Seduction and Betrayal (9 page)

Lövborg gets drunk, loses his manuscript, ends the night in a brothel. The surest workings of conventional plotting take a miraculous turn at this point in the play. Instinct and device merge and a strange violence, a rush of anarchy, flows through the scenery. Tesman had found the manuscript and brought it home, but when a ravaged, desperate Lövborg turns up the next morning Hedda does not tell him that his book is safe. Instead, when he threatens to destroy himself out of disgust with his life, she hands him one of her pistols and makes the odd, unforgettable plea: “Eilert Lövborg — listen to me. Will you not try to — to do it beautifully?”

Hedda slowly puts the manuscript into the stove, saying that she is burning Thea's child. Among other brutal feelings that take over Hedda's mind, one of them seems to be a protest against romanticism, against the expansiveness of Lövborg's ravings about what the book had meant to him and to Thea, how precious it was, how it stood for life, for fidelity, and for love.

As a general's daughter, Hedda has aesthetic notions of marksmanship; she believes that guns should be used with style. But Lövborg is a writer, an intellectual, driven by rages of remorse, despair, and uncontrollable feeling. He has all the awkwardness, the clumsy carelessness of his kind. Yet, even with that, his end is truly a mess, full of outrageous horror, and no elegance at all. At the brothel the pistol in his breast pocket discharged and the ball lodged in his bowels. “That too!” Hedda says, with an expression of “disgust.” “Oh, what curse is it that makes everything I touch turn ludicrous and mean?” The absolute dreariness and ineptness of her existence seem to be illuminated by Lövborg's ludicrous death. We do not know what she wished of him, except that in some way she wished to be the agent, if only the agent of destruction, in someone's life, someone outlandish enough to be worthy of her own outrageousness. Hedda shoots herself in the temple — properly. She is at the end as at the beginning all style, but style without a proper setting. It is finally just a series of gestures, isolated, drifting. Thea and Tesman hope to piece the lost book together from notes. Even that destruction is conditional, imperfect.

George Brandes speaks most interestingly of the “coarseness” of the world in Hedda Gabler. He writes, “Even where the conversation is carried on in a kind of masonic slang that is not lacking in wit, it is devoid of all refinement.” In the translations available one cannot get all the sound and rhythm, the social overtones, but there is no doubt about what Brandes means. This is one of the fascinations of the play — the undercurrent of vice and corruption. Judge Brack is an oily, sly sensualist, with the kind of knowledge of life offered by a clever cynicism. There is indeed something legalistic about his nature — he is mindful of details and in this capacity is a sort of blackmailer. He likes the quiet, sly drama of “situations.” His stag parties end in drunkenness and verge on the sordid — even the timid Tesman does not come home until dawn. Nevertheless, we feel Judge Brack is always in control, watchful, a bourgeois — and that is part of the “coarseness.”

Madame Diana's boudoir, where Lövborg is killed, appears to be a natural plank in the social structure. Most interesting of all is Hedda's floating curiosity about the underside of life. She and Lövborg have had long conversations, revelations. “There I would sit and tell you of my escapades — my days and nights of devilment.” She confesses that she wanted “a peep, now and then, into a world which she is forbidden to know anything about.” Actually, Hedda has a thirst for experience — combined with a self-protectiveness that keeps her in line. So in the end very little is open to her, neither the thrill of recklessness nor the comfort of respectability.

But it is not Madame Diana, stag parties, and loose recollections that make for the coarseness. It is the moral and intellectual shallowness of Hedda, her arrogant coldness, and ignorance. Her determination to destroy the worthy, loving, serious Thea, for no reason or gain to herself, comes from a nature not only damaged but fundamentally low. Her jealousy of Thea is not new, even though it has not in the past, nor in the present, been based upon a genuine competition. It is Iago's destructive compulsion, rooted at one moment in a triviality, and at another in something more threatening but never adequate to the destroying impulses. There is a waywardness in her never to be explained, and yet it does not seem unreal, incredible. Hedda is real enough, tangled, knotted rather than truly complex. We cannot find the force in her that might have prospered under a different sun because her force, her presence, are very much contained in all those defects and compulsions out of which Ibsen has created her. She is not the flower of environment, but rather of inner essence.

