Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler premiered a touch over 130 years ago and introduced to us a “wicked, diseased, disagreeable woman” (James), “a true type of degeneration” (Brandes), “the most reviled woman in literature” (Bloom).

When I was younger and dumber, I took up a minor in literature thinking I’d be a literary critic someday (ha!), but absolutely hated the coursework. Especially feminist and Marxist readings. New Criticism/formalist readings were more my style but after hearing my instructor scoff at Russian formalism and realising that she had no interest in letting us explore it, I dropped out.

The final assignment I wrote was on Hedda Gabler and just to humour the lecturer, I did a feminist reading. At that time feminism to me was liberal feminism and I despised it. (I was also passing myself off as a man in some places – a typical internally misogynistic female considering social transitioning.) So, I didn’t exactly open my copy of the play with great enthusiasm.

But boy did Hedda catch my attention from the get-go with her cold eyes and “not particularly abundant” hair and insouciant tone and pistols and dry humour, her disavowal of her role as a woman and refusal to acquiesce to societal imposition. She chooses radical freedom instead of ignoble submission. In The Second Sex, de Beauvoir spends a page describing a character from The Constant Nymph and I think parts of her description also fit Hedda perfectly: “When she does not find love, she may find poetry. Because she does not act, she observes, she feels, she records; a colour, a smile awakens profound echoes within her; her destiny is outside her, scattered in cities already built, on the faces of men already marked by life, she makes contact, she relishes with passion and yet in a manner more detached, more free, than that of a young man.” (emphasis mine)

Sure, she’s manipulative and remorseless, but she also has intellectual refinement, artistic sensibility, strength of spirit, and self-respect and the vehemence of criticism levied against her shocked me. To see her being accused of cowardice, evil, moral barrenness, betraying the feminist cause – every monstrosity, it seems – is to me a complete dismissal of, on a textual level, the layers of complexity Ibsen gave her as a character through dialogue, body language, proxemics, etc., and, on a broader level, of the complexity of being a woman.

Reading Hedda Gabler and the associated literature I needed to write my essay, I realised that there was a lot more to feminism than I’d thought there was. I reread it regularly and notice with each time how my response to it changes and how that reflects my maturation and growth. I still empathise with Tesman more and would rather meet Lovborg in person than Hedda, but this play is special to me in many ways.

Welp, that’s my self-indulgent spiel. I could talk more about it but would then probably need to pay Ovarit's server upgrade fees. Has anyone else read it? What did you think?