How Are Oppression and Repression Represented in Hedda Gabler?

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How are oppression and repression represented in Hedda Gabler? The play Hedda Gabler represents both repression and oppression, symbolised through objects and people. Hedda lives an affluent and elegant lifestyle, the room being described as one with “handsomely and tastefully chosen furnishings”. The description of the furnishings and decor in the first paragraph represents the conflict and oppression Hedda feels between the middle class and aiming to be upper class.
This can also be found by the clothes she wears, conforming to fashion and mimicking her view of how an upper class woman should manifest herself.
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“Oh it was a little episode with Miss Tesman this morning. She had laid down her bonnet on the chair there –looks at him and smiles- and I pretended to think it was a servant’s”. The fact that Hedda used this to her own enjoyment suggests a sense of immaturity.
The colour scheming and accentuation on dark colours puts emphasis on the oppressive nature of the room, and the lack of imaginative scope that is mirrored in Hedda’s confined mind “an opal glass shade”, “a wide stove of dark porcelain”.

Ibsen creates a controlled setting in which we are described, the conforming room, the expensive furnishings and decor, interprets to both the reader or audience the idea that Hedda is a prisoner, perhaps a prisoner in her own mind.
An interesting point from this idea is the fact that Hedda’s “mistreatment” would have been used as the norm for a woman of her day.
She seems to have everything she could ever wish for “…But you saw what pile of boxes Hedda had to bring with her”, and Hedda’s view of restriction that Ibsen creates, as well as the feelings of oppression seems almost selfish to the reader, and so to her rebellion of this heightens her ensnared situation. In the preliminary paragraph used to set the scene at the opening of the play, Ibsen depicts the room to have “glass doors with the curtains drawn back”. The sun shines in through the glass door” represents how Hedda looks longingly to the outside world, yearning for a life beyond the boundaries of hers. The interesting fact is that they are doors, they can be opened, but they are not- reiterating how Hedda represses herself to conform, but is also oppressed by how she knows she must behave. Many themes are apparent in the play. As the daughter of the late and esteemed General Gabler, Hedda requires a husband with social standing, an elegant home, money, servants, and other amenities stamping her as a refined nd respectable aristocrat. However, stirring within her is a desire to live, think and act independently, to take risks. But she largely represses this desire, preferring to maintain the appearances of respectability and stability instead. Thus, she rejects the intriguing but irreputable Lovborg for the humdrum but reputable Tesman. She lets it be known that she will not tolerate even insignificant offenses to her standards of propriety, such as Juliana Tesman’s new bonnet. Just fancy, if any one should come and see it,” Hedda says. A portrait of her decorous father hangs in her home to remind her of the traditional values she is expected to uphold. Hedda’s repressed longings embroil her in conflict after she learns that Lovborg has sworn off alcohol and struck up an amiable relationship with a woman Hedda loathes, Thea Elvsted, a childhood acquaintance who is now the wife of a sheriff. Hedda wants Lovborg but refuses to allow herself to have him. Scandal might develop; her reputation could suffer.
Hedda decides that if she cannot have Lovborg, neither can anyone else. She then becomes a juggernaut of destruction, destroying Lovborg’s book manuscript, his relationship with Thea, and Lovborg himself. In the end her scheming leads to her own self-destruction. Ibsen successfully exploits various dramatic techniques to present the themes of repression and secrecy through his effective stage directions and dialogues without even having the need to employ the technique of narration and soliloquies.
The smaller inner room reflects Hedda’s self-containment and her separateness from the others. This inner room is associated with Hedda as Ibsen uses things that are related to her such as General Gabler’s portrait, pistols and the piano that are placed in it. The stage direction technique where the “piano has been removed” into the inner room suggests to the audience that it does not “fit” in the drawing room which represents the Tesmans’ conservative lifestyle.
Ibsen’s clever techniques of provoking the audience into thinking that Hedda is a woman that is full of demands and wants, however, maybe under the fancy and sophisticated lifestyle that she portrays, lies an essential self that she possesses, waiting to break free from conforming to society’s expectations and pressures. This conveys to the audience the fact that Hedda possessed a split personality and has to repress her “true-self” through her cold exterior and composed-self as she thinks it is crucial to act “proper” in front of other people.
Ibsen vividly solidifies the theme of secrecy as he positions Tesman in the back room to the right of another room where Hedda and Brack are carrying out an explicit conversation – saying things such as “she’d put her hat down there on the chair. And I pretended I thought it was the maid’s” and “perhaps Auntie Julle brought that smell in with her” – criticising Tesman’s beloved aunt, even Tesman is in audible range. Thus, this emphasizes the secret contents of the conversation that Hedda and Brack have between the both of them.

Samantha Patton

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