EUGENE WILDE HEIGHT SERIES
As in a Greek tragedy, although the events all take place over a short span of time, they are the culmination of a series of past events, which are narrated by the characters: Lovborg’s relationship with Hedda, Tesman’s courtship of her, Lovborg’s recovery from alcoholism and relationship with Thea. The play makes use of some the devices of the “well-made play” typified by the works of Eugène Scribe-for example, the audience’s knowledge about the fate of the manuscript-but with a more condensed pattern, closer to the unities of time, place, and action that Aristotle described as typical of tragedy and that had been crucial to seventeenth-century French classicism. Lovborg considers the manuscript to be the child born out of his relationship with Thea Elvsted, and as she burns the manuscript, Hedda gleefully whispers, “Now I’m burning your child, Thea.” Tesman recovers it, but, in a fit of jealousy, Hedda burns it. Looking for an escape from her married life and eager to exercise “power over human being,” Hedda encourages Lovborg to start drinking again, and hopes to see him “with vine leaves in his hair.” Lovborg gets drunk and misplaces his manuscript. Tesman is amazed: “The future! But good Lord, there’s nothing we know about that.” Yet, Lovborg, the romantic poet figure, seems to have access to knowledge about the future. Lovborg, a recovering alcoholic, has written a brilliant book “on the course of civilization-in all its stages.” More importantly, inspired by Thea Elvsted, Lovborg has completed the manuscript of a sequel, which carries the history of civilization into the future. Thea Elvsted arrives and announces the arrival of a more portentous visitor from the past, Eilert Lovborg, formerly a rival of Tesman’s and lover of Hedda’s. In the middle of the first act, an old school acquaintance, Mrs. Hedda is no conventionally virtuous heroine, but Ibsen treats her sympathetically, as a victim of forces beyond her control. Although Tesman keeps saying that Hedda is “filling out,” there is some doubt as to whether Hedda is pregnant at any rate, she prefers to deny it. The action begins after they return from their honeymoon to a grand villa, which Tesman has bought for Hedda on credit. Hedda, a general’s daughter who has had many admirers, marries a scholar of modest accomplishment, George Tesman. Even at this point in his career, Ibsen shows the influence of two popular dramatic forms of the nineteenth century, melodrama and the “well-made play.”
Hedda Gabler ( 1890) is the last of Henrik Ibsen’s realist plays, published at the height of his fame and performed all across Europe in the last decade of the nineteenth century.
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