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Has anyone else noticed that the beautiful Hedda Gabler seeks everything but ends up with nothing, while Thea Elvstead has chosen to leave everything that Hedda values. Thea comes to the city empty-handed - financially, ethically and socially - but triumphs beautifully as Hedda suicides.
Thea and Hedda are such opposites of each other that I suppose we should expect her to succeed marvelously as Hedda ends up dead. Moreover, it is arguably Hedda's cowardice when it comes to her fear of scandal, a quality Thea completely lacks, which is her undoing.
Opposites include Tesman as opposed to Lovborg or Brack.
Lovborg's dead with a bullet in the bowel, Brack's triangular relationship is also dead, but the naive Jorgen Tesman ends up like Joseph with the virgin Mary (his homeless old-flame) and the reborn messianic child in the humble, family home of the aged prophetess (Juli)Anna. Two beautiful acts: Hedda's bloody bullet through the temple and her orphan husband's nascent nativity.
Quote:
HEDDA.___You, George? Your life?
I don't think Brack really functions that much as a foil to Tesman. He's certainly immoral and an unpleasant man, but I see him more as an extension of the controlling patriarchal figure of Hedda's father the general.
Certainly Tesman and Lovborg are foils
We have the Hedda, Lovborg past relationship that connects them as well as the Tesman, Thea relationship.
Then there are the present relationships:
We have Lovborg and Thea with their child the unpublished manuscript.
And Hedda and Tesman with their unborn child.
Hedda attempts to "murder" the child of Thea and Lovborg by burning it, and it seems just wonderfully symmetrical for that child to be reborn when Hedda kills herself and her unborn child. Of course, this is another failure of Hedda's attempt to control the world and people around her, she can't even succeed at destroying a manuscript.
Pairs play a large part in this play, the two aunts, the two academics, the two women, the two children, and of course the two pistols that do Hedda and Lovborg in.
I see Tesman and Thea, the only two with fair hair, as meek and honest people who are creating something beautiful in Ibsen's Nordic world. By contrast the pillars of society - General Gabler, Hedda, Brack and a rejuvenated Lovborg - operate ostentatiously while achieving little of lasting integrity.Quote:
Originally Posted by OrphanPip
An interesting insight. And there are even more pairs: two lacking parents (Tesman and Thea); two draft manuscripts (one on medieval basket weaving); Lovborg’s two old flames (Hedda and the redhead); two beautiful deaths (Aunt Rina's and Hedda's); two homes (Tesman's happy childhood home and Secretary Falk’s house smelling of death).Quote:
Originally Posted by OrphanPip