the world of hedda gabler

The World of Hedda GablerAuthor(s): Patricia Meyer SpacksSource: The Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Autumn, 1962), pp. 155-164Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1124635 .

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The World of Hedda Gabler

By PATRICIA MEYER SPACKS

Although Ibsen's Hedda Gabler has recently enjoyed considera- ble off-Broadway success, critical confusion about the play has not appreciably abated. Reviews of the recent production merely emphasized the conflicting views which have been advanced since Hedda Gabler first appeared in 1890. It seems to be a play about an extraordinary woman-but extraordinary in precisely what way? Is she naturally cruel and malicious, or is she made so by the events one sees on stage? In a review entitled "A Beautiful Snake," Whitney Balliett in the New Yorker, after admitting that various social problems are dealt with in the play, insists that Ibsen "was primarily interested in exploring ironically the cold depths of that changeless and most fascinating of all women-the bitch." Alan Pryce-Jones, on the other hand, in Theatre Arts, com- plained that the New York production made Hedda's bitchiness too immediately apparent. "To give the play its full impact, we ought to discover only slowly the full awfulness of which she is capable.... It is the shock of coming home to a humdrum exist- ence, to unexpected poverty, that releases the devil in her." But a minority opinion in The Commonweal, by Richard Gilman, suggests that "Hedda is not a femme fatale or a study in neurotic be- havior as much as she is a locus for energy turned in upon itself, an arena for the struggle of being with non-being."

These representative opinions suggest the nature of the critical controversy, and hint at the difficulty of finding a coherent read- ing of the play. Ever since Ibsen himself insisted that Hedda was about a character, not ideas, commentary has tended to center on the complex and mysterious title figure. But no interpretation based solely on the enigmatic Hedda quite accounts for the play's power, a power available even in the mid-twentieth century, de-

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156 Tulane Drama Review

spite the implausibilities of motivation (Hedda's marriage to Tes- man, for example), of speech (Miss Tesman on the subject of in- valids), and of action (Mrs. Elvsted's convenient production of the working notes of Ldvborg's book). This power seems to derive both from the total structure of the play and, Ibsen's insistence notwith- standing, from a subterranean structure of ideas. That ideas about the nature of womanhood and of society are at work here is immediately suggested by Ibsen's own working notes on Hedda. A sec- tion headed "Main Points" contains these comments:

1. They are not all made to be mothers. 2. They are passionate but they are afraid of scandal. 3. They perceive that the times are full of missions worth devoting

one's life to, but they cannot discover them. These statements certainly outline Hedda's problems, but the phraseology, the "they" which obviously applies to women in general, hints that Ibsen had a broader application in mind. And there is even a sense in which Hedda's problems are duplicated, not only by the other women in the play, but by the men as well. The desire to control someone's destiny, announced explicitly by Hedda ("For once in my life I want the power to shape a human destiny") is shared, in more or less devious forms, by all the other important characters; this theme dictates the action of the drama, in the Aristotelian sense, and accounts for its most profound overtones.

A yearning to shape a destiny is quite clearly the center of Hedda's motivation, and its demonstration in her case involves all the major symbols of the play. The destinies at Hedda's disposal are somewhat limited. Her own destiny does not seem to be under her control: her marriage to Tesman is proof of that. She married, without love (she hates the very word), because she had danced herself tired and wasn't "getting any younger"; even General Gabler's daughter was forced to accept marriage as the only re- course, and not even General Gabler's daughter, in a loveless marriage to a virtual non-entity ("a thoroughly worthy man" who "may still go far," but about whose capacities Hedda obviously has serious doubts)-not even she can retain control over her own future under these circumstances. There are financial restrictions, for one thing, so that she cannot entertain as she had wished;



PATRICIA MEYER SPACKS 157

and, of greatest symbolic importance, there is the unwanted pregnancy, the visible emblem of Hedda's subjection.

