Hedda Gabler Trivia Quiz

Answer: True

In 1889, while on a visit to Austria, the sixty year-old Ibsen was accosted by one Emilie Bardach, a pretty, spirited girl who had read many of his plays and dreamed of meeting him. She considered herself the embodiment of the "Ibsen Woman" as defined by the characters of Nora in "A Doll's House" and Rebecca in "Rosmersholm", among others. Ibsen was fascinated by the contradictions in her nature; though she considered herself a free spirit and defied society's conventions, she seemed perpetually bored and disinclined to use her considerable talents toward any creative end. It is believed that she was the prototype, not only for Hedda, but also for the character of Hilde Wangel, who appears in two Ibsen plays- "The Lady From the Sea" and "The Master Builder". Ibsen cut off all communication with Emilie early in 1890, when he began work on "Hedda Gabler", but he sent her a copy of the play as a Christmas gift later that year.

In addition to Emilie, other anecdotes which were related to Ibsen were used in the play. The story of a dissolute young professor who had lost a manuscript during a drunken debauch suggested the similar loss of Eilert Lovborg's manuscript, while the story of a composer's wife burning the manuscript of his just-completed symphony during a fit of jealous pique was transformed into Hedda's ritualistic burning of the work which Lovborg had told her was inspired by Mrs. Elvsted.

Answer: Father

General Gabler was not only a military man, but also an aristocrat. Tesman's Aunt Juliana remembers Hedda as a girl, proudly riding behind her father down the street, and is immensely proud that her nephew has succeeded in winning such a girl. Although Hedda's legal surname is Tesman, Ibsen used her maiden name as the title of the play.

He explained the title of the play thus: "My intention in giving it this name was to indicate that Hedda as a personality is to be regarded rather as her father's daughter than her husband's wife."

Answer: Autumn

The stage directions for Act I state that trees covered with autumn foliage can be seen through a glass door at the back of the stage. Later in the act, Hedda comments ruefully on the yellowing leaves outside, whereupon Tesman notes that it is already September.

Hedda's wistful comments regarding the change of season and the approaching end of the year reflect her restlessness over the dead-end that her life seems to have reached in her marriage to the pedestrian academic Tesman.

Answer: Her bonnet

In the first scene of the play, while Aunt Juliana is fussing over her adored nephew, Hedda notes with distaste that the servant (Berta) has carelessly left her old bonnet lying about. Before Hedda's entrance, Tesman had admired that very bonnet which, his aunt explained, had been newly purchased on Hedda's account, so that she would look appropriately elegant should they go for a walk together.

Hedda's remark causes her considerable consternation, and Hedda feigns dismay over her supposed faux pas (though she later admits to Judge Brack that she had known the bonnet to be Miss Tesman's, and took malicious delight in disparaging it). One suspects that Hedda perpetrates this supposed "gaffe" in an attempt to keep the well-meaning, but overly solicitous Aunt Juliana at a distance. If so, it fails in its purpose; before she leaves, Juliana takes Hedda's face in her hands and promises not to let a day go by without stopping in for a visit.

It is unclear whether she is truly oblivious to Hedda's calculated insult or whether she suspects her true motives and is determined to keep an eye on her, and indeed it can be played (and directed) either way.

Answer: Her hair

Thea is described upon her entrance as having unusually abundant flaxen, wavy hair. Hedda has referred to her beforehand as "The girl with the irritating hair that she was always showing off". In their schooldays, Hedda used to terrify Thea by pulling her hair and threatening to burn it off of her head, a fact which Thea mentions during their subsequent conversation.

Hedda laughs off her childhood threats, but near the end of the next act, when she sees the bond that has formed between Thea and Lovborg, she "playfully" reiterates her desire to burn Thea's hair, before practically dragging her in to tea.

Answer: That Lovborg has told her about his past relationship with Hedda.

Ironically, it is the timid Thea who has defied convention and left her husband in order to be the "muse" to the brilliant but unstable Lovborg. Additionally, Thea shows little concern for the scandal that her decision will create, a fact which astonishes Hedda.

She tells Hedda that she has reclaimed Lovborg from his dissolute habits and has assisted him in his work; a magnum opus on the future of civilization. She is, however, ignorant of Lovborg's previous romance with Hedda, though she does claim that the shadow of a woman from Lovborg's past continues to stand between them.

This woman had threatened to shoot him when they parted. She assumes this woman to be Mademoiselle Diana, who is discreetly referred to as a "red-haired singer", but who is pretty clearly a prostitute.

