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How Spatial Confinement Reveals Hedda's Feelings of Oppression - Hedda Gabler Lit Analysis


tiffal 1 / 1  
May 29, 2015   #1
This essay is a lit analysis on the play Hedda Gabler and the role that spatial confinement plays in it.

Spatial confinement. Psychological confinement. Societal confinement. Throughout Hedda Gabler, Hedda wrestles with these inner and outer forces, ultimately losing the battle and killing herself. Restricted to her role as the dutiful and obedient housewife, Hedda struggles to make sense of her life - a life that she views as boring, but a life that she is nonetheless expected to live. Unwilling to abandon her life yet enclosed within the social expectations of her, Hedda constantly finds herself challenging her pre-established role in her life through her muffled pinings for escape. Yet, despite her lofty expectations for her life to be perfect, all her hopes end up as disappointments. Failing to resign herself to her trappings and assimilate into her role, Hedda loses the battle for her life and at last finds the escape and liberty that she has looked for all her life in death. Throughout the play, Hedda's confinement in her house reveals her struggle with her feelings of oppression as a woman and wife.

With a constant calm and reserved facade, Hedda Gabler seems like an imperturbable character that, though aloof at times, remains amicable. Confronted with Miss Tesman's affection and hug, Hedda "gently [frees] herself" and lightly objects with a "Oh-! Let me go" (231). Ibsen's depiction of Hedda with soft and gentle actions maintains her expected demeanor as a polite and taciturn wife that is grateful to her aunt-in-law and supports her husband. However, as light as Hedda's response is, her message clearly belies her docile attitude. While these actions raise little suspicion with the other characters of Mr. Tesman and Miss Tesman, who still believe that Hedda is the perfect niece and wife, Hedda's response to Miss Tesman shows her slight annoyance with the display of affection. Uncomfortable with the situation, Hedda tries to escape Miss Tesman with as much finesse as possible. Yet, caught off guard by the unwanted physical attention, Hedda's facade slightly falters and her underlying feelings are revealed. Through Ibsen's use of short declarations, Hedda's reaction to Miss Tesman's love all but shows Hedda's averseness to the situation, Mr. Tesman and his family.

As perturbed as Hedda is with Mr. Tesman and Miss Tesman, it is when Hedda is left in the room alone that her true frustration with her life manifests itself. "Raising her arms and clenching her fists as if in a frenzy", Hedda finally loses her carefully cultured calmness and lets her emotions inundate herself and the room (231). Trapped within a society that frowns upon assertive and opinionated females, Hedda has been forced to resolve herself to the situation and act the part of the docile wife, hiding her emotions and enveloping her opinions under layers of cultivated feigned complacency. With everyone gone, the room becomes a sanctuary for Hedda to divulge her true vehement ire towards her situation and provides a look into Hedda's inner mind. The stage directions and Hedda's physically aggressive movements reveal her suppressed feelings of oppression that she dare not express in front of company and show the exasperated face behind the looking glass. Through Hedda's near temper tantrum, Ibsen divulges her true anger towards her trappings, towards her role as a wife, and towards her role as a proper woman.

The room is a physical trap, and it represents Hedda's psychological and societal limitations as a woman who can't escape her designated role. It serves as a parallel to her battles with the expectations of her to be a complacent and unassertive wife. As Hedda "moves about the room...[and] flings back the curtains from the glass door," she is also flinging back the curtains of the expectations in her life (231). Looking out the window, Hedda sees the possibilities of another life, a freer life where nothing is expected of her and she can live and act how she desires. Nevertheless, she does not go outside and she does not leave behind her orthodox life. The act of opening the curtains is the physical manifestation of Hedda's longing for escape and her struggle to reconcile her desires for freedom with her struggle to escape the oppressiveness of the room of behavioral constraints. Hedda struggles to free herself both mentally and physically from the confinements in her life. As Hedda paces about the room, she demonstrates the inner quandary that she faces in her struggle to escape and to live within this room that she so restlessly wants to leave.