But if she cannot control her own life, perhaps she can dominate others. Her human contacts consist almost entirely of efforts, some- times quite random and meaningless, to assert her dominance. Her husband seems a defenseless victim for Hedda to exercise her power on, but he is hardly worth bothering with, as Hedda herself suggests. Aunt Rina and the maid are easy prey; Hedda merely practices on them. Mrs. Elvsted seems almost as vulnerable, although she turns out to have hidden resources, as, of course, do Lovborg and Judge Brack. Even Tesman eludes Hedda at last. There remains the inost obvious object of control: the unborn child. In motherhood, one would think, Hedda could gratify her need to form the lives of others: she would not be a good mother, but perhaps she would be a more satisfied woman. But this avenue, of course, she totally rejects; and the reason for her rejection points to the most essential quality of her character.

For Hedda Gabler wants power-not responsibility. The antith- esis between the two concepts is at the heart of the play; Hedda's unwillingness to accept responsibility is the central aspect of her perversity. She rejects normal, two-way marriage, rejects the very idea of love, rejects the normal functions of motherhood. And, un- willing even to accept full responsibility for the actions she really commits ("I suddenly get impulses like that and I simply can't control them"), she cannot go to bed with Eilert or in any other way brave social disapproval.

The burning of the manuscript, the "child" of Eilert and Thea, underlines the ambivalence of Hedda's nature. It is, of course, most obviously an assertion of her power, a dramatic attempt to form the destinies of others. But it is also, equally apparently, an expression of her perversity: a willful destruction of the fruit of a male- female union, a demonstration of her jealousy of those who, freer than she can ever be, can defy society and find a genuine "vocation." The only vocation she finds open for herself is the manipu- lating of others-perhaps she can get J6rgen to go into politics, to combat her boredom. But she herself painfully recognizes the inadequacy of such plotting, and the superiority of the way which Eilert and Thea have found. And her strength-her ability to act




ruthlessly and powerfully-is intimately involved with her weakness, her inability to accept responsibility or defy society directly.

In the past, it has seemed possible to her that she can turn the weakness to her advantage, make it into a strength. Her pre-marital relationship with Eilert, as it is revealed in the play, seems to have been an extended effort in this direction. She had power over Lav- borg-he says so himself-and exercised it, "in a devious way, if you please," for the sake of a vicarious sense of freedom, unable then or ever to brave social restrictions herself. The vine leaves that she wishes to see in his hair are the symbol of beauty achieved by defiance of society; his dissipated life in the past, the dissipation she urges him toward in the present, represent to her the possibility of escaping rather than submitting to narrow social limits. It is entirely for her own sake that she manipulates him: not merely for the joy of controlling a destiny, but for the immediate joy of knowing that she has, with perfect safety, with no apparent responsibility, caused a violation of conventional restrictions. Even her attempt to drive Eilert to suicide has a similar direct motivation: it is for the sake of preserving her illusions as well as for the sake of asserting power. Her dialogue with Judge Brack, after his report of the suicide, makes the point perfectly explicit:

Hedda. Oh, what a sense of freedom there is in this act of Eilert L6vborg's.

Brack. Freedom, Mrs. Hedda? Of course, it is freedom for him. Hedda. I mean for me. It gives me a sense of freedom to know that

an act of deliberate courage is still possible in this world-an act of spontaneous beauty.'

Judge Brack then goes on to demonstrate that this view of the situation is a "beautiful illusion." It is, in this respect, identical with all Hedda's views of the essential nature of reality: there is a sense in which, almost consciously, she insists on remaining in the world of illusion. She rejects the basic functions of women-marriage, motherhood; she rejects the real world of responsibility; her preservation of the sense of power and control depends on her withdrawal from reality for the sake of illusion. When Lovborg tries to find out why their intimacy had ended, Hedda cries out, "I realized the danger; you wanted to spoil our intimacy-to drag it down to reality" (italics mine). What she means, apparently, is




that Livborg wanted to turn their relationship into a sexual one, in which Hedda would have been forced to participate directly, instead of gaining vicarious fulfillment through his freedom. Her unwillingness to be dragged down to reality remains paramount: Hedda can't stand to talk about money, can't stand any mention of her pregnancy.

