Home | Me | Soliloquy | My Biodata | Top 20 | R.Schumann | F.Schubert | W.A.Mozart | L.V.Beethoven | J. Brahms | F.Mendelssohn | CM von Weber | Heinrich Heine | Henrik Ibsen | Poems
Henrik Ibsen
House Of Sensibilities

ibsen2.gif

Henrik Ibsen
b. 20th March 1828 (Skien, Norway) 
d. 23 May 1906 (Christiania, Norway)

December 2002 latest!!
I'm currently on a quest to read all the plays of my favourite dramatist, Henrik Ibsen. This project begins in December 2002 and I will be updating my thoughts and progress on this page as I go along.
 

Hedda Gabler
Published: 1890
 
This is a text that I've done for my literature class in university, and my first real introduction to Ibsen's drama (I've read Peer Gynt some years back, but for fun).
 
The first thing you'd notice about an Ibsen drama is that it is completely water-tight, and I don't mean it in a "legal-document" sense. In his plays, there isn't a single wasted line or stage direction -- everything said, every action and every bit of the set means something, and will lead you somewhere.
 
Hedda Gabler is a general's daughter, who has been brought up in an aristocratic manner and still occupies the mindset of her past noble style of living. Therefore, she is completely at odds with society and the male figures around her, whom I feel she thinks are not worthy of her high ideals.
 
She is trapped on all sides by the three main male figures of her life. Her husband Jorge Tesman appears at first to be completely unassuming and genteel. But turns out to be completely absorbed with his research on ancient civilization with no real affection for Hedda.
 
Judge Brack is obviously a more swarthy and attractive male figure and there is plenty of oozing sexual potential between him and Hedda but his main goal is to blackmail Hedda into submission.
 
An even more interesting character is the wasted genius figure of Eilert Lovborg, who had a past with Hedda before her marriage. His relationship with Hedda is extremely psychologically complex. Hedda sees him as a window to the outside world that she never dares to experience herself because of her desire to remain "respectable" which befits her (imagined) aristocratic notions.
 
(to be continued...)