The play Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ipsen (1890) is quite a drama!

Commentaries correctly identify the patriarchal pressures on Hedda. However, the commentaries tend to miss one important influence: Hedda seemingly had a severe case of borderline personality disorder. That disorder would explain in part why she repeatedly pulled the hair of a younger girl when both were in school, why as an adult she tried to drive an ex-beau to a “beautiful” suicide, why she caused one uproar after another, why she engaged in unpredictable, harmful acts such as burning the sole copy of a brilliant manuscript written by the ex-beau, why at times she disliked everyone, why she was so unhappy, why she married a man she disliked, and why she suicided

Ipsen deserves credit for describing a person with a specific mental health problem almost a century before the problem was formally acknowledged with a diagnosis in DSM-III.

Photo by Barry Weatherall on Unsplash