Her desperate suicide is, of course, Hedda's dramatic attempt to reconcile the opposed sides of her character. Now, for the first time, she decides to assert her dominance by controlling her own destiny, to reconcile beauty and reality. The beauty is to come from the willed act; death itself is ugly, in Hedda's view: she will have nothing to do with Aunt Rina's death. But her suicide is to be an act of defiance, of assertion, of profound meaning-and Hedda, at the last, would rather mean than be. It is, of course, a totally ap- propriate final irony that this heavily weighted act should be re- acted to merely as a violation of social convention ("people don't do such things"), with no recognition of the deep significance in- herent in such a violation on Hedda's part.

The other characters in the play, motivated to a greater or lesser extent by the same need to control a destiny, are not all so unsuccessful as Hedda. Mrs. Elvsted, indeed, who seems to be set up, thematically and descriptively, in contrast to Hedda (abundant, curly golden hair versus sparse brown hair; willingness to ignore conventional standards for the man she loves versus Hedda's inability either to love or to ignore convention), is conspicuously successful in the areas where Hedda fails. But it is a mistake to sentimentalize her, as some readers of the play have done, to see her as the "good woman" opposed to Hedda's evil. Matters are by no means so clear-cut. Like Hedda, for example, whose perversity is emphasized by this fact, Thea Elvsted seems strangely removed from normal maternal and connubial impulses. Like Hedda, she has made a loveless marriage, a marriage of convenience. She has no children of her own. Her stepchildren she has apparently aban- doned without a qualm. Her "child" is the manuscript: it is she who suggests the identification. This substratum of coldness is ob- scured, in Thea's case, by the fact that she so brilliantly fits the stereotype of the gentle, clinging, defenseless little woman. But Ibsen is at some pains to point out that the gentleness, the clinging




quality, are merely her modes of achieving ends rather similar to Hedda's. She is as conscious as Hedda herself of the power-motif:

Hedda. Tell me, Thea-how did this friendship start between you and Eilert Liovborg?

Mrs. Elvsted. It grew gradually. I began to have a sort of power over him.

Hedda. Really? Mrs. Elvsted. Yes. After a while he gave up his old habits. Oh, not

because I asked him to-I never would have dared do that. But I suppose he realized how unhappy they made me, and so he dropped them.

It is almost a parody of ladies'-magazine manipulation: the poor, misguided man gives up his bad habits and never realizes he is being "handled." Hedda's outbursts of jealousy ("I think I shall have to burn your hair off, after all!") are in a sense justified: the best testimony to this fact is Eilert's "she's somehow broken my courage -my defiant spirit." Eilert, to be sure, has a tendency to romanti- cize himself, and this remark is in a sense a self-justification for weakness. Yet it underlines Thea's success in exercising power: her power is felt by Eilert as much as Hedda's has been in the past.

Like Hedda-like all women, Ibsen seems to suggest, because women's possibilities are limited by their social role-Mrs. Elvsted looks outside herself for a destiny to control, and it is for this reason that she is so resilient at the end of the play. Unlike Hedda, she has not run out of available victims. She ends with a vision of twofold control: she can be to Tesman what she has been to Lov- borg ("If I could only inspire your husband in the same way!" she says to Hedda), and she can even continue to form Eilert's destiny posthumously. One wonders, of course, about the reality of the love she professes for Lovborg. Love and the lust for power, the polar extremes of all great visions of human emotional capacity from Christianity to Freudianism, seem to be absolutely antitheti- cal for Hedda; as one sees with increasing clarity the extent to which the desire for control is central also in Thea, it is difficult to believe that it is not, in her also, finally a substitute for love.

