영어로 읽는 고전 _ 헨리크 입센의 헤다 가블러
『헤다 가블러』는 1890년에 쓰이고 1891년에 초연된 희곡이다. 장군의 딸로 자란 헤다가 사랑 없는 결혼에 갇힌 채 자기 삶의 주도권을 갈망하는 이야기를 그린다. 남편의 학문적 경쟁자이자 그녀의 옛 연인이었던 남자가 재기한 모습과 눈부신 원고를 들고 다시 나타나면서, 헤다의 질투와 조종은 비극적인 사건들을 촉발한다. 주변 사람들의 운명을 좌우하려 술수를 부리던 그녀는 점차 상황에 몰리고, 마침내 그녀의 자유를 위협하는 음험한 집안 친구 앞에서 옴짝달싹할 수 없는 처지에 놓인다.
Classics Read in English _ Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen
Hedda Gabler has been married six months and is already suffocating. She is a general's daughter, raised to ride and to shoot and to expect a life with some grandeur in it, and she has settled instead for Jørgen Tesman ? decent, tedious, absorbed in his research into the domestic crafts of medieval Brabant. The house she lives in was bought to please her. She never wanted it. Ibsen keeps her father's pistols on stage from the first act, and titles the play with her maiden name: this is a woman who never became a wife at all.
Then Eilert Løvborg comes back ? the man she once let too close and then sent away, sober now, brilliant, with a finished manuscript that will eclipse her husband's career, and with a plain woman beside him who has saved him by loving him steadily. It is that last detail Hedda cannot survive. What follows is not scheming for gain but destruction for its own sake: a burned book, a pistol pressed into the wrong hand, a vision of a beautiful death arranged for someone else because she cannot arrange her own.
And waiting through all of it is Judge Brack, courteous and patient, who understands precisely what she has done and would like, in exchange for his silence, a certain kind of arrangement. Cornered at last by the one thing she fears more than boredom ? being owned ? Hedda goes behind the curtain, and Ibsen ends the play on the flattest, most devastating line in his work: people don't do such things.
Summary
MISS TESMAN.
[Stops close to the door, listens, and says softly:] Upon my word, I don't believe they are stirring yet!
BERTA.
[Also softly.] I told you so, Miss. Remember how late the steamboat got in last night. And then, when they got home!?good Lord, what a lot the young mistress had to unpack before she could get to bed.
MISS TESMAN.
Well well?let them have their sleep out. But let us see that they get a good breath of the fresh morning air when they do appear.
[She goes to the glass door and throws it open.
BERTA.
[Beside the table, at a loss what to do with the bouquet in her hand.] I declare there isn't a bit of room left. I think I'll put it down here, Miss. [She places it on the piano.
MISS TESMAN.
So you've got a new mistress now, my dear Berta. Heaven knows it was a wrench to me to part with you.
