Seduction and Betrayal (7 page)

Strange that Helmer should want a doll's house and yet be so hostile to details of domestic creation. Over and over he leaves the stage with an air of insufferable self-love when there is anything to do with sewing or household affairs. In one scene he mocks the arm movements of a woman knitting. He flees from the presence of the children when they come in from the cold outside, saying, “Only mothers can endure such a temperature.”

Nora's children — this is a hedge of thorns. Abandon Helmer, all right, but bundle up the children and take them with you, arranging for his weekend and vacation visits. Even in Ibsen's day one actress refused the part saying, “I could never abandon my children.” Nora's love for the children seems real. The nurse points out that they are used to being with their mother more than is usual. Helmer, again lecturing about heredity, says lying mothers produce criminal children. Nora shudders, remembering her interest payments. The nurse she will finally leave the children with is the one who has raised her, but still the step is a grave one. In one of the most striking bits of dialogue between husband and wife, Helmer says, “...no man sacrifices his honor, not even for one he loves.” “Millions of women have done so,” Nora replies.

When Helmer says that she cannot leave her children, she might have said, “Millions of men have done so,” and in that been perfectly consistent with current behavior. Nora seems to be saying that she cannot raise her own children in the old way and that she needs time to discover a new one.

Nevertheless the severance is rather casual and it drops a stain on our admiration of Nora. Ibsen has put the leaving of her children on the same moral and emotional level as the leaving of her husband and we cannot, in our hearts, assent to that. It is not only the leaving but the way the play does not have time for suffering, changes of heart. Ibsen has been too much a man in the end. He has taken the man's practice, if not his stated belief, that where self-realization is concerned children shall not be an impediment.

In William Archer's Preface to
A Doll's House
he had the idea that the woman who served as the model for Nora had actually, in real life, borrowed the money to redecorate her house! There is something beguiling in this thought, something of Nora Helmer in it. The real case was a dismal and more complicated one. The borrowing woman was an intellectual, a sort of writer, who had some literary correspondence with Ibsen. A meeting was arranged and the biographer, Halvdan Koht, says that “she was hardly what he [Ibsen] expected, but young, pretty and vivacious.” She was invited to Dresden, and Ibsen called her “the lark.” Some years later the lark married and borrowed money secretly to take her husband south for his health. She had trouble paying the money back and the Ibsens urged her to confess to her husband. She confessed and he, in fury, demanded a divorce. The poor wife suffered a nervous breakdown, was sent to an asylum. “In this catastrophe the marriage was dissolved.”

The play and the true happening are a wonderfully rich psychological comment on each other. When we learn that the model for Nora was intelligent and ambitious everything falls into place. There is no need to wonder about motivation or changes of character, sudden revelations. Ibsen has not made Nora a writer, but he has, if we look carefully, made her extremely intelligent. She is the most sympathetic of all his heroines. There is nothing bitter, ruthless, or self-destructive in her. She has the amiability and endurance that are the clues to moral courage. Nora is gracious and fair-minded. Even when she is leaving Helmer, she thanks him for being kind to her. With Dr. Rank, the family friend, who is in love with her, she is honest and her flirtation has none of the heavy cynicism of Hedda Gabler's relation with
her
family friend, Judge Brack, and none of the bitter ambitiousness of Rebecca's relationship with Rosmer. Nora is not after anything and we cannot imagine her in nihilistic pursuit of an architect (
The Master Builder
) or the sculptor (
When We Dead Awaken
). Nora's freedom rests upon her affectionate nature.

The habit is to play Nora too lightly in the beginning and too heavily in the end. The person who has been charming in Acts 1 and 2 puts on a dowdy traveling suit in Act 3 and is suddenly standing before you as a spinster governess. If the play is to make sense, the woman who has decided to leave her husband must be the very same woman we have known before. We may well predict that she will soon be laughing and chattering again and eating her macaroons in peace, telling her friends — she is going back to her hometown — what a stick Helmer turned out to be. Otherwise her freedom is worth nothing. Nora's liberation is not a transformation, but an acknowledgment of error, of having married the wrong man. Her real problem is money — at the beginning and at the end. What will she live on? What kind of work will she do? Will she get her children back? Who will be her next husband? When the curtain goes down it is only the end of Volume One.

