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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