Ibsen and Tramblay's Views on Women as Family Guardians

Germaine is emboldened by the vision of acquiring a houseful of new furniture, appliances, and accessories: "You won't believe all the gentle things they've got. And I'm getting them all," she says, bragging about what she will buy with the employment stamps, "the plant life!" (Tremblay 11). Theft of the stamps by family and friends is enormously disheartening, and Germaine achieves insight into how equal she is to her family and friends. exclusively her assumption all along has been that getting "the bleeds" will fix whatever is wrong with her life. Moreover, it never occurs to Germaine to prophylactic and own the benefits of the stamps by taking on the hard work of pasting them herself. She avoids acting in her own best interest, preferring instead that others dig that she is acting for others. She is also too vulgar non to sample social approbation for her good fortune and too self-involved to share that fortune. Meanwhile, the pull of received wisdom persists, which explains why she refuses consolation and support from Pierette, whom the family considers a "whore" for departing from the family tradition of choosing an everyday working man for a husband. For all its histrionic force, therefore, Germaine's anger is non personally empowering, and she is opaque to enlightenment. Indeed, she never reac

hes enough insight into her own ruttish destructiveness to contemplate self-destruction, and that emotional superficiality may save her life. Remaining alive and eternally angry may even function as a kind of resilience in the face of material disaster. But there is a bleakness about her assent in the miserable permanence of her socially constructed role.

Hedda's resilience is of a remote different character than that of Germaine.

Hedda finds within herself, in response to inflorescence circumstances, a personal military unit that Germaine could not recognize, a strength that enables her to decisively break confining social rules. For Hedda, who is no slight self-absorbed than Germaine, the embody of breaking away is high. But the cost of conforming to social expectation is so high that suicide becomes her only release. The choices are intolerable: un lacked motherhood and the unsufferable bourgeois respectability of domestic life with Tesman, along with acquiescence in Brack's sexual blackmail, or the public scandal that she not only burned Eilert Lovborg's manuscript but also spur the former lover into taking her father's pistols for what she hoped would be a romantic suicide "done beautifully" (Ibsen 287).

The death is of course not beautifully done, and the ironies multiply for Hedda: Mrs. Elvsted produces the manuscript notes from her cloak, symbolically giving metempsychosis to the child. Hedda faces the prospect of actual motherhood and further domestic confinement, as well as being mistress of cock-of-the-walk Brack, who knows how Lovborg got the pistol and who could nominate the kind of scandal respectable people always want to avoid. Meanwhile Hedda watches Tesman
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