Hedda Gabler

Jørgen Tesman is Hedda’s husband. He is an academic and an aspiring professor at the beginning of the play. He hopes that when he gets his professorship, he will be able to provide a life of luxury for Hedda. Tesman does not come from the kind of wealth and influence that Hedda does. He is somewhat in awe of her. He knows that his peers must be jealous of him, as Hedda had many suitors before him. Tesman sees Hedda as a symbol of his upward social mobility. 

Since marrying Hedda, his social status has changed. His aunts are proud of him, and he feels that he has to make his career reflect his new status. He has gone into debt in order to buy the house that Hedda supposedly always wanted and to present the image of the two of them as the perfect, happily married couple. In reality, he and Hedda actually have very little in common. Hedda has no interest in Tesman’s academic pursuits and Tesman cannot find any real point of connection to his new wife. He wants Hedda to connect with Juliane so that they will appear to be the perfect family, but does not recognize that Hedda and Juliane fundamentally do not understand each another. He ignores her obvious feelings of isolation from his happy family. This demonstrates his inability to see Hedda as her own person, not just an extension of him. Tesman does not see that Hedda has her own thoughts and feelings, even when Hedda is obvious about her dislike for Juliane.

The only person that Tesman is really able to connect with is Mrs. Elvsted, and only at the very end of the play when they choose to recreate Ejlert’s work from his notes. Their connection is primarily an academic one, though it is also in some ways a continuation of the relationship between Mrs. Elvsted and Ejlert. The play ends before Tesman and Mrs. Elvsted can begin an affair, as Mrs. Elvsted and Ejlert did while working on the manuscript, but there is an implication that this might be where their relationship is heading. Hedda is once again left outside of things.

Mrs. Elvsted is a nervous and shy young woman who went to the same school as Hedda when they were teenagers. She is unhappily married to a man more than a decade her senior who already has children from his first marriage. Like Hedda, Mrs. Elvsted has very little power and control over her own life. She forms a connection with Ejlert when he tutors her stepchildren. Their relationship is purely intellectual at first, but they eventually begin an affair. Mrs. Elvsted acts a foil to Hedda. Where Hedda would never allow herself to become a man’s helper, Mrs. Elvsted is content to support Ejlert with his academic career, even though she knows that as a woman, she will never get any credit for her contributions. In the personal relationship between Hedda and Mrs. Elvsted, Hedda maintains control by gently threatening and manipulating Mrs. Elvsted. 

This dichotomy gets flipped on its head over the course of the play. Hedda realizes that in fact Mrs. Elvsted is the one who has control of her own life. She has made the choice to leave her husband and be with Ejlert, despite what people might say. She does not let the potential of scandal stop her from going after the thing she wants: a life with Ejlert where she can help his academic career and contribute her own ideas. This makes Hedda furious: She values her autonomy, but she is also unwilling to be the subject of scandal. Hedda cannot escape the Constraints of Social Convention that Mrs. Elvsted has decided to free herself from.

Ejlert is a former colleague of Tesman’s and Hedda’s former lover. He is a disgraced academic whose alcohol addiction cost him his job. At the beginning of the play, he has returned to town following the publication of his first book. Ejlert is not proud of this book, despite its critical acclaim, as it does not reflect his true academic theories. He is obsessed with the manuscript of his next book, which he believes will be his great success. Ejlert puts so much importance on his manuscript that when he loses it, he likens it to losing a child. The manuscript is his and Mrs. Elvsted’s “child,” as Mrs. Elvsted helped him work on it. To Ejlert, losing the manuscript is worse than destroying it, because it demonstrates a lack of care and deliberate action, which Ejlert abhors. 

Despite having begun an affair with Mrs. Elvsted, Ejlert is still in love with Hedda. He is horrified that Hedda has married Tesman, as he believes that she has thrown herself away. Ejlert laments that she did not kill him when she ended their relationship. During Hedda and Ejlert’s relationship, Ejlert was in the midst of his fall from respectability. He drank a lot and had wild ideas that made him very exciting to Hedda but fundamentally ineligible. It would have been a great scandal for her to marry him, and so she chose instead to break it off and marry Tesman. Despite this decision, Hedda still wishes to control Ejlert and his fate, and as he is still deeply in love with her, this is easy for her to do. She maintains a great deal of power over him and believes that when she tells him to shoot himself, he will listen to her. What Hedda does not realize is that Ejlert is not as in control of himself as she wants him to be. Though Hedda and Ejlert both value determination and self-control, Ejlert does not demonstrate these ideals in his own life.

Brack is the closest thing that Hedda Gabler has to an antagonist. He, like Ejlert, is Hedda’s former lover. He is now a powerful man, and he has never married. Brack’s primary motivation is rekindling his relationship with Hedda, even though she is now married to Tesman. Brack wants what he calls a “triangular relationship” where Tesman is his close friend and Hedda is his mistress. Hedda is attracted to Brack, but she has no intention of being unfaithful to Tesman because she has already decided to fit herself into the role of a wife. Brack and Hedda have interesting conversations together, but Brack wants more. Their close relationship allows Hedda a bit of leeway: She can speak honestly about her marriage, which she cannot do with her husband.

Like Hedda, Brack wants to control other people. He relishes the idea of having some way to keep Hedda under his thumb. He agrees to keep quiet about the origin of the pistol because he knows it will put Hedda in his debt. Tesman and Juliane are also in his debt: He was the one who arranged the sale of the Falk villa, and he persuaded Juliane to mortgage her annuities to secure the furniture. Brack’s biggest mistake is that he underestimates Hedda. He believes that she will allow him to control her and that she will agree to his terms. He openly disbelieves her when she says that she would rather die. In the end, Hedda proves Brack right. She refuses to let him control her, and the play ends with Brack’s utter disbelief.