Hedda Gabler
Nor is it the case that Hedda Gabler is a play written without commitment. The play is not a fanciful excursion into the alien and the macabre. As Michael Meyer points out: “ . . . if we examine Hedda Gabler closely we find that it contains one of the most revealing self-portraits he ever painted. The play might, indeed, be subtitled ‘Portrait of the Dramatist as a Young Woman.’” 6
Hedda Gabler , in fact, reprises the most compelling themes of the Ibsen canon: the yearning for the absolute ( Brand ), impatience with the poverty of cultural illusions and the desire to discover the truth and beauty of ultimate reality ( The Wild Duck ), social ostracism ( A Pillar of Society ), the oppression of woman ( A Doll's House ) and the battle of Dionysian "joy of life" and Apollonian propriety ( Ghosts ). Hedda Gabler's dilemma is one with which the playwright would sympathize. As Meyer notes: “Two emotions are dominant in her, the fear of scandal and the fear of ridicule, and Ibsen himself, though always willing to trail his coat in print, seems also to have been privately dominated by these emotions.” 7
Resistance and reactions of alienation to Hedda Gabler are a logical consequence of the fact that audiences and critics have not been thoroughly acculturated to a female persona as the frame of a lyrical tragedy. The tradition of initiation which, to a degree, finds expression in tragedy is distinctly male. In attempting to explain the rejection of Hedda Gabler by audiences of the period, Herman Bang, one of Ibsen's contemporary admirers, points out that "most of Ibsen's plays had been about egotistical men and selfless women; but here was a play about an egotistical woman ; . . . . " 8 The tradition of lyrical tragedy, as we have seen, is dominated by males attempting or persisting to define themselves. ‘Being a man’ is perhaps the single most characteristic phrase of Greek and Shakespearean tragedy. Hedda Gabler is anomalous in relation to the pre-modern canon of tragedy (though not unique) because it is the consciousness and dilemma of a woman to which the entire play coheres.
A frequent tendency among critics who interpret Hedda Gabler is to recast the play in a familiar mold, typically dimming the lights on Hedda by identifying her as an antagonist or as half of a couple and thus allowing her to be upstaged by Loevborg, a more familiar, male protagonist. For example, Orley I. Holton, in The Mythic Patterns of Ibsen's Last Plays , persistently attempts to impose the frame of the myth of the temptress or various archetypes of destructive female ("Eve," "Delilah," "Omphale," and "Clytaemestra") upon Hedda Gabler and Hedda. 9 The attempt, I would argue, does extreme violence to the play. His contention that "the principal action of Hedda Gabler is the temptation and destruction of Eilert Loevborg" 10 is so contrary to the evidence of the play that he eventually retracts his argument by noting that Hedda Gabler "is simply not this or that, not even destructive temptress, . . . ." 11
In so far as Holton maintains his main line of argumentation, he is only able to sustain the thesis at the cost of a striking misevaluation of the characters of Eilert Loevborg and Thea Elvsted. Holton's assessment of Loevborg as a visionary of great intellectual power and independence of will is certainly a facade which Loevborg cultivates and to which Hedda, in her naiver moments, might ascribe, but this heroic image is certainly not the picture which the play as a whole portrays of Eilert Loevborg. Loevborg fails at every test of character and credibility which is placed before him in the play. Holton's heroic image of Loevborg can only be maintained if one accepts categorically (as Holton does) that Thea suffers from a "limited intelligence and lack of imagination." 12 Holton overlooks the fact that the active source of this impression of Thea is Eilert Loevborg, who is attempting to seduce Hedda with an enhanced image of himself--an image which seems to require the occasional depreciation of Thea Elvsted.
Not only is Loevborg bombastic in front of Tesman with his claims of the greatness of his new book, he is as willing to be scurrilous with Hedda as is Judge Brack. He shows himself easily manipulated by Hedda, in fact almost childishly so; and quite prepared to construct an elaborate lie, such as the story that he had destroyed the manuscript, in order to preserve his heroic/demonic self image in front of Thea. Loevborg's tacit promise of a beautiful, heroic suicide to Hedda is another example of his willingness to spawn heroic impressions of himself and his failure to live up to those impressions.
