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Henrik Ibsen
Introduction
Hedda Gabler, drama in four acts by Henrik Ibsen, published in 1890 and produced the following year. The work reveals Hedda Gabler as a selfish, cynical woman bored by her marriage to the scholar Jørgen Tesman. Her father’s pair of pistols provide intermittent diversion, as do the attentions of the ne’er-do-well Judge Brack. When Thea Elvestad, a longtime acquaintance of Hedda’s, reveals that she has left her husband for the writer Ejlert Løvborg, who once pursued Hedda, the latter becomes vengeful. Learning that Ejlert has forsworn liquor, Hedda first steers him to a rowdy gathering at Brack’s and subsequently burns the reputedly brilliant manuscript that he loses there while drunk. Witnessing his desperation, she sends him one of the pistols and he shoots himself. Brack deduces Hedda’s complicity and demands that she become his mistress in exchange for his silence about the matter. Instead, she ends her ennui with the remaining pistol. The work is remarkable for its nonjudgmental depiction of an immoral, destructive character, one of the most vividly realized women in dramatic literature.
Audiobook
- Librivox. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://librivox.org/Librivox provides free public domain audiobooks read by volunteers from around the world. Simply search for 'Hedda Gabler' and download the zipped file to listen. Files are in MP3 format.
Playwright Biography
- Henrik Ibsen. (2015). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from http://school.eb.com.au.db.plcscotch.wa.edu.au/levels/high/article/41947Henrik Ibsen, in full Henrik Johan Ibsen, (born March 20, 1828, Skien, Norway—died May 23, 1906), was a major Norwegian playwright of the late 19th century who introduced to the European stage a new order of moral analysis that was placed against a severely realistic middle-class background and developed with economy of action, penetrating dialogue, and rigorous thought.
Senior Library Books
- Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler byCall Number: 839.8226 HENISBN: 9780415238199Publication Date: 2003-09-29Since Hedda Gabler exploded on to European and American stages in the 1890s, the play and its title character have troubled and transfixed audiences, performers and critics the world over. This sourcebook balances essential reprinted texts with incisive commentary to: set the play within the contexts of Norwegian nationalism, the women's movement and the cultural movement of Naturalism; examine and emphasize the links between the performance and criticism of the play, from 1890 onwards; offer a guide to key passages in the play, showing how a knowledge of the play's contexts, performance history and critical fortunes can give rise to exciting new readings of the text; and prepare readers for further study of the play, with suggestions for reading on specific issues of interest.
- Hedda Gabler and Other Plays byCall Number: 839.8226 IBSISBN: 9780140440164Publication Date: 1951-03-30In these three unforgettably intense plays, Henrik Ibsen explores the problems of personal and social morality that he perceived in the world around him and, in particular, the complex nature of truth. The Pillars of the Community (1877) depicts a corrupt shipowner's struggle to hide the sins of his past at the expense of another man's reputation, while in The Wild Duck (1884) an idealist, believing he must tell the truth at any cost, destroys a family by exposing the lie behind his friend's marriage. And Hedda Gabler (1890) portrays an unhappily married woman who is unable to break free from the conventional life she has created for herself, with tragic results for the entire family.