedy. Carolyn W. Mayerson doesn't. What do you think of their
interpretations? Do you think this play is a tragedy?
Lou Salome:
For it is an act of self renunciation, in a dark and
ironic
sense, through which Hedda rings down her life; she does not die for
another
person. . . and she does not live for another person. . . she dies for
herself
as she had lived for herself. In that she dies, she proves herself to
be
among those free born, untamed creatures; for in the necessity of her
death,
there first is revealed the whole tragedy of the uncanny contradiction
of
Hedda Gabler: the tragic aspect is that Hedda may only prove to herself
the
true existence of her inner freedom by cancelling herself out. She
extinguishes
the life of the tame and false Hedda, caught in the meshes of her own
weakness,
who while still living would not have found bearable the verdict now
intoned
by Counselor Brack over the deceased: "People don't do such things!"
Caroline W. Mayerson:
Hedda is incapable of making the distinction between
an
exhibitionistic gesture which inflates the ego, and the tragic death,
in
which the ego is sublimated in order that the values of life may be
extended
and reborn. Her inability to perceive the difference between melodrama
and tragedy accounts for the disparity between Hedda's presumptive view
of
her own suicide and our evaluation of its significance. Ibsen with
diabolical
irony arranged a situation which bears close superficial resemblance to
the
traditional tragic end. Symbolically withdrawing herself from the
bourgeois
environment into the inner chamber which contains the reliques of her
earlier
life, Hedda plays a "wild dance" upon her piano and, beneath her
father's
portrait, shoots herself "beautifully" through the temple with her
father's
pistol. She dies to vindicate her heritage of independence. . . And we,
having the opportunity to judge the act with relation to its full
context,
may properly interpret it as the final self-dramatization of the
consistently
sterile protagonist. Hedda gains no insight; her death affirms nothing
of
importance. She never understands why, at her touch, everything becomes
"ludicrous and mean." She dies to escape a sordid situation that is
largely
of her own making; she will not face reality nor assume responsibility
for
the consequences of her acts. The pistols, having descended to a coward
and a cheat, bring only death without honor.
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