Thea is distressed to hear that Mlle Diana has returned to town, and fears that she will once again ensnare Lovborg; she little suspects that it is Hedda herself who will prove to be his downfall.

Answer: She fires a pistol at him.

Judge Brack had called upon the Tesmans the previous day, and at the beginning of the play, George mentions that he had secured very favorable terms for the purchase of their home. Brack's relationship with Hedda is an interesting one; they both belonged to the same circle of friends, and clearly enjoy each other's conversation.

At the same time, Brack seems intent upon dominating Hedda and she is just as intent upon not being dominated. The love/hate aspect of their relationship is illustrated by the bizarre manner in which Hedda greets Brack when he arrives: she aims and fires one of her father's pistols in his general direction.

Although Brack is a bit alarmed by this, he is clearly not unused to this quirk of Hedda's, and upon examining the pistol, mentions that he is very familiar with it. Brack seems to have been an admirer of Hedda's, whose feelings for her were stronger than she was able to reciprocate. Unable to win her affections, Brack sets about to possess her by manipulation, which seems to have been his motive in securing the villa for her and George.

Answer: She was in love with him.

Hedda complains to Brack about the unending tedium of her honeymoon with Tesman (who spent much of the time searching in library archives). When Brack mentions "love", Hedda makes an exclamation of disgust, and says "...don't use that sickening word!" When Brack asks why she did marry Tesman, she begins to say that she had "danced herself tired", and that her day was done, but she quickly repudiates that idea (which may be more true than she cares to admit).

She goes on to explain that Tesman was the only one of her admirers who had offered to provide for her, and that his respectability and correctness are above question.

Despite her restless and iconoclastic nature, Hedda nonetheless hides under the mantle of social approbation; she prefers to carry out her designs by stealth.

In this respect, she and Brack are exceptionally well-matched.

Answer: It threatened to develop into something more serious.

Hedda's relationship with Lovborg had been an intimate friendship, during which he came to regard her as his "confessor" and revealed to her things which he had previously shared with no one else. For her part, Hedda got a vicarious thrill listening to Lovborg's "confessions" regarding his most intimate feelings and his accounts of various debaucheries in which he had indulged himself. For Hedda, it was secretly exhilarating to receive these glimpses into a world which was forbidden to her (we may assume that, since her father- a military man- was alive at this time, and as she was living at home, her activities were rather strictly proscribed).

Unfortunately, Lovborg wanted to take their relationship beyond mere friendship, and came to have deeper feelings for Hedda.

She was uncomfortable with this development, probably because it threatened the stability of her own life, and actually regarded it as a betrayal.

Answer: She was afraid of scandal.

Hedda's genuine dread of the slightest hint of scandal is one of her chief characteristics, and stands in sharp contrast to her wild nature and thirst for adventure. She has no fear of firearms; in fact playing with her father's pistols is her chief form of entertaining, much to Tesman's dismay. We may assume that the strictness of her upbringing has inverted her personality, driving her to manipulate others into doing what she herself dares not do.

As we will see, her feelings for Lovborg will not prevent her from undermining his self-control and plotting his self-destruction.

Answer: That Thea had been terrified of losing him to another woman.

Knowing that Lovborg, with Mrs. Elvsted's support, has renounced his former vices, including alcohol, Hedda shrewdly (and ruthlessly) sets about to undermine his self-control and Thea's influence. She first points out to him that his refusal to touch alcohol has aroused the contempt of Judge Brack.

When this fails to work, she tries another track: seeing the unblinking trust that Lovborg has in Thea- a trust which he assumes she shares- she reminds Thea of their visit that morning, during which Thea had expressed her fear that the mysterious woman from Lovborg's past would come between them. Hurt and angered at this revelation of Thea's distrust, Lovborg seizes a glass of punch and, after a toast to Thea's health, empties it.

As Thea despairingly reproaches Hedda, Lovborg takes a second glass and downs it as well.

He is about to refill it, but Hedda stops him; she has succeeded in shaking his self-control, as well as his trust in Thea. Although he subsequently apologizes to Thea and seems to have regained control of himself, he has taken his first step on the path to self-destruction.

Answer: With vine leaves in his hair.