Because Nora is free and whole she does not present the puzzling tangle of deceit and subterfuge, suppressed rage and dishonesty, that are so peculiar a tendency in the women in Ibsen's other realistic plays.
A Doll's House
is a comedy, a happy ending — except for the matter of the children. The play was published more than ninety years ago and we have found out very little we could add. In the case of grating marriages the children are still there, a matter of improvisation, resistant to fixed principles. Fortunately some of Ibsen's more far-out heroines — Hedda Gabler, Rebecca West, and Irene — are childless and this makes their suicides and falling off a mountain easier on the moral sensibilities of the audience.

H
EDDA GABLER
is one of the meanest romantics in literature. She is not offered as a grotesque or meant to serve as a subsidiary who will force forward the plot and provide comparison to those of a lighter, kinder spirit. She is, instead, given the very center of the stage; she is given that by Ibsen, and the ambivalent attractions of her nature draw our attentions even closer, inside, toward those empty spaces neither she, nor we, can fill with motive and purpose. Hedda is mean-spirited and petty in both large and small matters.

The only other romantic figure of a corresponding hardness and cruelty is Heathcliff in
Wuthering Heights
. He does not pretend to any courtesies or disguise. Still Heathcliff is somewhat, if not entirely, redeemed by his annihilating attachment to Cathy, by his having been abandoned as a child and cruelly tormented by the natural son of his adopted father. Also, Heathcliff shows a sort of progress; he goes away and makes a fortune, thereby indicating that for all his sufferings there is a masculine force and control in him. He gradually, by will and ruthlessness and again by control, gains the Earnshaw property — but, of course, he loses in the end all that could have made his life meaningful.

Creatures of the will move step by step toward victory and loss almost at the same time. At least, this is true in literature where design and completion play a part. Such persons will not allow for the contingencies of existence. The speeding will would destroy everything around it if it were not that the demands of aesthetic structure finally cut down the fascinating, offending, dominating hero. Like Heathcliff, Hedda Gabler attracts us and repels us at the same time. They are both, so to speak, stars, created figures, large but somehow without symmetry. We do not know where we are with them and often they are simply exaggerated, unimaginable creatures who fling themselves and their moods at us in a random fury. And yet their stories stir us; they are never boring. There is never a relaxation of tension. Something of universal psychic life and truth draws us to believe them as possibilities, even if we cannot connect them clearly and definitely to their actions under the terms of realistic causality. Restlessness, mood, obsession. Everything comes at us in fragments, disturbing bits and pieces. You feel life cannot sustain their degree of willfulness, and part of the suspense of their character is the anxious waiting to learn in just what way they will fall.

Hedda Gabler is unusual, I believe, in having no motivation whatsoever. In a sense, we do not want her defined. She is irksome, troubling, and yet a sort of heroine one is still investigating, pondering, at the end of the play as much as at the beginning. Her faults are profoundly deep and murky, stirring about in the darkest, coldest springs of destructiveness. She cannot like anyone, except perhaps her dead father, but she is a temptation, very special, like the Serpent, chosen by nature, by some casual stroke of fate, to represent threatening, willful, beguiling coldness.

Hedda has nothing in common with Medea, Phaedra, or Clytemnestra. They have been hurt, betrayed; they are jealous; they know love and therefore the need for revenge on its deceits. They have desires for the future, if only the desire to have destroyed certain conditions of the past. Their actions connect with their feelings. Hedda Gabler shares with Hamlet the quality of lending herself to a disconcerting number of possibilities for interpretation. But Hamlet's father has been murdered and his mother has married the guilty uncle.

