594 Irving, John
Brack’s reference to her pregnancy. Her extreme
sense of vulnerability and aggression that arises out
of her sense of being trapped beyond hope, is what
projects her beyond the mere victim in a feminist
text.
There is little doubt that in Hedda Gabler, as
much as in all of Ibsen’s plays, a woman must not
be offered the choice of independence at the cost of
alienation from and rejection by society. Ibsen’s
firm commitment is to the view that women must be
allowed to make up their own minds and must have
the last word on their bodies. Ibsen’s contemporaries
and early feminists considered his creations noth-
ing short of miracles. His plays shaped the feminist
movement in Scandinavia and had deep and lasting
impact. The universe that Ibsen created for his char-
acters to inhabit furthers many ends. One of them
certainly is his historic contribution to the feminist
movement in the 20th century.
Gulshan Taneja
Spirituality in Hedda Gabler
Even though Ibsen’s plays are commonly associated
with naturalistic theater and material issues of his
times, Ibsen had a profound understanding of the
human enigma. In his plays he reveals insights into
the heart and soul of his characters even when he
portrays his characters embroiled against the back-
drop of sociopolitical issues of his day.
Hedda Gabler’s neurotic personality is accorded
an inner logic of its own even as her actions do not
accord with conventional expectations. Hedda lives
in a secret world of her own, buried deep in her
unconscious and observing a code of values that
is independent and her own. One can argue that
Ibsen’s one major interest in creating the character
of Hedda Gabler was to delve deep into the depths
of the spiritual dimension of humanity.
Despite the day-to-day material web in which
Hedda is shown entangled, Ibsen sought to look
deeper into her soul. Several readers and scholars
have described Hedda as spiritually empty. She
makes demands upon life and demands too much.
But her focus in life is on the petty and the insignifi-
cant. Her demands reveal a mind and heart narrowly
confined to the most constricted yearning of which a
human being is capable. No finer sentiments inspire
her heart, no deeper philosophical notions fire her
mind. Neither religion nor faith nor love moti-
vate her in her yearnings. Her desires are the shal-
lowest for a human being and her sensations are the
sensations of the lowliest of animals. Ibsen shows
remarkable artistic judgment in giving her actions
and judgments the hues of apparently common and
widely noticeable actions and judgments.
It is easy to miss that the essential purpose of
the dramatist in creating such a character was not
to show us an unredeemed villain but rather to illu-
minate the fact that each and every human being is
in danger of degenerating into such a soulless being
when devoid of spiritual health. It is in this sense
that Hedda Gabler, as also other plays of Ibsen, must
be understood. Elizabeth Robbins, the actress who
played Hedda Gabler to great acclaim and had great
influence on the way Hedda was perceived in the
20th century, had rightly said: “How should men
understand Hedda on the stage when they did not
understand her in the persons of their wives, their
daughters, their women friends?” And when she
goes on to say, “Hedda is all of us,” she is pointing
to general decay and a widespread spiritual malady
that had overtaken the Europe of Ibsen’s day and
to which Hedda Gabler provides a major testimony.
Gulshan Tanejairving, joHn The World According to
Garp (1976)
Constructed as a biography, John Irving’s fourth
novel, The World According to Garp, traces its titular
character literally from conception to memory, fol-
lowing him through the ordinary and extraordinary
events of his life. Son of fictional feminist icon
Jenny Fields, T. S. Garp (named after his biological
father, Technical Sergeant Garp) grows up in the
privileged environs of the Steering School, sur-
rounded by the excesses of wealth but enclosed by
his mother’s protective and constant gaze. As he
grows into adulthood, the novel allows us to enter
Garp’s world more intimately, reading the work of
the nascent author during the process of composi-
tion in a war-ruined Vienna. Understanding Garp’s
purview by glimpsing the writer’s writing recurs as
a motif several times throughout the novel, allow-