Hedda rejoices that she has broken what she sees as the enervating influence of Mrs. Elvsted on Eilert Lovborg. She has encouraged him to assert his true nature and return to the wild and unfettered lifestyle that he had formerly enjoyed. She assures Thea that Lovborg will return "with vine leaves in his hair, flushed and fearless." This suggests that she envisions Lovborg as the god Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and inspirer of ritual madness and ecstasy. Dionysus was also known as Eleutherios, the Liberator who freed men and women from their commonplace natures.

It is interesting to note that the female followers of Dionysus, the Maenads, symbolically destroyed and devoured their chosen deity in the form of a bull, whom they would tear apart and feast upon.

Hedda herself will destroy the very man she so idolizes, though not directly, and not in the idealistic manner she envisions. Despite her seeming hard-headedness, Hedda is surprisingly unrealistic in her view of Lovborg. She only knows of his former dissolute habits second-hand through their conversations of old; she has never seen them first-hand.

Her exalted and idealistic vision of the "liberated" Lovborg will end in bitter disillusionment.

Answer: That Lovborg had despaired over losing his manuscript.

Tesman reveals to Hedda that early on in the dinner party, Lovborg had read to him part of his new book. He waxes admiringly (and enviously) over his friend's genius, and remarks that it is all the more pitiable that Lovborg is incapable of moderation in his habits. Apparently the party at Judge Brack's had degenerated into an orgy (at least by Tesman's standards), and Lovborg ended up sufficiently drunk that he needed to be walked home. Tesman admits that he had lagged a bit behind the others, and had come upon Lovborg's manuscript, which he had carelessly dropped on the way. Tesman produces the manuscript and announces his intention to return it to Lovborg, who, in his state of inebriation, failed to notice that he had lost it.

Answer: She refuses to look upon sickness and death.

Poor Aunt Rina had apparently been an invalid for as long as anyone could remember. In Act I, when Aunt Juliana presents Tesman with his embroidered baby shoes, Tesman recalls fondly that Aunt Rina had embroidered them for him, despite the fact that she had been bedridden even then.

Hedda resolutely refuses to accompany Tesman to his aunt's deathbed; she states that she will not look upon sickness and death, and that she loathes all sorts of ugliness. This statement helps to explain her subsequent state of despair in Act. IV when she hears from Judge Brack the sordid and loathsome details of Lovborg's death.

Answer: Lovborg had been arrested at Mademoiselle Diana's.

Lovborg had eventually ended up at the rooms of Mademoiselle Diana, where he revived from his drunken stupor and apparently became rather amorous, until he realized that his manuscript was no longer in his possession. In a drunken rage, he accused her of having stolen it, and the two came to blows.

The police were called in, and in the ensuing fracas, Lovborg struck one of the constables on the head. He was taken to the police station, along with several others involved in the incident. Brack's story, which he claims to have gotten straight from the police, distresses Hedda, who laments out loud that Lovborg didn't have vine leaves in his hair, as she had imagined. Brack strongly suggests that she and Tesman should regard Lovborg as persona non grata in their home from this point on.

His reasons for this advice, as Hedda surmises, are not entirely motivated by prudence; with Lovborg out of the way, he (Brack) will become "...the only cock in the basket", an allusion to a possible adulterous relationship between them during Tesman's not infrequent absences.

Hedda will reiterate this allusion- with considerably different emphasis- at the end of the play.

Answer: To the murder of a child.

Lovborg cannot bear to tell Thea about the events of the previous night, and that he had lost the manuscript during a drunken debauch. He encourages her to forget about him, knowing that she will be dragged down with him in the scandal that is sure to ensue. When she refuses, he desperately lies to her that he had destroyed the manuscript by tearing it into pieces and throwing it into the fjord. Anguished, she compares this to the murder of a child- her and Lovborg's- and declares that it is all over between them.

Hedda, meanwhile, had locked the manuscript into the drawer of the writing-table, keeping mum about the fact that Tesman had discovered it the previous evening. Lovborg admits to her, in Mrs. Elvsted's absence, the truth about the previous evening and that he had lost, not destroyed the manuscript. He hints darkly to Hedda that there is nothing for him to do now but to end it all. Hearing this, Hedda presents him with a "memento": one of General Gabler's pistols, with which she had threatened to shoot him years before. She urges him to "do it beautifully."

Answer: "I am burning your child."

Hedda's concluding lines as she burns the manuscript are addressed to Thea Elvsted: "Now I am burning your child, Thea!- Burning it, curly-locks! Your child and Eilert Lovborg's. I am burning- I am burning your child." Lovborg had earlier told Hedda that "Thea's pure soul was in that book.", a remark which must have caused her considerable pain as it makes clear that his feelings for Thea are greater than Hedda would have liked to believe. Unable to inspire him either romantically or artistically, Hedda resolves to destroy both him and his work, which both he and Thea had come to regard as their "love-child".