In Hans Georg Meyer's Henrik Ibsen , we find this same determination to see Loevborg occupying a heroic role in the play. For example he argues that "all the characters in this play, with the possible exception of Lövborg, Tesman's boyhood friend, are guilty of human inadequacy: they are incapable of a decisive, serious act of will." 13 However, this vision of Loevborg belies the catastrophe of the play. Hedda was disappointed in these expectations of Loevborg. He clearly did not go to Lady Diana's apartment with the intention of committing suicide, and the circumstances of his death confirm the impressions of his detractors that he was an incorrigible alcoholic incapable of "a serious act of will" be it abstinence, or suicide, or the governance of his own life. The discovery of this truth begins the final crumbling of Hedda's reality.
In the same vein, Hans Meyer argues that Loevborg is the only character capable of love.
. . . love being defined as the power that frees man to unlock himself, open himself, dare to come out in the open, and seriously and irrevocably will himself and his beloved to be their true selves. No character in this play except Lövborg is capable of this kind of love. 14
This contention is not substantiated by the play. Nowhere in the play does Loevborg demonstrate this capacity: not with Hedda, for he clearly abandoned her long before her marriage to Tesman, not with Lady Diana, for he was apparently prepared to shoot her as a thief, and least of all with Thea, for he was prepared to use her as a stabilizing force in his life, to drag her into disrepute, and at the same time he demonstrates little affection for her; going so far as to describe her as "silly" before Hedda (292) and, of course, pursuing an evening tryst in spite of her and losing the manuscript which meant so much to her.
Thea's character is the central, but unspoken, mystery of the play. She is the object of Hedda's jealousy, the center of Loevborg's concern and guilt (it is because of what he has done to her--"lost her child"--that he contemplates suicide) and, in the end, she becomes George Tesman's "inspiration." Holton's dismissal of Thea as "unimaginative" and "not very intelligent" 15 overlooks the play's very broad insinuations that Thea Elvsted played a major part in the completion of both of Eilert Loevborg's new books. The books are the only tangible evidence that Loevborg is anything more than a self-inflating womanizer. Loevborg is clearly haunted by Thea's presence. He eventually confesses that Thea has broken his courage, that because of her he can no longer "spit in the eyes of the world" as he had once done (315). Thea's strength and, perhaps, Loevborg's self-surprising affection for a mild woman like Thea arouse Loevborg's self-doubt. It is the suggestion that Thea is there to watch over him which drives Loevborg to drink. Tesman reports to Hedda on Loevborg's grandiloquent speeches at Brack's party about the woman who inspired him. Tesman concludes that the woman is Thea. She may be Tesman's idea of an inspiring woman, but she clearly would not fit Loevborg's vision of inspiration. Hedda is therefore tempted by the prospect that she (Hedda) is Loevborg's inspiration. Thus Thea's role in Loevborg's work is never clearly elaborated but the question arises repeatedly. The manuscript is pointedly noted to not be in Eilert Loevborg's handwriting. Tesman's reaction upon reading Loevborg's new manuscript is to report: "I'm amazed how sound and balanced it is. He never used to write like that." 16 (278) The manuscript is recognized by both Thea and Loevborg as being "Thea's child." Eilert confesses that "Thea's heart and soul were in that book. It was her whole life." (316) In the final scene we learn that the great manuscript might be recreated without Loevborg. The play does not lead us to an unequivocal conclusion that Thea, a former governess, wrote a book on the future of civilization. It does tell us that her Apollonian, mundane, stabilizing influence was essential to its completion. Without Thea's controlling restraint, Loevborg's ecstatic inspiration leads to nothing but chaos. Thea thus represents the positive aspect of the Apollonian, whereas Hedda's life demonstrates its negative effects. Loevborg, the pure Dionysian, on his own without Thea's influence, appears increasingly dissipated, dubious, insubstantial and un-heroic.