Ibsen's stage instructions describe Hedda as having hair of an agreeable “medium brown, but not particularly abundant.” Thea's hair is “remarkably light, almost flaxen, and unusually abundant and wavy.” This accounts for the remembered instance in their school life when Hedda tried to burn Thea's hair. Also it is curious that when she is burning the manuscript Thea has helped Lövborg to write, helped him so much they sentimentally called it their “child,” Hedda speaks not of Lövborg but of Thea, and again of her envy of Thea's hair. “Now I am burning your child, Thea. Burning it, curly-locks!” This is the envy and emptiness of a narrow, vulgar world.

One of the main clues to Hedda's character is that she is a Philistine. For all the rage of her temperament and the glow of her recklessness, she is the general's daughter, a child of the military life. Philistinism in her has a certain aristocratic coloring of defiance and arrogance, and she would not fit Arnold's use of the term for that reason. But she is not an aristocrat; she has neither practical means nor the assurance that certain openings into pleasure and comfort can always be found. Her daring is that of specialists — in this case the military — and it does not suffice in the absence of duties. She is truly rootless without her father, classless, without definition, adrift. To set oneself up against the claims of culture and creation without having worldly privileges to take their place causes great turmoil in the unconscious. Envies, angers, and aggressions churn and fuss and yet it is hard to feel superior to culture and learning without having extraordinary natural assets of another order. Defenses are devious and distaste for real worth is justified as proportion, judgment. A cold and controlled Philistine like Hedda will always see in sentiment about art and creative effort a general sentimentality and exaggeration. Poor Thea, in telling of leaving her husband to follow Lövborg, of going to his rooms to look for him — actions a respectable woman of that time could not easily take on — keeps saying, “What else could I do?” This sort of
activity
on behalf of another — even on behalf of love — this intense engagement, the social risk, the bother are incomprehensible to Hedda. Selfishness and Philistinism combine powerfully in Hedda's nature. She despises those acts of dedication that fill the void.

First, she is contemptuous of Tesman's running about in the libraries of Europe on their honeymoon. True, his projects are not exalted and he is a nervous pedant. But would it not have been the same to her if he had been studying Baroque churches or the French Revolution, if he had been writing poetry like Wordsworth? To Hedda, unworldly concentration is absurd. She would rather buy a favorite horse than have Tesman buy books on his special subject. “Your special subject?” she says, as if she did not even remember what it was.

Hedda is as much interested in Lövborg as it is possible for her to be interested in anyone. Yet, when her husband brings in Lövborg's new book and asks if she wants to look at it, she says, “No, thanks.” When she burns the manuscript she is showing her contempt for the intellectual effort that went into it. In confessing the destruction to Tesman, she speaks of it as “only a book.” And if Lövborg is foolish enough to kill himself over the loss, well, “Do it beautifully.”

At one point Hedda has the idea that her bumbling, shy, bookish husband should go in for politics. The cynical, worldly Judge Brack is astonished that such an unlikely thing should occur to her. Of course, she hardly thinks of Tesman as likely to succeed as a minister. What she reveals in the suggestion is the idle working of a mind that can think of any outlandish matter, since she has a fundamental contempt for what Tesman is doing, what he can do, what he has always done — his earnest, uninspired scholarship.

The emotions Hedda arouses in us are tentative, ambivalent. She is the center of our fixed attention and yet we do not know how to feel toward her. Her style and the fascinations of her futile indifference are strong enough to suggest that longings for her nature if not her fate are in all of us. We cannot pity her because of her lack of any instinct for goodness, her disregard for the claims of other people's lives; and yet her carelessness with her own life is a perverse form of honor. She is coarse and, worse, soulless, but the cool, cynical wit of many of her best scenes tells us that she is not stupid.

