— Anonymous
I have read Hedda Gabler previously, but I went back to the text to refresh my memory to write this. I thought it would be easy, given I have so much time to read during the quarantine. However, I find it difficult to do much of any classwork at home. I would usually read on the train or at school, maybe at a Starbucks, because the home environment is often not good for getting work done. I did not get very far into my second reading, but in that time, I have thought about men writing women characters. I thought Hedda Gabler was a story of a woman who was a feminist, but I sometimes wonder if a man can truly understand how it is to be a woman, simply because they are not living as one. The name of the play is Hedda Gabler, and Ibsen wrote that his intention was for the character Hedda was her father’s daughter, rather than the husband’s wife. I think this is well displayed throughout the play, because she isn’t so much a fan of her husband, and she is not only used to a higher class life that having a General as a father provided, but she also “played around” with her father’s guns. I think that these parts of Hedda still point to her being like her father or being connected to her father. From a modern perspective I would say that feminism should not be aimed at women being more masculine, but more towards freedom and equal access. Perhaps during that time being masculine was feminism, but I do think that the “freedom” of the modern feminism came with the ending, with Hedda killing herself. Perhaps this goes further than all these things, and great works are great because you have to read it multiple times. Maybe Ibsen was commenting on how the things that some people desire, like Hedda, seem out of the ordinary, but we should be asking why, what you want is considered ordinary. That is the question that makes this a great work to me.