However, as soon as her husband returns to the room, Hedda "again calm and controlled" plays the role of the pristine wife perfectly as she replies nonchalantly to her husband's question about what she was looking at outside with "I'm just looking at the leaves" (231). Completely juxtaposing her earlier pensive, even existential, behavior towards her role in her life, Hedda has once again adopted her perfected facade of the supportive and placid vanilla wife. The stage directions dictating her calmness and the way that she speaks and the content of her words, or lack thereof, all go to reinforce her consummate front - the same front that she adopted with Miss Tesman. Unable to communicate with her oblivious husband, who for the most part is satisfied with his role in life, Hedda instead says something about the seemingly meaningless topic of leaves - something that he understands and expects from Hedda as a woman. Nevertheless, the casual afterthought about the withered state of the leaves being "so yellow - and so withered" discloses Hedda's inner feelings of decrepitude from years of being trapped in her role as a woman (231). Even though so blatantly said, Hedda's drawing of parallels between herself and the leaves evokes no reaction or response from her naive husband, who still believes that his wife is happy in her situation. The ignorance of her husband and his failure to comprehend anything but her homemaker behavior further demonstrates Hedda's feelings of oppression in her house. Even in her own house with her own husband, she cannot speak freely about her hopelessness and instead has to suppress her emotions.

Just as Hedda is confined to this house because of her marriage and her role as a proper wife and homemaker, so she is confined to the frame of expected docile behavior because she is a woman. When Hedda realizes that she has already been with her husband for months and will continue to remain there for an interminable amount of time, she is "once more restless" (231). The depiction of Hedda's behavior once again shows her earnest longing to leave her role, her life, and her marriage. She is not only contesting with her physical environment in her movement about the room, but also with the psychological confinements that she and the other people in her life have been conditioned to live within from the day she was born. Hedda simply does not know how to face this situation and cannot do anything about it. Unable to accept her life but unable to escape, Hedda "[leaves] the glass door" and continues to dutifully live her life (231).

Designated roles. They cage us mentally and physically. Although this play dealt primarily with the archaic limitations and trappings of a woman in Victorian times, it also appealed to the enclosures and struggles that we all face from time to time in our lives - the cages and roles that we are forced to adopt and live in because of the still persisting expectations. For Hedda, her role as a wife and a woman constricted her in her house. No matter how passionately she wanted to escape her feelings and her role, Hedda was confined by ossified expectations in both her and the people around who never truly understood or heard her and could never help her. Hedda instead imprinted her emotions on the unseeing and unlistening walls of the very rooms that she was confined in. Even though Hedda lived in a luxurious house and had a luxurious life, this house was merely a reflection of her feelings. Just as the house and her husband were trapped in debt, so Hedda was trapped in her luxurious life with nowhere to go and no one to save her. Hedda was bound to her life with ropes that could only be burned by the spark of a pistol.

Works Cited:
Ibsen, Henrik. Hedda Gabler. Trans. Rolf Fjelde. New York: Signet Classics. 2006. Print.
lcturn87 - / 435 236  
May 29, 2015   #2
I have given some suggestions that could help you in your analysis. Here are a few suggestions that I think maybe helpful:

Personally, I think you should form a whole sentence in the beginning stating how Hedda is faced with spatial confinement. When you mention the other two types of confinement, it seems as if the whole topic changes. I was unsure of the meaning, "vanilla wife", so I looked up the term. I would avoid using this because there are too many renderings of this term. Simply, stating that she tries to be the supportive wife will suffice.

I would form a new sentence when you begin the last paragraph. You can use a transition word in the beginning to make a smoother transition into discussing your analysis of the story. I feel that you don't have to use the word enclosure, but using struggles is a better way to describe the difficulties that people face in their daily lives. Also, you mention that the house was trapped in debt. There is an expression that discusses how the "weight of debt hovers over a person". Do you feel this adequately describes the situation? You could end the essay just by stating "...her untimely death".
OP tiffal 1 / 1  
May 30, 2015   #3
Is the analysis written well overall?


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