3 ideas
Newly married to the pedantic scholar Tesman and bored in a villa she never wanted, Hedda Gabler learns that her former admirer Lovborg has lost the only manuscript of his brilliant book, and instead of returning it she feeds it page by page into the stove, calling it the child he made with Thea. When his death proves squalid and Judge Brack gains blackmail power over her through that pistol, she shoots herself offstage in the next room.
Read the drawing room as the mechanism of confinement: every exit, object and sightline shows what the character cannot escape. The heroine's options are fixed by the furniture before she ever acts.
A capable person barred from any legitimate sphere of action will still seek to control someone's fate, and if nothing can be built, the control becomes the power to destroy. Hedda cannot shape her own life, so she tries to shape Lovborg's, first by pushing him back to drink and then by pushing him toward a chosen death. When even that is taken from her by scandal and Brack's hold over her, the last act left under her control is her own death.