The ways in which the need for control can be disguised through gentleness, "femininity," are sketched also in the more shadowy character of Miss Tesman, Aunt Julianne. The only unmarried




woman in the play, she has an obsessive interest in Hedda's pro- spective children. The normal interest of the maiden aunt, one might feel, except that the other two female characters have been importantly defined by their lack of interest in real children. In this context, the spinster's deep concern seems yet another instance of the perversity which envelops the world of the play. Her mode of control is sacrifice. "I simply must have someone to live for," she says; and again, "One can always find some poor invalid who needs to be taken care of." She is certainly a "good" woman; her desire to help is unexceptionable. Yet it is not hard to sympathize with Hedda, however much one condemns her brutality toward the old lady: the audience or reader, too, can easily feel that Aunt Julianne is eager to worm her way into the lives of others, that she has a strong potentiality of subtle dominance, in a peculiarly feminine way.

On the masculine side, the need to dominate is also apparent, and also subtly handled. It is most clear in Judge Brack, who is in some ways Hedda's male counterpart. He, too, avoids responsibility ("generally speaking, I have a great respect for the state of matri- mony, but I confess, that as an individual-"); he, too, clearly wants power; to be "cock-of-the-walk" by "back ways," to assert masculine sexual dominance. "I'm exceedingly glad that you have no sort of hold over me," remarks Hedda in the third act, and Judge Brack replies with an ambiguous laugh and an equally ambiguous remark, taken by Hedda as a.veiled threat. The resolution of their relationship is explicitly and emphatically in terms of the power-motif.

Hedda. That means you have me in your power, Judge! You have me at your beck and call from now on.

Brack. Dearest Hedda-believe me-I shall not abuse my advantage. Hedda. I am in your power, all the same. Subject to your commands

and wishes. No longer free-not free! ... No, I won't endure that thought. Never!

Brack looks at her half mockingly. People manage to get used to the inevitable.

This interchange is, of course, one of the precipitating causes of Hedda's suicide.

The other two men, like the two women besides Hedda, conceal




their desire for control in devious ways. Tesman seems an obvious weakling, with no opportunity for domination. He doesn't assert himself in his marriage; he loves to wait on Hedda: in this respect he resembles his aunt. But when he is given his first opportunity to control a destiny, when the manuscript of Eilert's book falls into his hands, he demonstrates a singular ambiguity of response." He doesn't give the manuscript back to Eilert or tell any of the others that he's found it ("I didn't want them to know-for Eilert's sake, you see"); when, the next day, he calls on Eilert "to tell him the manuscript was safe," he leaves no message; he does not mention the manuscript to Mrs. Elvsted, although he meets her immediately after his failure to find Eilert. Of course he lacks the sort of courage which Hedda has so abundantly; it is she who, for her own reasons, actually destroys the manuscript. And when she has done so, Tesman is free to adopt once more the strong moral tone he is most comfortable with. Finally, he shares with Mrs. Elvsted the opportunity, so satisfying to them both, of controlling Eilert's destiny after his death. For this goal, he willingly abandons control of his own future. ("I'll devote my life to it! ... My own work will simply have to wait.") "You know," he says, "sorting out and ar- ranging other people's papers-that's something I'm particularly good at-." And our ultimate scorn for Tesman is based partly on the fact that this statement seems so profoundly true: this is the only sort of control, the only variety of power, that is readily available to him.

Eilert is a more complicated case. He, too, tempts one to sentimentalize about him, and certainly he is the pleasantest person in the play-but he, too, has his faults. In the past he has made an abortive effort to exercise some control over Hedda, to make her become his mistress. Not only did he fail in that effort, but he was subjugated, instead, to her ideas of freedom and beauty. Lbvborg is the one person in the play who, during the time of the action, is primarily concerned to control his own destiny: Hedda skillfully perverts that concern into a desire to demonstrate to others how efficiently he can manage himself. (There are, of course, already elements of this desire in L6vborg: he does not propose to compete with Tesman for the professorship, but he wants everyone to know that he could have done so.) But paradoxically, this man who