With Hedda there is nothing to start with. She is not the Queen of Thebes, the Princess of Elsinore or even of Ibsen's Christiania; she is, instead, to be understood as a provincial, somehow (again not quite clearly) a compromised woman of twenty-nine, newly married to the foolish and unimpressive scholar, George Tesman. She enters the play at an odd point in her life; she is on the decline, stuck. Being married to George Tesman is, for her, a bitter resolution; it is the negative side of overwhelming, relentless fate. There is nothing awful and grand about it; indeed it is embarrassing. Instead of the ancient betrayals, deaths, murders, and jealousies, Hedda's drama is to have started life with recklessness, flamboyance, and to have ended up with a dud; she has when we first meet her just endured a honeymoon with a dazed, educated simpleton. It is unbearable; the very atmosphere immediately announces not a tragic unhappiness but an empty, paralyzing, ridiculous marriage. The curious modernity of the plot is that the workings of destiny have shrunk to yawning boredom. We feel George Tesman is too good for Hedda, but no woman in the audience could possibly be in love with him herself. Difficult to place sympathy as the scene unfolds.

Hedda takes every chance to act badly and to hurt others. Sometimes she does so with a languid pettiness and sometimes with malignant determination. By nature all ice and indifference, she accomplishes her delinquencies without a rush of agitation or beating emotion; and that is why it is hard to remember that throughout Ibsen's four-act play Hedda does not show a single, decent, generous impulse. We consider her at her best when she shows nothing beyond her style. How is it possible that with all these distressing qualities, Hedda Gabler challenges and pleases and is the most fascinating, humanly interesting of Ibsen's women. Actresses long to play the role and she has had a steady public since 1890. The blurring, the murkiness of her bad nature are themselves dramatic discoveries. The audience, when it is a woman, knows her own George Tesman; and the male is ever willing to risk his peace with a Hedda.

Hedda Gabler is not operatic, except perhaps at the end. Before that, she is working out a small-town provincial destiny that takes place entirely in her own feelings and temperament. There is no political or philosophical content to her destructiveness; no angry raging against poverty, fate, injustice, ill luck. The obstructions again are negative: Who else? Where else? What else? she asks and there is no answer. Negative forces are more devastating to Hedda's integrity than positive wishes unfulfilled. This is the originality of Ibsen's extraordinary force in this work. The gods have not had their sport with Hedda. She has, if anything, had her sport with the gods. She has done as she pleased, without remorse, without thought for the suffering of the others. But even that is negative. Nothing whatsoever is advanced by her actions — for her. Others are woefully hurt, ruined, even killed, but she is not one bit richer or happier.

There are two corpses at the end of the play and, of course, that of Hedda Gabler herself is one of them. And yet the play is not in any true sense a grand tragedy. It remains a brilliant and brutal scene from provincial life, one that grips us with its dramatic fascination and yet does not leave us stunned by grief and pity. Some of the diminishment of emotion at the end of the play may be laid to Ibsen's decision to tidy up for us. Hedda has burned a precious manuscript and a promising young thinker has died of a gunshot in a brothel — these are losses that might create waves of feeling in our minds. But the loss is refound. In the end Hedda's husband, Tesman, and the young man's mistress, Thea, are sorting out the notes from the dead Lövborg's great book, and sorting out themselves at the same time. A tragedy would not leave Thea and Tesman with their life's work ahead of them up in the study. After all, they have lost the persons they loved and their consolation in a bit of editing and repasting for posterity is more than a little dampening. And what about the effect of the dramatic, offstage final gunshot, as Hedda shoots herself cleanly in the temple? It is a memorable denouement about which one feels not sadness so much as
Bravo!
Admiration for skill and crazy daring and ultimate, complete indifference.

Hedda Gabler
is a strange play, about a stranger. What is wrong with her? Everything is wrong with her morally. She has no particular virtue to recommend her, but she does have an advantage, the advantage of style. This is what overwhelms us, captures and holds our attention, makes us feel, even unwillingly, a sort of complicity, admiration. Hedda is cool — the older sense of the word. She is not, by the exercise of control, disguising turbulence and ambition, or even need. Her indifference is real. She is not in love. No one in the play has deeply stirred her feelings. The failure or inability to care for anyone is the first condition of her nature. It is not, however, a cause of action; it is merely a condition, the first circumstance of her character and her situation. It takes its place along with other details, many other details, such as being a liar. It is the basis of her style, the very stuff out of which the image she casts has been put together. It is intensely interesting.