Marriage, Love, Sexuality, and Jealousy Theme Analysis

Lӧvborg accuses Hedda of fearing scandal because she is a coward, and Hedda concedes that she is. But it is perhaps her marriage to the mediocre Tesman that represents the far greater concession to her cowardice. Hedda chose Tesman for his socioeconomic solidity and respectability, and also because her own “marriageability” was ebbing. She does not love him—she finds the very word “love” to be “glutinous” and “sickening”—nor is she even amused by him. It is with a sense of wry deprivation that she now anticipates being in his company at all times, in all seasons, consoled only by the fact that he stands to attain to the highest social distinction. For Hedda, then, marriage is a wretched compromise one has to make with one’s body and one’s society in order to live respectably and without scandal.

Hedda wants nothing to do with other men—at least sexually—either. Judge Brack repeatedly insinuates that he would like to be more than a trusted friend in the Tesman household, and he obliquely propositions Hedda. The passengers aboard the train of marriage jump out and move about a little, he suggests—meaning that people often and casually indulge in extramarital affairs. “I never jump out,” Hedda responds. Her fidelity to Tesman may be motivated by her aversion to scandal, but it may also be motivated, as many critics have suggested, by sexual frigidity and repression on Hedda’s part. She does tend to disengage from her male companions as soon as their relationship threatens to “develop into something more serious,” in her words, just as she did with Lӧvborg when the two were adolescents. Furthermore, she is ashamed when Tesman announces to Aunt Julle that she, Hedda, is pregnant—and she is perhaps also disgusted that anyone should have a reason to imagine her engaging in intercourse. Ibsen, however, leaves us few clues as to the cause and significance of Hedda’s sexuality. Perhaps she is disturbed by the fact that her destructive spirit is housed in a body capable of sexual reproduction, or perhaps she is merely unable to muster much more than egotism and hatred in relation to others.

While Hedda is evasive of her sexuality, she is readily and openly prone to jealousy. Her social world, after all, is fraught with love triangles: Judge Brack tries to get between Hedda and Tesman, Lӧvborg succeeds in getting between Mrs. Thea Elvsted and her husband, Hedda tries to get between Lӧvborg and Mrs. Elvsted, and so on. Hedda’s jealousy of Mrs. Elvsted, however, is not so much motivated by love as by a lust for power and influence over the fates of others. Indeed, Hedda seems to confuse the products of love and the products of power. For example, she thinks of Lӧvborg’s manuscript about the future as being his child, conceived by his helpmate and muse Mrs. Elvsted—and she burns this manuscript, murmuring as she does so, “Now I’m burning your child, Thea.” If the manuscript is Lӧvborg and Thea Elvsted’s labor of love, which Hedda’s jealousy destroys, Hedda in contrast conceives with Lӧvborg the idea of his courageous, beautiful suicide. It would seem that she is keen to produce only destruction, despite being literally pregnant herself.