Fiero is a Ph. D., now retired, who formerly taught drama and play writing at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. In this essay he investigates the significance of the secondary female characters in Hedda Gabler, with a focus on their function both as foils to Hedda and as women whothemselves fail to meet the woman's primary role as wife-mother in the conventional thinking of the time.

Because the titular character so completely dominates Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, discussions of the play from a gender perspective seem to almost exclusively focus on Hedda. It is easy to understand why. She is clearly the central figure, the one whose grating dissatisfaction arises from a conflict pitting her needs against conventional notions of propriety and female fulfillment as an adoring, dutiful, submissive wife and nurturing, loving mother. She is, moreover, the play's prime mover, the plot driver, the one who...