The Effects of Emoticons in Hedda Gabler and Miss Julie

“Jealousy is a tiger that tears not only its prey but also its own raging heart” (unknown). Love, hate, jealousy leading to madness, examples of these have been shown countless times in Strindberg’s Miss Julie and Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. As understood by the context, madness here is comprehended to mean a sort of minor insanity. Each play in its own respect discovers the relationship between love and hate, hate and jealousy, and jealousy and madness. Love is exhibited by conversation in both plays; Hedda’s conversations with all of the story’s characters, about many different things; as opposed to Miss Julie, who talks to the servant, Jean, for almost the entire play. She does have dialogue with Kristine [the chef], but it is very, very limited. Although Hedda’s conversations with all of the characters are not very long at all, the story takes place in a longer time window, whereas Miss Julie’s conversation with Jean lasts one night, and Kristine talks to Jean and Julie the next day. The hate in Hedda Gabler is shown through the actions of the character towards the others. Though the action is what shows that there is hatred, the immediately following dialogue clarifies whom the hatred is aimed towards and why Hedda is not pleased with them. But in the case of Miss Julie, just as love is shown through conversation, the hate and jealousy is displayed in the same fashion. Again, this is because the entire story of Miss Julie happened to take place in one day; so there was not enough time to be able for the characters to show each emotion through action. Because Hedda Gabler was over a longer period of time and had more things that went on then in Miss Julie, Ibsen was thus able to use it to show more emotion; but, the majority of the demonstrated emotions were through long, complex conversations. This comparative paper will focus on two beautiful pieces of world literature, Henerik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and August Strindberg’s Miss Julie. Through conversation, both authors are able to surface realistic circumstances that deal with love, hate and jealousy. In the end these three extraordinarily powerful emotions are able to drive the women insane. Ibsen and Strindberg create love, hate, and jealousy by keeping the main characters, Hedda Gabler and Miss Julie, constantly involved in dialogue, as to create realistic human behavior between the characters. To efficiently compare the abilities of the authors to create madness using these emoticons, this essay will break down the topic, and address each emotion individually.
The transition from love to inanity was ironically the lack of love that Hedda Gabler had for her husband, Jorgen Tesman, which slowly took a turn to jealousy and ended up becoming a hate for her own life, which drove her into the open arms of insanity and eventually the taking of her own life. The story of Hedda Gabler consisted of her being a newlywed to Tesman, a professor, but ended up hating her life. In the beginning she exhibited rude and obnoxious characteristics towards the other characters. This carelessness for those around her drove her to do things that normal people would not do. She burned Eilert Lovborg’s manuscript, gave him a gun, which he used to attempt suicide. When Judge Brack tried to use his knowledge of her unruly actions as blackmail, Hedda lost her mind altogether and killed herself. She only married him because he was in love with her, and he was willing to buy her the house of her dreams (Ibsen); from the beginning it is in the open that Hedda did have feelings for Tesman, but was a materialistic person with no respect for others. This lack of respect was shown at the very start of the play when Aunt Julie had come to visit the newly married couple, she had come all dressed up with a new hat that she bough to impress Hedda, but instead she was in for a rude surprise, “Look! Here…She’s left her old hat here on the chair” (Ibsen 21). Even though she didn’t know that it was Aunt Julie’s hat, she still showed flout toward the housekeeper. As the story progresses, this lack of love and respect becomes Hedda’s jealousy for Mrs. Elvsted. Mrs. Elvsted was married to the mayor, and because of her status in society, she had a very easy life. But for some reason she was not satisfied; yet was able to find something in Eilert Lovborg that did satisfy her. Hedda was jealous of this because she wasn’t satisfied with her own life, but she couldn’t didn’t have someone like Lovborg that could make her days worth living. Hedda showed this jealousy in possibly her most hate filled action in the entire play. When she burned Lovborg’s manuscript after he tried to kill himself. She knew that her husband, Tesman, wanted to finish Lovborg’s book as a tribute to him. There are differing opinions on whether she did it out of hatred and jealousy or because she didn’t want Mrs. Elvsted to find out that Tesman had picked up the manuscript and had not returned it. Though the latter sounds nice and caring, as seen from Hedda’s personality throughout the play, it is extremely unlikely that that was her intention. After doing all of this, Hedda Gabler finally had enough, and on page 126, “Shot herself! In the temple!” From the examples provided it has become clear that her lack of love, jealousy and hatred led to her eventual insanity and death.
At the end of the play, Miss Julie was in a state of madness; which came from the unreturned feeling of love that she felt for Jean. The entire play was Miss Julie’s conversation with Jean, one of the servants. She talked about how she loved him, but how she hated all men. Miss Julie was inconsistent by her words many times during the story. She hated men, but longed for sex; in the middle of the story, Miss Julie and Jean go into a room and engaged in sexual activity. This contradiction itself can be proof that Miss Julie was being driven insane from her own feelings and actions. But throughout the play, the feeling of love is portrayed in a mix with random bursts of hate.
“Oh, I’d love to see the whole of your sex swimming in a sea of blood just like that. I think I could drink out of your skull You think I loved you because my womb hungered for your seed Bear your child and take your name!—Come to think of it, what is your name anyway? I’ve never heard your last name. You probably don’t even have one. I’d be Mrs. Doorkeeper or Madame Floorsweeper. You dog with my name on your collar—you lackey with my initials on your buttons” (Strindberg)!
The reader, from this, can infer that Miss Julie is presenting this line in a very sarcastic manner, in which she is intending to insult Jean. Yet later persists that she and Jean run away together, and open a hotel, along with other plans. The fact that Miss Julie was unable to be consistent with herself shows that she is not mentally stable, and the reasons for that are obviously her inability to handle such passionate emotions.
Through the many examples and explanations provided by this essay, the relationships between three of the strongest and most passionate emotions: love, jealousy, and hate, have been linked together in ways not commonly thought of. Despite the fact that love and hate are on the opposite sides of the spectrum, the way that people react to the feeling imposed by love and hate are very similar. Both feelings imply extreme passion, which lead people out of logic and reason, to act purely on emotion. It has been shown through thorough analyzation that when all of these emotions are blindly acted upon simultaneously, they can lead to insanity; which ultimately led to their own demise. Ibsen and Strindberg did an excellent job of being able to create true human behavior through conversation and being able to show the consequences of sightlessly pursuing such passionate emotions.

Word Count: 1212

Works Cited
Ibsen, Henrik. Hedda Gabler. Trans. Nicolas Rudall. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Inc., 1992.

Strindberg, August. Miss Julie. Trans. Truda Stockenstrom. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Inc., 1996