Complicated

The article ‘Hedda as “Modern Woman”’ by William Archer is an analysis of Hedda’s character in Hedda Gabler. The review highlights some interesting points about Hedda being a modern woman because she is so indefinable and unpredictable. The author writes that modern women are full of the ‘pettinesses, the peculiarities, the inconsistencies, the contradictions’ that we are today. Hedda is described as weak and strong, capricious and determined, petty and powerful, yet always herself, always real. This writer sees Hedda as someone complicated and yet beautiful. He has a point when he says that the various aspects to her make her a real person that is hard to define in one term like Shakespeare’s heroines.

When I read the book I personally just thought that Hedda was a bad person, a mean person. She strives to manipulate everyone around her and doesn’t care if anyone gets hurt. She sticks to her beliefs, yes, but who in their right mind would actually go so far as to give a gun to someone and tell them to ‘make it beautiful’. She is happy when she hears that Lövborg killed himself and sad when she hears that he didn’t do it intentionally. She clearly has some kind of psychological problem that she doesn’t know how to deal with. She shoots herself, not considering the baby that she carries in her belly. I understand that people would go to extremes to not be dependent of a man, but who willingly kills their baby too? She is someone who is too arrogant and too self-obsessed to compromise and talk about thinks or figure things out before taking action. She doesn’t know what it means to love someone and she doesn’t know what it means to get over something. A minute a woman shows interest in a man that she had long forgotten, she willing goes and destroys her life. She seriously has some issues. I know that she is a complex and interesting character that deserves that she is analyzed and understood and found fascinating but I just cannot relate to her. It seems as though she doesn’t know what she wants either: she fools around and as William Archer says, is sometimes weak, sometimes strong and above all contradictory. If she was so true to her beliefs and motifs, she shouldn’t be so flaky.