Reflective Statement 400 word

Upon reading Hedda Gabler, I was particularly intrigued by the social imbalance evident in the text,
through characters such as Hedda and Miss Tesman. In the interactive oral, I discovered that in the
1880’s, Norway experienced a tumultuous political revolution, and in 1882, the Norwegian Storting
was reformed, after the Industrial Revolution of the 1840’s, which preceded exponential industrial
growth from 1850–1880. In the class discussion, we conferred that the social snobbery that this
change elicited could have been the muse for the social struggle that Ibsen depicts in Hedda Gabler,
and that the industrial revolution perpetuated the emergence of a culture of societal exploitation. This
tension is reflected through characters such as Hedda and Thea who have an urge to dominate and
control one another.

Given that Ibsen wrote Hedda Gabler in 1890, when Norway was rife with this social change, we
began to question the extent to which Ibsen was influencing social change. Through the interactive
oral, I learnt that he was a liberal progressivist, an influencer, and then considered the text as a
reflection of his political motives. He makes sparse biblical references, reflecting his modernist
support for the increasingly secular society at the time. His themes of female identity, wealth, and
addiction would have been shockingly controversial to the hypocritical society at the time, but equally
reflected its new surfacing ideologies. One such ideology was female suffrage, and in 1884, Ibsen
signed a mass petition for women’s suffrage. Clearly, his feminist activism was a political motive
underlying his presentation of female entrapment and conformism of Hedda and Thea in the play.

As we learnt in the oral, Ibsen is considered the ‘father of dramatic realism’ and influenced other
writers such as James Joyce, who exposed the stagnation of Irish society in ‘Dubliners’. We realised
that Ibsen believed that the key to educational theatre was in relatability, as an audience could
subconsciously superimpose the play upon their daily lives. Potentially, this was the intent of his
painstakingly specific stage directions; an attempt at making the text a dramatic reflection of the
private dilemmas of a Norwegian reader’s daily life at the time.

To conclude, the interactive oral gave me a deeper contextual understanding of the key themes
underlying Hedda Gabler. I now see how it was considered shockingly controversial when it
premiered on 31st Jan 1891, and comprehend Ibsen’s influence upon Norwegian Society through the
play.