The play is clearly not in the mold of so many tragedies of the destruction of a male Self precipitated by a propinquitous female. On the contrary, in the final analysis, Eilert Loevborg (ironically) proves the instrument of Hedda's destruction rather than vice versa. He stands in relation to the tragedy as Lady Macbeth stands to Macbeth (a driving energy), as Electra to the Oresteia (a weaker alter ego) and even as Desdemona does to Othello (an unbalancing object of desire). Loevborg is both a symbol and an object of Hedda's discontentment. He represents the desire for and folly of Dionysus unconstrained. Like Dionysus he reaps destruction and madness. It is, of course, Loevborg's accidental self-wounding with Hedda's pistol while in Lady Diana's apartment which faces Hedda with the most redoubtable of all possible scandals.
To understand Hedda's manipulation of Loevborg's suicide we must appreciate that the demands of Hedda's sense of self are great and much stands in the way of their fulfilment. Unlike an Orestes or a Macbeth, there is no clear objective or ambition set in her path offering potential fulfilment, so she creates the goal of power, of the absolute and aesthetic domination of a man who to her seems potent. Aside from this objective which Hedda clearly spells out in the play, we learn about what she requires to fulfill her selfhood in negative terms; that is, in terms of what she chooses to reject or what she avoids or the objects of her antagonism.
The play allows no doubt as to the significance of the fact that Hedda is "General Gabler's daughter!" (245). The play is named for Hedda Gabler, the name Loevborg is forbidden to use, (289) and not Hedda Tesman. The issue of names and naming pervades the play--Auntie Juju versus Miss Tesman, Thea/Thora/Mrs. Elvsted/Miss Rysing, and Tesman versus George--indicating the concern with establishing identity in terms of relationship and position and attitude. Hedda's irritation that Tesman calls Thea "Rysing" rather than by her husband's name is the first indication of Hedda's jealousy of Thea's independence. There is no doubt that Hedda is more her father's daughter than George Tesman's wife, yet she enforces the use of Tesman's name as hers while remaining conspicuously unwilling to come to terms with the role which the name implies. The play could be described in large part as Hedda's self-destructive struggle to come to terms with a name, an identity proper to her--Hedda Gabler, Mrs. Tesman, Loevborg's inspiration, a powerful and independent Hedda.
In many instances the play seems to beg a Freudian interpretation. More specifically it seems to invite conclusions akin to Freud's spurious notions of "penis envy." 17 Patrick Roberts ( The Psychology of Tragic Drama ) surmises an unresolved Oedipal relationship between Hedda and her father which accounts for her neurotic behaviour--her apparent frigidity, her jealousy and obtrusiveness, her burning of the child/manuscript--and is ultimately expressed "through the phallic pistol which is her last gift to Löbvorg [Loevborg]; the masculinized woman seizes the father's penis to strike down her inferior lover in a sadistic act of love." 18
The play, I believe, can be understood without the intervention of the Freudian exotica of childhood sexuality; that is to say, in social/psychological rather than psychoanalytic terms. As Harold Clurman points out in his book, Ibsen :
Failure to enact the dictates of one's innermost nature spells disaster. And a society which represses the innate potentialities of its members and thus the possibility of progress fosters hypocrisy, corruption, disruption and, finally, violence. Hedda Gabler is not only a psychological study of a certain type of woman, but (indirectly) a social parable. 19
In his introduction to the play Meyer lists some examples of Ibsen's preliminary jottings for the play, such as:
1) They aren't all created to be mothers.
2) They all have a leaning towards sensuality, but are afraid of the scandal.
3) They realize that life holds a purpose for them, but they cannot find that purpose.
Woman have no influence on public affairs. So they want to influence individuals spiritually.
