This first act, besides introducing characters, acquaints the audience with Hedda Gabler’s surroundings in her new life as Mrs. Tesman. Brought up as a general’s daughter accustomed to travel in aristocratic social circles, Hedda must confront her future as a housewife in a middle-class household. The fact that she is pregnant reinforces her potential role as homemaker. The nature of her doom is underscored by the character of Miss Juliana Tesman, who represents the older generation of domestic womanhood who has devoted her life to the care of others.
George Tesman, good natured and sentimental, assumes that the duty of a husband is merely to satisfy the domestic requirements of his wife so that she can be happy in the confines of her home. With this in mind, he agrees that they shall keep an open house—in Hedda’s chosen home—and maintain the luxuries important to proper entertaining. Believing that a woman naturally falls into household routines once she is married, George has no further insight into Hedda’s temperament. George’s research into the “domestic industries of medieval Brabant” is an ironic symbol of his conservative, simple-minded views of married life, as well as a symbol that indicates his inability to encompass other than material details.
As to his heroine, Ibsen establishes her main symptoms of disaffection with life: a profound emotional coldness, an incapacity to interest herself in anything besides social pleasures, and a destructlive desire to control the lives of others. Hedda cannot respond to the warmth of Aunt Julia, she cannot abide the idea of expecting a child, and was totally bored during her wedding trip.
To further express her emotional sterility, Ibsen shows how Hedda is unable to reciprocate in a relationship. Like a young child, she can only receive without knowing how to give in return. Without reciprocating, she accepts George’s love and support; by pretending friendship, she learns all about Thea’s personal life yet reveals no confidences of her own. Later on, when Lövborg recalls his previous relationship with Hedda, he describes how she extracted detailed confessions from him yet withheld her own self-revelations. This intense, almost morbid interest in the lives of others is another aspect of her empty emotional life. At the same time that investigating and analyzing other people’s lives is one way for Hedda to gain some understanding of her own unsatisfied nature, she reveals her personal frigidity and adolescent self-centeredness.
This first act also demonstrates a pathological quality in Hedda’s personality. Cruelly insulting Aunt Julia by complaining that it is the servant’s bonnet lying in the chair, Hedda tries to undermine Miss Tesman’s sense of worth. Compelling Thea to reveal her innermost feelings, she seems to search for Mrs. Elvsted’s weaknesses so she can later use this knowledge for her own selfish purposes. Having established that his heroine is emotionally empty yet eager to learn how other people face life’s experiences, Ibsen shows how the imperious and unsubmissive Hedda tries to destroy the personal values of those whose satisfactions she cannot attain.
