The Master Builder "When We Dead Awaken", and "Hedda Gabler". Early reactions to the play by Ibsen's critics were mixed, possibly due its heightened ambiguities. Hilda, for example, seems to alternate roles between an inspiring force, urging Solness to temper his rampant ambition and so find real happiness, and a temptress, pushing Solness to commitments he cannot possibly fulfill. English critic William Archer (the play's original translator) suggests that the play is not as completely symbolic as some have maintained, interpreting it instead as "a history of a sickly conscience, worked out in terms of pure psychology". He notes that, in this regard,
Hedda Gabler as her father's daughter than her husband's wife." Hedda, the daughter of an aristocratic and enigmatic general, has just returned to her villa in Kristiania (now Oslo) from her honeymoon. Her husband is George Tesman, a young, aspiring, and reliable (but not brilliant) academic who continued his research during their honeymoon. It becomes clear in the course of the play that she has never loved him but married him because she thinks her years of youthful abandon are over. It is also suggested that she may be pregnant. The reappearance of George's academic rival, Eilert Løvborg, throws their lives into