And later in the notes Meyer finds the comment: “It's really a man's life she wants to lead. In all respects. But then scruples intervene. Some inherited--some implanted. 20
We apprehend Hedda's rejection of her female role through the emphases repeatedly placed on her relation to her father, as well as through references to her horseback riding, and her interest in duelling pistols. The general aberrance of her nature is suggested by her hatred of flowers and sunshine and her admiration of the bare trees of autumn. We sense a great potential in Hedda Gabler, as do all those around her, but that potential is not answered by the world in which she is forced to live. She therefore attempts to express it in the stereotypically masculine manner of the exercise of power.
We gain a more thorough understanding of what Hedda is after by considering her jealousy of Thea. On one level Hedda's jealousy stems from the cliche situation of one woman coveting another woman's man. Hedda craves a sexual relationship with Loevborg, but she is blocked by the rigidity of her own sense of propriety, by her cowardice and by her ultimate fear of scandal. Hedda is, after all, the sort of woman who would never jump from a train for fear that someone might look at her legs (277). Yet Loevborg means far more to Hedda than sexual gratification. As Hedda's repeated Dionysian heroic image of him appearing post- débauché "with vine leaves in his hair" suggests, Loevborg represents the potential of another world, free from the Apollonian constraints, the poverty, the tedium and vacuity of Hedda's role as a woman. Hedda explains to Loevborg that her fascination with him, as well as her candor and inquisitiveness, were not wrought of love so much as the desire to glimpse the forbidden world which he represented.
LOEVBORG. Yes--that's what I can't understand--looking back on it. But tell me Hedda--what you felt for me--wasn't that--love? When you asked me those questions and made me confess my sins to you, wasn't it because you wanted to wash me clean?
HEDDA. No, not exactly.
LOEVBORG. Why did you do it then?
HEDDA. Do you find it so incredible that a young girl, given the chance in secret, should want to be allowed a glimpse into a forbidden world of whose existence she is supposed to be ignorant?
LOEVBORG. So that was it?
HEDDA. One reason. One reason--I think.
LOEVBORG. You didn't love me, then. You just wanted-- knowledge. But if that was so, why did you break it off? (291-2)
Hedda had threatened to shoot Loevborg because of his sexual advances to her but she abandoned both her threat and the relationship because of her fear of a possible scandal. Hedda confesses both her cowardice and her desire for Loevborg, and Loevborg is finally able to arrive at a fairly accurate assessment of what Hedda is really after.
HEDDA. And I'm a coward. (Leans closer to him, without looking him in the eyes, and says quietly.) But let me tell you something. Something you don't know.
LOEVBORG. (tensely) Yes?
HEDDA. My failure to shoot you wasn't my worst act of cowardice that evening.
LOEVBORG. (looks at her for a moment, realizes her meaning, and whispers passionately). Oh, Hedda! Hedda Gabler! Now I see what was behind those questions. Yes! It wasn't knowledge you wanted! It was life! (292-3)
Hedda's object in her attraction to Loevborg is "life," and her jealousy of Thea is based on this feeling of being unfulfilled. She begrudges Thea nothing less than her existence, the fullness of her reality and the courage required to live out that fullness.
Ibsen takes pains to describe and contrast Hedda and Thea's heads of hair. The symbolic focus of Hedda's jealousy of Thea is her hair. This jealousy predates any involvement with Loevborg for, as Thea recounts, Hedda once threatened to burn Hedda's hair when they were at school together. Hedda first remembers Thea as "the one with that irritating hair she was always showing off" (256). At the end of Act Two when the men have left for Brack's bachelor party, though the issue seems to be control of Loevborg, it is Thea's hair which once again becomes the focus of Hedda's jealousy.
MRS. ELVSTED. You're after something, Hedda.
HEDDA. Yes, I am. For once in my life I want to have the power to shape man's destiny.
MRS. ELVSTED. Haven't you that power already?
HEDDA. No, I haven't. I've never had it.
MRS. ELVSTED. What about your husband?
