Power and Influence Theme Analysis

Every character in Hedda Gabler seeks power and influence of some kind. As one critic describes it, the play “is most convincingly read as the record of a series of personal campaigns for control and domination: over oneself, over others, and over one’s world.” Most of the power struggles are petty: Jörgen Tesman wants to know more than anyone else about medieval domestic crafts, of all things, so that he might gain the professional and social power that would come with a prestigious professorship. Judge Brack wants a hold over Hedda, his verbal sparring partner, presumably so that he can have sexual access to her (Hedda, for her part, cannot endure the idea of being “subject to [his] will and [his] demands”). More grandly, Ejlert Lövborg wants to intellectually control the world by seeing into its future, even though, ironically enough, he can’t control himself when under the influence of alcohol. Mrs. Elvsted, for her part, comes to the “terrible town” where the Tesmans live so that she can exert a counter-influence over Lövborg and save him from his self-destructiveness.

While most of the characters in the play want power and influence for practical reasons, Hedda seeks to control and dominate others on a whim—seemingly she wants only to alleviate the excruciating boredom of her life, and so makes others suffer for no better reason than because she can. As Ibsen wrote in one of his notebooks, “The demonic thing about Hedda is that she wants to exert influence over another person.” She has an insatiable will and burns to accumulate things, but finds no satisfaction in what she has. As such, she has exhausted her wishes—but her will itself still requires exercise, and she exercises it precisely by hurting others, which lessens her own suffering and pleases her as an expression of her power. Performing power, then, becomes an end in itself for Hedda, from insisting that her maid Berte refer to Tesman not as mister but as doctor, to something so monstrous as encouraging Lövborg to suicide. In this sense, Hedda is the most extreme example of her society’s lust for power. Whereas her father, General Gabler, led men to death on the battlefield, Hedda leads men to death from the comfort of her drawing room.