Literary Analysis of a text within a particular context - Essay Example

In a sense, her dominance over the male characters can be considered as her fantasy -of being free and to act freely- that continually shrinks due to the male expectation of loyalty from a wife. Hedda comes from a higher socioeconomic class. But her husband is much lower than her class and still depends on Aunt Julie for financial support. This sense of superiority provokes her internally to demand an equal play in the family that is obviously more than what male notion of a woman’s loyalty allows.

In this regard, Hedenskooq comments, “In Hedda, we find a woman who is strong, brazen, and independent, yet is determined to live her life through the context of the society around her. She is a woman caught in a vicious cycle of expectation and disappointment.” (325) One of Ibsen’s motivations to juxtapose the husband-band wife patriarchal structure of modern family system is to show his readers how money matters in women’s loyalty to husband and how a woman reacts to this juxtaposition.

What the society considers as women’s happiness, namely the material happiness in her husband’s house is merely emotional death by materialism. Also women continually go on to sacrifice their own share of equal play, to fulfill the male expectation, under the disguise of the social ideology of “loyalty of a wife”. Since in Jurgen Tessman’s household, the financial happiness is evidently not present, the crust of loyalty has simply melted down and Hedda seems to seek more of dominance or at least of an equal play than being subservient to him.

Again as male dominated society will still not allow her to play an equal share, she exerts dominance on others in Jurgen Tessman’s family. Hedda was not willing to marry Tessman since he is economically depended on his Aunt Julie and since he is a member of a social that is lower than Hedda’s. But for some reasons she was forced to marry him. Indeed Hedda is the product of patriarchal society. In it, she