HEDDA. Him! Oh, if you could only understand how poor I am. And you're allowed to be so rich! (Clasps her passionately.) I think I'll burn your hair after all! (289-9)
As we have already seen in The Libation Bearers hair (Orestes' hair) is a symbolic offering of one's essence, and seems closely tied to personal identity. In The Golden Bough Frazer details the significance of hair among various cultural groups as a totem both of courage and of the individual's strength and spirit. 21 Ibsen gives hair similar symbolic significance in Hedda Gabler . When Hedda burns the manuscript which she describes as Eilert and Thea's child, which has already been described as Thea's life, she is in effect carrying out the desire she has already expressed as burning Thea's hair.
HEDDA. (throws one of the pages into the stove and whispers to herself). I'm burning your child, Thea! You with your beautiful, wavy hair! (She throws a few more pages into the stove.) The child Eilert Loevborg gave you. (Throws the rest of the manuscript in.) I'm burning it! I'm burning your child! (317)
In response to the oppression of her own desultory existence Hedda seems driven by the desire to create some kind of fire in her world. In regard to Thea it is no less than the potential fruition of her being-in-world which Hedda envies--of which her courage, her relationship with Loevborg, the manuscript and her beautiful hair are all symbols. Hedda is awed by Thea's daring in leaving her husband, is disturbed by her successes with Loevborg, and is made distraught by the happy ending which seems in store for her. All of this adds up to Thea's being a developing individual who having bravely faced the realities around her has defied them and appears, in Hedda's eyes, on the verge of turning reality around to the fulfilment of her selfhood. Loevborg, sensing this, taunts Hedda with comments on Thea's courage and the openness of the friendship he shares with her (294). It is Thea's apparent conjunction with an affirming and sustaining reality which Hedda lacks and covets and feels jealously compelled to destroy.
How has Hedda Gabler descended to this point of feeling threatened by the shadow of little Thea Elvsted? We enter Hedda's life at a late point in her decline. The Gabler fortunes have obviously been lost, the general deceased, and Hedda Gabler, as she explains, had "danced herself tired" (276). To the incredulity of Loevborg and the bemusement of Judge Brack, Hedda marries George Tesman in the hope of saving her failing fortunes and carving out a renewed existence for herself. As the play opens we discover the suffocating entrapment which Hedda will be forced to endure with Tesman--his Milquetoast personality, his limitations and specializations, his fawning aunt and maid. Their villa, which Hedda had once frivolously claimed to desire, she, in fact, despises. She describes her reaction to it by saying: "Ugh--all the rooms smell of lavender and dried roses" (281). Even the fine furnishings and the social life which Hedda had expected seem about to be denied her. She is trapped, wretched, impoverished and, to paraphrase her words, bored to death and without natural talents save boring herself to death (282).
Hedda's pregnancy is an underlying issue throughout the play, and is a reinforcing motif of her entrapment. Theatrically the pregnancy works well as a visual metaphor for Hedda's suffocation as she struggles with morning sickness, gasping for air. Hedda repeatedly and perfunctorily strives to alienate herself from Tesman; repeatedly responding to the grist of Tesman's life and career with comments akin to ‘keep me out of it,’ ‘don't involve me,’ and ‘it means nothing to me.’ There are perhaps two levels to Hedda's rejection of childbirth. First it commits and ties her to a female role which she finds unbecoming to her. Secondly it ties her more closely to George Tesman and draws her more tightly into the circle of his life. The pregnancy calls for people to "look at Hedda" (as George asks his aunt to do) in a new way. Hedda is not only required to become something she feels she is not but she now becomes all the more conspicuously and inescapably an "object" of the attentions of Tesman and his aunt.
In the desperation of her fallen state, facing the crisis of having her life redefined for her by the Tesmans, Hedda's interest in the world of the profligate Loevborg is rekindled. Caught between these equally undesirable yet exigent worlds, Hedda's reaction is a kind of hysteria--pathological jealousy, alienation, rebellious pettiness, the discharging of a firearm, the counselling of Loevborg's suicide, and the burning of the manuscript.
