Warning: This story contains spoilers for Hedda.

Why does Hedda Gabler marry George Tesman? She is spirited, beautiful, sophisticated, and the daughter of the late General Gabler, but she has chosen to marry the meek academic George Tesman, a man of lower class and of distinctively mediocre intellect. But the witless and untalented Tesman is the exact type of pushover that appeals to Hedda—he will be devoted to her, rarely challenge her, and allow her to reap the benefits of being a married woman of society without making her compromise her strong will.

It is the fact that she could do much better than him that makes her marriage so convenient, but in trying to secure a novel type of freedom for a woman in a traditional world, Hedda enacts deceptions and schemes that tragically prove th

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