“Hedda Gabler in Ibsen’s play of the same name broke moral norms, both from a contemporary and modern perspective”, says lawyer Lisa Schiøth Wang.
In the article ‘Tidløse eller tidsmessige normbrudd’ (Timeless or temporal norm violations – in Norwegian only) in Nytt norsk tidsskrift, Wang, together with professor of law Marit Halvorsen, read Hedda’s violations of norms in light of the Penal Code of 1842. The article is based on Wang’s master's thesis.
“I chose to write about Hedda Gabler because I’m interested in legal history and women, but the thesis on A Doll's House had already been taken. So I chose Hedda Gabler, at the suggestion of my supervisor.”
A growing field of research
The subject ‘law and literature’ is an American import that is still relatively uncommon in Scandinavia. The field is growing, however. For example, the legal history community at the Department of Public and International Law at the University of Oslo (UiO) is working on legal readings of all Ibsen's dramas, which will lead to the publication of a book marking the 200th anniversary of Ibsen’s birth in 2028, Wang explains.
“The field of law and literature encompasses several approaches: Legal documents can be read as literature, trials can be understood as drama or we can explore how literature is governed by law”, she elaborates.
Fiction can also provide perspectives that legal sources do not address, according to Wang.
“Literature is about people, and the aim of law is precisely to regulate people’s lives.”
The authors hope that we can better understand Ibsen’s drama by seeing how the society of his day regulated different breaches of norms. And that this will offer a deeper understanding of the play’s underlying assumptions, which may have changed over time.
Difficult to understand
Many of the recent productions of Hedda Gabler have received lukewarm reviews. Reviewers have pointed out that the play, particularly the suicide, does not resonate with a modern audience, Wang explains.
“In our article, we test whether a legal reading can add something to the literary interpretation”, she says.
“A review of the legal rules touched on in the play reveals the norms that applied at the time, and highlights the changes that have, and have not, taken place in society since then.”
And Hedda Gabler touches on a wide range of legal issues: Theft, defamation, foeticide, adultery, threats and complicity in suicide, to name but a few.
Hats and pistols
The play begins as Hedda Gabler and Jørgen Tesman return home from their honeymoon. Hedda’s father was a general, and she has little respect for her husband, who has a university fellowship in cultural history. Already in the first act, Hedda Gabler insults Jørgen’s aunt Julle by pretending she thinks the aunt’s hat belongs to the maid.
“A great deal has been written about this scene”, says Wang.
“The play makes it clear that Hedda deliberately insults Jørgen’s aunt. Considering how severely defamation was penalised in Hedda’s time, we can infer that this type of humiliation was regarded as very serious by the standards of the day, much more so than in our time.”
She then hands him a pistol and encourages him to use it.
Defamation is not a criminal offence today, but hate speech is, the lawyer points out.
In the second act, Hedda plays with her pistols in the garden and fires at Assessor Brack, a friend of the couple, as he arrives, Wang continues.
“Regarding the negligent handling of firearms, the situation is the opposite – this is a punishable offence today, but was not regulated by the penal code at the time of the play”, she explains.
“That said, aiming the pistol at Brack would probably constitute a criminal threat both today and in Ibsen’s time.”
Does Hedda act with intent?
Another norm breach Hedda commits is manipulating Eilert Løvborg into drinking alcohol, even though he has stopped, Wang continues.
Løvborg is Hedda’s old flame, and a cultural historian like Tesman. He is working on a manuscript that could threaten Tesman’s position if it were published.
“It is not a crime to entice a recovering alcoholic to start drinking again, but it is definitely a breach of social norms. The play thus highlights that not everything immoral is punishable, and that there are often grey areas.”
The same applies when Hedda aims the pistol at Brack’s head, Wang explains.
“This act can also be interpreted as an attempt to cause bodily harm. However, it is often difficult to determine whether Hedda's actions are intentional – and thus potentially punishable – or not.”
She not only kills herself, but also her unborn child
The fact that Hedda persuades Løvborg to drink also has fatal consequences. He ends up drinking with Tesman and Brack, and loses his precious manuscript, which Hedda gets hold of and eventually burns.
Here, too, it is difficult to determine what Hedda’s intent is, according to Wang.
“Hedda has Løvborg’s manuscript in her possession, but we don’t know for certain whether her intent is unlawful gain, which would make it theft. However, she does burn it knowingly and deliberately, which is an offence”, she says.
“She then hands him a pistol and encourages him to use it. Since the events in the play leave open the possibility that the shot that killed Løvborg was not fired intentionally, we have classified this as attempted complicity in suicide.”
Double murder
The play ends with Hedda’s suicide, which prompts the play’s most famous line from Assessor Brack: “But good God! People don’t do such things!” A line that can be read as a comment on everything Hedda does that is improper or unacceptable, according to the article’s authors.