Hedda's desire to transcend the hollow, insubstantial order of things which governs her life and to make contact with a more solid reality is expressed in her abstract preoccupations with perfection, geometrical aesthetics, the absolute exercise of power and the absolute itself. Hedda hatches her scenario for Eilert Loevborg's suicide out of these notions. Thus Hedda manages, out of her hysteria, to deduce a momentary conviction that life is substantial, that it touches the absolute. She spawns a sense of reality captured in the fact that "Eilert Loevborg has had the courage to live according to his own principles. And now at last he has done something big! Something beautiful!" (328). After her most extreme acts of madness Hedda shows a new malleability, almost a willingness to reconcile herself to life with the Tesmans. I believe it is significant in terms of her beginning to feel that she has grasped some piece (however ephemeral) of a Self-affirming reality that after Hedda admits burning the manuscript, (though it is obviously prudent for her to appease Tesman at this moment) for the first time she, at least, pretends to be a loving wife to George and a willing mother of his child. (In other words, from indifference to hypocrisy is a step toward belief and integration.) The point is more clearly established in the beginning of Act Four in which Hedda suddenly shows a new maturity. She seems to have reconciled herself to Aunt Juliana; even to the point that Hedda, who had earlier claimed she couldn't "bear illness or death" and that she loathed "anything ugly," (306) is now offering to help with the preparations of Aunt Rena's corpse. Hedda's newfound belief in a larger world in which courage, freedom and decisive action are possible temporarily sustains her just enough for her to begin to come to terms with her daily life. This reconciliation, however, is fragile and short lived.
When Brack robs Hedda of "that charming illusion" (328) of a larger reality by revealing to her the ignominious facts of Loevborg's death, he in fact robs her of any hope of a fruitful symbiosis of her sense of herself and her reality. Hedda has therefore already been cut adrift when Judge Brack reveals the power which he holds over Hedda to embroil her in a scandal. She is to be pressed into an adulterous liaison which the whole of her nature seems to rebel against. Even the least of those elements by which she might fashion a place in the world for herself, George Tesman, is lost to her to Thea and the work and memory of Eilert Loevborg, and Thea emerges still more independent and seemingly victorious. There is no world left for Hedda and her suicide is neither a thing of beauty nor an act of will, it simply expresses that inescapable absence.
Notes
5. see Meyers, "Introduction to Hedda Gabler," Ibsen Plays: Two (London: Eyre Metheun, 1980) and Ibsen (New York: Doubleday, 1971) p. 645.
6. Meyer, "Introduction to Hedda Gabler ," p. 227.
7. Ibid, p. 233.
8. Herman Bang, Tilskueren (October-November, 1892), pp. 827-38, quoted in Meyer, Ibsen , p. 645
9. Orley I. Holton, Mythic Patterns in Ibsen's Last Plays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970), p. 82.
10. Ibid, p. 81.
11. Ibid, p. 85.
12. Ibid, p. 94.
13. H.G. Meyer, Henrick Ibsen , trans. H. Sebra (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1972), p. 124.
14. Ibid, p. 124.
15. Holton. p. 93-4.
16. All quotations of Hedda Gabler are from Ibsen Plays: Two , ed. and trans., M. Meyer (London: Eyre Metheun, 1980).
17. B.W. Downs, Ibsen: The Intellectual Background (New York: Octagon Books, 1969), points out that while Ibsen would have been aware of notions of the unconscious from pre-Freudian French psychologists, there is no real evidence that he was an adherent of this new psychology (pp. 181-2). However, Patrick Roberts, in The Psychology of Tragic Drama (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), in his interpretation of Hedda Gabler , invokes the Freudian principle that psychic texts lie out of reach of the mind that produced them.
18. Patrick Roberts, The Psychology of Tragic Drama (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 220.
19. H. Clurman, Ibsen (New York: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 165-6.
20. Meyer, "Introduction to Hedda Gabler ," pp. 233-4.
21. Frazer, pp. 230-3.
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