wishes only to control his own life has as little power to do so as Hedda. And this is because he is the focus of other people's efforts at control. His dissipation in the past was largely Hedda's responsibility; his success in the present has been under Mrs. Elvsted's supervision and inspiration. He is as concerned as Hedda herself about the opinions of others, once she has suggested that others may be thinking badly of him: the suggestion that Mrs. Elvsted has lost faith in him starts him on his course of dissipation once more. After the loss of the manuscript, he confesses that he has no force of his own. In his final appearance on stage, he apparently goes off to commit suicide under the influence of Hedda; and the final irony is that even his mysterious death seems not to have been, after all, the result of his own will and control. ("Did he threaten to shoot [Mademoiselle Diana], and did the pistol go off then-or did she grab the pistol, shoot him, afterwards putting it back into his pocket.") As far as direct control is concerned, then, he is totally unsuccessful. Yet in another sense-this is the ultimate, vital twist of the play-he controls the destinies of the very people who have controlled his: Hedda, Tesman, Mrs. Elvsted. For this business of control is not, as it turns out, a one-way matter: the victim, the object of control, forms the life of his manipulators as inevitably as they form his. Hedda is driven to suicide by Eilert's final denial, in action, of her principles. Mrs. Elvsted and Tesman are driven together by Eilert's death; their future course of action is dictated by his memory and his manuscript. And one has little hope that their relationship will prove, ultimately, any more fruitful than the other relationships that the drama presents: in this world of power- need, fruitfulness is an unlikely resolution.

For it is, after all, a world that we glimpse in the play. Unlike many of Ibsen's other works, Hedda Gabler presents no characters who seem to stand primarily as representatives of society and social pressure. Yet "society" looms in the background: "what people will think" is a constant issue. And the group we see on the stage seems ultimately a social microcosm, suggests exactly why and how society exercises so much restrictive and destructive force. These are people all turned on one another, all obsessed with control of one another: the freedom that Hedda so yearns for becomes in this context clearly impossible. There is no room for freedom; Eilert's ap-




parent freedom in the past was illusory. Even if one wishes only to control his own life, he finds himself cut off from this possibility because there are so many other people who also want to control his life, who insist on controlling it. The psychological fact becomes, for Ibsen, ultimately a social fact: what seems to be a study of an abnormal woman turns into a study of an abnormal society. The futile condition of women ("They perceive that the times are full of missions worth devoting one's life to, but they cannot discover them") is both partial cause and effect of a profound social chaos, a modern Hobbesian world in which people are forced to band together for fear of one another-and if they do not fear one another, they should.

Here is the ultimate source of the pessimism one feels in this play: there is no escape from this world and its pressures, and dis- aster, of one sort or another, is always implicit in it. One can imag- ine the story of Mrs. Elvsted, or Tesman-any character in the play. It would lack the interest of Hedda's story, for it would deal with a far more commonplace individual, but it would be the story of an equally frustrated life. And the sense one has that Hedda is not, ultimately, completely a villainess, that she deserves and demands sympathy as well as condemnation, comes partly from the recognition, which the play forces on its readers and viewers, that Hedda's difference from the rest lies mainly in the fact that she is more straightforward in the expression of the drives that dominate them all. She attempts, as much as she can, "masculine" solutions for her problems; and in a society where men demonstrate such "feminine" deviousness and participate in "feminine" values, where women have little scope for straightforward action, she is tragically doomed to failure. The play's disturbing quality, its ability to leave the viewer strangely uneasy, comes partly from the fact that it condemns not only Hedda, but the world which surrounds her-a worid not in the least dated, a society with troublesome affinities to our own.

NOTES

1All quotations are from Eva Le Gallienne's translation in Six Plays by Henrik Ibsen (New York, 1957).

2 Tesman's moral ambiguity was first noted by Hermann J. Weigand, who also commented on Mrs. Elvsted's flaws in The Modern Ibsen.



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