After sending him off to destroy himself, she herself consigns the culmination of his life's work to the flames. The scene of Hedda sitting by the fire (a distinctly Satanic touch), gradually feeding the pages to the flames while uttering those chilling final lines is one of the greatest moments in all of theatre.

Answer: That she did it for his sake.

Hedda knows that Tesman will want to inform Lovborg that the manuscript is in his possession. To explain its absence she shrewdly admits to him that she had burned it, but that she did so for his own sake (the script specifies that she says this "Suppressing an almost imperceptible smile").

She tells him that she could not bear the thought of anyone putting him in the shade. This convinces Tesman that Hedda truly loves him, and the effect of this conviction on his typically staid, plodding demeanor provides a moment of high comedy before the tragic and shocking denouement of the play. Tesman is further overjoyed when Hedda hints that she is pregnant (something she had intimated to Aunt Juliana at the beginning of the act). Whether or not this is actually true is the source of some dispute; in the beginning of the play, Tesman calls attention several times (and much to Hedda's annoyance) that she has "filled out".

This may intimate that she is with child, or merely that she has put on some weight (out of boredom?); in either case, Hedda is clearly uncomfortable with the suggestion.

Answer: That it was, in fact, a murder-suicide.

The shooting was not a murder-suicide- only Lovborg has died-, nor was it even a suicide (though it might possibly have been a murder). Judge Brack has gotten the full details of the shooting from a contact of his from the police department. To Hedda's increasing horror and loathing, he reveals that Lovborg is, in fact, already dead, and that the shooting was not a suicide, but accidental.

When Lovborg left Hedda he did not return to his rooms, but to Mademoiselle Diana's, where he demanded the return of his "lost child" (the manuscript), believing that she had stolen it.

He took out the pistol, possibly to threaten her with, and either it discharged accidentally, or was wrested away from him by Mlle Diana, who shot him with it and then returned it to his breast pocket.

In any case, the bullet lodged, not in his breast, but in his bowels. Hedda is appalled at the revolting details of what she had thought would be a glorious and noble act, and is even more dismayed when she learns that she will inevitably be dragged into the scandal, since Brack has recognized the pistol as being one of her own.

It is bound to come out either that Lovborg stole the pistol from her, or that she gave it to him herself. Her only hope to avoid the scandal she so terribly dreads, as Judge Brack clearly intimates to her, is to place herself completely at his disposal and under his control, in return for which he will keep his knowledge of the ownership of the pistol to himself. Hedda is horrified by the choice offered to her, and declares that she can never endure the thought of being under Brack's control. Brack dismisses her statements; shrewd and intuitive though he is, he is unable to fathom quite how desperate and distraught his revelations have made her.

Answer: Judge Brack

After her conversation with Judge Brack, Hedda notes that Tesman and Thea are already making considerable progress in reconstructing Lovborg's magnum opus from the notes that Thea had saved. She goes to the back room, draws the curtain, and is heard playing wild dance music until the shocked Tesman begs her to stop.

She then hears Tesman say that he is planning to ensconce Thea at his aunt Juliana's, in the room left vacant by the death of aunt Rina, and that he intends to visit her each evening in order to work on the new manuscript (which, given the absence of Lovborg's creative spirit and the intrinsic dullness of Tesman's, can only be a pallid skeleton of the original work).

When Hedda asks how she is to get through the evenings alone, the typically obtuse Tesman absently suggests that Judge Brack will be happy to look in on her now and again.

The latter pointedly assures him that he will be only too happy to comply, adding "We shall get on capitally together, we two!" With heavy irony, Hedda replies "Yes, don't you flatter yourself we will, Judge Brack? Now that you are the one cock in the basket-".

A pistol shot punctuates this sentence; Tesman assumes that she is playing with the pistols again. Drawing back the curtain to the back room, he is horrified to see that she has shot herself in the temple. The final line of the play is uttered by Judge Brack who, for once, is in a state of complete shock and is badly shaken: "Good God!- people don't do such things!" Hedda's final act is to defy the control he believes he has won over her. It is also, along with the burning of the manuscript, one of only two occasions in the play in which she acts directly, rather than manipulating things- and people- to suit her purposes. Significantly, both of these acts are destructive, in the case of the suicide, self-destructive.