Hedda Gabler - Fiend or Heroine?
Last night I went to see the Roundabout Theater's production of Hedda Gabler starring Mary Louise Parker at the American Airlines theater here in New York. As I was watching the play (before I walked out during the interval), I started thinking about the fictional scandalous women, women whose stories shocked the reading public at the time. Women like Madame Bovary , Forever Amber , Scarlett in Gone with the Wind, and Fanny Hill . This blog has been mainly about the real life Scandalous Women in history, but I thought I would start a new feature, tackling some of these fictional women and why their stories were so outrageous to readers at the time. I have long had a love/hate relationship with the play Hedda Gabler . I have seen many productions of this play and I still can't get around the fact that I hate this character. Last night, I started wondering what it was about this fictional woman that pushed my buttons. And was it the same for audience members in the late 19th Ce...