Hedda Gabler more important than the rational one. Ibsen was interested in the then-embryonic science of mental illness and had a poor understanding by present-day standards. His "Ghosts" is another example of this. Examples of the troubled 19th-century female might include oppressed, but "normal", wilful characters; women in abusive or loveless relationships; and those with some type of organic brain disease. Ibsen is content to leave such explanations unsettled. Bernard Paris interprets Gabler's actions as stemming from her "need for freedom [which is] as compensatory as her craving for power... her desire to shape a man's destiny." The play was performed in
Hedda Eulenberg Hedda Eulenberg Hedda Eulenberg (6 March 1876 – 13 September 1960) was a German translator and writer Eulenberg was born in Meiderich (today part of Duisburg) in Prussian Rhine Province, the daughter of Wilhelm Maase, a music director. She passed her school-leaving exam ("Abitur") in 1893 at the "Luisenschule" in Düsseldorf. In 1897 she married the author Arthur Moeller van den Bruck in Berlin, whom she had known since her days at school in Düsseldorf. 1901 she met the writer Herbert Eulenberg in Berlin at the premiere of his play "Muenchhausen". The same year Arthur Moeller van den Bruck fled