“Hedda is also probably pregnant, and thus commits a double crime”, says Wang.
“She not only kills herself, but also her unborn child, which at the time of the play was both a violation of the penal code and considered deeply unethical.”
Another transgression on Hedda’s part is that she expresses not wanting children, a recurring theme throughout the play. At the end of the 19th century, such an attitude in a woman was considered outrageous, and even seen as something that could actually provoke criminal behaviour in women, Wang points out.
“Hedda kills herself partly because Assessor Brack threatens to tell the police that she gave Løvborg the gun and was thus complicit in his death. Unless, that is, she becomes his mistress. Aside from Hedda, Brack thus commits one of the play’s most significant breaches of social norms.”
Several of the transgressions in the play may not be punishable by law, but are nevertheless seen as immoral.
The aim of the penal code is not primarily to punish immoral behaviour, that is not necessarily the responsibility of the law. Social responsibility belongs to the civil sphere of society, according to Wang.
“This is outlined in the preparatory works to the penal code, both in Ibsen’s time and today”, she says.
“But the character of Hedda seems more afraid of social sanctions than of legal ones. And it is in light of this that we believe we can find one of the keys to understanding Hedda's suicide: She would rather die than lose her social position and cause a scandal.”
Defied the traditional female role
“The most conventional and widespread notion of what it meant to be a woman in Hedda Gabler’s time was that a woman’s role was to be a wife and mother”, says Lisbeth Pettersen Wærp, professor of Nordic literature at UiT The Arctic University of Norway.
“A woman’s duties and opportunities in life were therefore seen as being within the family, rather than outside it in society.”
Hedda clearly defies this ideal of womanhood, Wærp explains.
“After the honeymoon, she is confronted with everyone’s expectation that she is pregnant – which all indications suggest she is – and she makes it clear that she dreads the idea of becoming a mother.”
If you read the drama as a product of its time, the suicide makes sense.
Wærp highlights several possible reasons for Hedda's transgression:
“The class aspect, for example, and her upbringing. She was brought up by her father, General Gabler, and has some lofty romantic ideals of male heroism and beauty”, the professor elaborates.
“The fact that she doesn’t love Jørgen Tesman at all, and indeed despises him for his intellectual mediocrity, obviously makes it no easier for her to reconcile with her role as wife and mother in the Tesman household. Instead it becomes a threatening prison.”
A plausible suicide
“Do you agree that the character of Hedda, and especially her taking her own life, is difficult for a modern reader to understand?”
“If you read the drama as a product of its time, the suicide makes sense”, says Wærp.
“What gradually becomes apparent is how Hedda, little by little, becomes trapped in everything she despises, leading to a life she finds unbearable. And not only life within the Tesman household, but also as Assessor Brack’s mistress.”
For a modern theatregoer, the answer is different, according to Wærp.
“From a modern perspective, Hedda in 2026 would likely have many more options than staying with a husband she neither loves nor desires. And whom she also looks down on.”
Wærp refers to Wang and Halvorsen’s article, which suggests that Hedda was probably guilty of attempted complicity in Løvborg’s suicide.
A modern-day Hedda could choose to leave Tesman, but she might still be subject to today’s penal code, she says.
“Even in 2026, she would still not be able to do anything about the other problem, i.e. Assessor Brack. He knows something about her that would be dangerous for her if it got out, and that he has withheld from the police. He uses this to coerce her into a sexual relationship.”
“When faced with these prospects – sex slave versus a long prison sentence – suicide is not unthinkable, even if remains unlikely.”
Different readings
The character of Hedda was defended by many female feminists at the time the play was written, while numerous male critics dismissed her as an untrustworthy monster, according to Lisa Schiøth Wang.
Prominent women's rights advocates such as Hanna Butenschøn (1851–1928) and Ragna Nielsen (1845–1924) pointed out, among other things, that Hedda Gabler finds herself in an impossible situation: She is forced into a marriage she did not want because, as a woman of her time and social class, she cannot support herself.
“Nielsen emphasised that it was the marriage of convenience that was the real crime in the play”, according to the lawyer.
“If you read the law, you see that women were granted the right to own property separately in 1888, enabling them to manage their own income and assets independently, even within marriage. However, even though this change to the law strengthened women’s economic rights, it did not mean that women like Hedda immediately entered the workforce.”
It was not until 1927 that women gained right of use over community property.
Wang argues that historical laws don’t always show the full picture, and that non-legal sources reveal more about everyday life.
“Research on women’s history has, for example, shown that women in practice engaged in both trade and craftsmanship, even though Christian V’s Norwegian Code largely prohibited it in law. And this knowledge comes from sources other than legal texts, such as tax records, court records and civic rolls”, she explains.
“It is interesting to see that the written law does not always reflect everyday life in practice.”
