I finished Hedda Gabler, and now in my mind’s ear I hear these Russian men saying “Hedda!” over and over again. This is repeated within the play numerous times, both in admonishment and in fondness.  Off-the-cuff I’d say she is a real bitch, or a caricature, or trouble.  She doesn’t give much, just reacts to the statements others make about her. She denies everything. Denies love, denies pregnancy, denies friendship, denies lust. I suppose you could interpret her as being a woman held in the bonds of social norms whose only power is in refusal. It is a subtle protest, I suppose, but the problem is that the more she refuses, the less options she has until she starts to feel a surging insanity growing within her.

So, her disempowerment leads her to follow the age-old tradition and disempower others. She punishes those around her who know what they want and who have the motivation and freedom to grasp their desire. She does not understand her own actions and is almost compulsed to hurt happy people.  In the play, we watch Hedda attempt to destroy lives and spirits.  But she is thwarted in the end and finds that her destructive actions only ultimately serve to destroy herself, and as she blows her brains out in her one, single, directed and as she would say, “beautiful and meaningful” action, she frees her community from her manipulative influence.

Obviously, I saw it as a happy ending. I had little patience for Hedda and her nasty comments and not-so-subtle manipulations of lesser people.  I was thrilled when her husband found a new relationship, project, and purpose for his life.  Hedda, though she denied it, was one of those wild girls who partied all night long and had many trysts with many men, always searching for that one true love or one true thing or, if she were modern, a high to match the first one. Or maybe she just wished she was, and maybe the men were attracted to her purity and inner darkness.  Then one day she decided she’d had enough and settled down with the first decent guy with a good earning potential. And found herself bored with the pleasant life. So she racks up the credit bills and loses herself in aesthetics and dreams of finding a purpose.

She could be any of us.

Except, she has no concept of freedom. She has never been free to choose her life, because she is terrified of society and its censure.  She has never been in control of herself, her body or her impulses. She cannot see a way towards light. She is not free to determine who she is, because everyone is constantly telling her what and how and who she must be.

And she has this romantic ideal of what a life worth living is. She dreams of something that only exists in moments.  She has no sense of how to achieve truly beautiful moments, and the only one she can imagine is one in which she herself is obliterated.

At any rate, this is what I have been reading and I’m really quite glad to see Hedda go to the great beyond.  I wonder how inner emptiness can lead one to destructive behaviour.  And I wonder if she resonates because we all feel a little empty while we (mostly) blindly follow the deerpaths society has left us, getting our day jobs and making our nightly dinners, going out on friday or saturday nights and then the store, back to the grindstone. And maybe we all want to be there for those fleeting, beautiful moments when we feel truly alive.

But, I don’t have to play with pistols or blow my brains out to get there. I’ve got prisms in my window and every sunny day after work around the time dinner is made, rainbows dance on my walls and in the corners of the hallway for a mere magical half hour before they fade away as the sun moves in its own ascribed pattern.