Examples Of Honesty In Hedda Gabler

Sometimes honesty is hardest to come by when one has convinced themselves that it is present, even while what they thought was honesty is nothing more than a mere deception. Sometimes lying to oneself is almost indistinguishable from honesty. If they can convince themselves that they are telling the truth, then who can come to their rescue? Who can reveal reality to the eyes of those who are willfully living in fantasy? This is the situation in which the namesake of Henrik Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler finds herself. Hedda Gabler is a woman of high society who has lost interest in what she considers to be the dull aspects of her life. Nothing from her husband, George Tesman, to her great wealth can satisfy her. This discontentedness, however, does not stem from what she thinks it does. Her emptiness runs far deeper, and the lies that she tells herself may prevent her from ever filling it.

In conversations with her friends and her relatives, she explains that every decision she makes is out of boredom. She chose her and her husband’s house out of boredom. She plays with pistols out of boredom. Even her choice of spouse appears to have been made in an attempt to stave off boredom. When her husband’s colleague, Judge Brack, asks her what talents she has, she responds saying, “Oh, please be quiet. I often think I only have one talent, one talent in the world…boring the life right out of me.” (Ibsen 878) Hedda has forgotten what it is like to content. What she claims as boredom is an emptiness that she attempts to fill with manipulation, but there is only one thing that can fill that kind of