Using Emily Dickinson’s well-known poem about ‘female self-portrait-as-male’ as a reference, this chapter examines issues of rage, gender prison, marriage and agency-via-writing. The entrapped Hedda and the play’s obsession with guns—ostensibly owned by General Gabler, flaunted and then suicidally used by Hedda—testifies to a displaced or even ‘stolen’ phallic power, now reconceived as rage. The notion of another male power, writing, is prophetically upended when Hedda burns Løvborg’s manuscript on the ‘History of the Future,’ calling it her ‘child,’: and ultimately also killing both herself and her unborn fetus. Hedda’s story is as much about ‘doing’ as it is about constraints, and so her experience and her acts become a genuine ‘history of the future’: how a caged woman breaks free. Hedda Gabler is thus literature as ideological utterance, bringing a culture’s arrangements to visibility in a way that so-called objective discourse—be it history or philosophy—cannot easily manage.
VP25.09: Fetal intervention with international collaboration, administrative support and social services to the rescue of an unborn fetus
