Props In Ibsen's Play Ap Essay

Ibsen uses props in the play to reveal information about the characters that would usually go unnoticed or would be more difficult to understand. The six props I am going to be talking about are the slippers, the hat, the portrait, the photo album, the manuscript and the pistols.
In act one Aunt Julle produces Tesman"'"s old slippers, much to Tesman"'"s delight. He wants Hedda to examine them but she is not interested. The slippers help Ibsen to prove the status of the marriage between Hedda and Tesman, which Hedda calls "'"excruciatingly boring"'". When aunt Julle gives the slippers to Tesman he seems very excited and wants to show Hedda them. He says to Hedda '"'My old morning shoes. My slippers –look!'"' and Hedda replies with "'"Oh yes.
Her inability to perceive the difference between melodrama and tragedy accounts for the disparity between Hedda's presumptive view of her own suicide and our evaluation of its significance. Ibsen with diabolical irony arranged a situation which bears close superficial resemblance to the traditional tragic end. Symbolically withdrawing herself from the bourgeois environment into the inner chamber which contains the reliques of her earlier life, Hedda plays a "wild dance" upon her piano and, beneath her father's portrait, shoots herself "beautifully" through the temple with her father's pistol. She dies to vindicate her heritage of independence. . . And we, having the opportunity to judge the act with relation to its full context, may properly interpret it as the final self-dramatization of the consistently sterile protagonist. Hedda gains no insight; her death affirms nothing of importance. She never understands why, at her touch, everything becomes "ludicrous and mean." She dies to escape a sordid situation that is largely of her own making; she will not face reality nor assume responsibility for the consequences of her acts. The pistols, having descended to a coward and a cheat, bring only death without