Is she more a man than a woman? Perhaps so. Her only joys have been horses and guns. She treats her husband as if he were a bad colt picked up at an auction. Her coquetry is guarded, not very different from the masquerades of the bachelor Judge Brack. Neither is overcome by romantic impulse; they will not go under for love. The idea of becoming a mother is unbearable to Hedda. But her peculiar Philistinism — the destructive form it takes — has something to do with the fact that the only life she has is a woman's life of the most reduced sort. True, the reduction is due in part to the perversity of her character, to her refusals, omissions, deviations. She has no projects that engage her, she has never been asked to cultivate an understanding of intellectual and creative concentration, to experience the pleasure and labor of it.

Hedda Gabler is a bourgeois woman of the nineteenth century. What is odd about her is that in sloth and disaffection she has turned away from the props and crutches by which other women desperately tried to give life hope and warmth. She has no respect for what is called “a woman's world” and even less for a life of work and ideas. The cave of nothingness which she has gradually entered seems to leave only a dull resentment alive. She can at least participate, slyly, in the civil war of one woman against another. She is a foot soldier in this battle. Hedda is always contemptuous of women and cruel to them when the occasion arises. She is mean to the servant, indifferent to the death of the old aunt, wicked to allow Miss Tesman to pauperize herself to furnish the unloved villa, and, most of all, sadistic toward Thea. If Hedda may be said to have loved only her father, her only other surviving emotion is hatred of Thea. But why should she hate her, what is to be gained by it, what can it really mean to her?

Thea, the eternal student and nursemaid to talent, the depressed wife of Sheriff Elvsted, had little for Hedda to envy in the past except for her fund of patient survival energy. But this energy has become something glowing and useful when it attaches itself to the damaged artist, Lövborg. It is genuine and it is radical. The energy and feeling are insistent enough to give Thea the courage to leave her husband and to set out, in the classical, illuminated, isolated way of a hero, to pursue her fate. She sees in the backsliding, special Lövborg, a cause, a belief, a love that could truly identify her as a person, a life. Thea is not dominating in the play, not deeply interesting or ever able to invade the center of our feelings. She is an idea, historically another Nora, without Nora's charms. Her governessy, high-minded qualities stir up a heated hatred in the feckless life of Hedda; it is the hatred of the arrogant, not of the driven. That is why it is dry and futile.

Hedda's recollection of her jealousy of Thea's abundant, curly hair is a symbol of a trivial, enduring envy, one of Ibsen's marvelous, throw-away insights. We pity Hedda that with her the winds of experience and purpose, or simply the activities of life, have not been able to sweep away this remnant, this discreditable scrap of youthful greed. Her destructive courage and style have not, after all, left her free of the slaveries of girlhood.

When it first appeared,
Hedda Gabler
received the worst press of all Ibsen's important plays. The objectivity, the distance, the refusal of doctrine, the mysterious, menacing
scare
of it, the lack of “womanly” qualities in a character so riveting sexually and dramatically — hardly anyone was immediately able to see the desolate grandeur and foretelling of the creation. Hedda, rather than Nora, was the real prophecy. Hardly a woman in, for instance, the films of Ingmar Bergman is imaginable without her.

Thus on the fateful banks of the Nile,
Weeps the deceitful crocodile!

R
OSMERSHOLM
is one of Ibsen's most interesting plays. The surface is clear enough and yet the darkness is very thick and troubling. Like so many of Ibsen's plays, there is no one in it to like without ambivalence. This lack of a positive is seldom troubling; here it is the murky negative that disturbs us most sharply. Which of the three can one trust? How is life to be served here — and whose life? It is a play about death perhaps, the death of the hunter, in this case a woman, who returns from her trip into the forest of sexual competition with two bleeding carcasses and a feeling of futility.

The heroine, Rebecca West, is a fiercely engaging woman. She is recognizable, especially in her acquaintance with dilemma, the dilemma of survival. She is torn apart by the kind of high motive she wishes to offer life and the decision and the low passion and cunning by which these high dreams are to be accomplished. The ugliest necessities and the most splendid hopes toss her about in a manner of the greatest dramatic and psychological interest. Early deprivation has sharpened her intelligence, hardened her will, without in any way making her freely accept the immorality of private selfishness or social inhumanity. She must entrap, and then must step on the sharp blades herself.