When Hedda Gabler was first published in
1890, it greatly puzzled both critics and theatrical producers. Its fragmented,
staccato language, its rambling conversations in which much of the story is
communicated subtextually, its tone of tragicomic nihilism and above all, its
enigmatic, brooding heroine all marked such advances in dramatic technique as
to render it nearly incomprehensible to many of its early readers. Although
Ibsen had become, by 1890, sufficiently notorious a playwright as to guarantee
that the play would be produced, much of the early production history reflects
this essential puzzlement.
Hedda Gabler has always been among the
most popular of Ibsen's plays, perhaps only exceeded by A Doll's House and Peer
Gynt in the total number of performances. Nor is it difficult to see the reason
for the play's continuing popularity. The character of Hedda herself, with her
wiles and stratagems, her cruelty and her charm, her cowardice and her cunning,
has always been at the centre of our fascination with the play.
Hedda Gabler is not an easy character to
get to know. At first reading she seems a bitter personality portrayed in an
old-fashioned script set in an outmoded and foreign society. How could a woman
in more than a 100-year-old play possibly be understandable or relevant to the
twenty first century viewer? However, upon further examination, Hedda Gabler's
fictional reality not only offers us the opportunity to observe the art and
social concerns of Ibsen's day, but also extends to us a paradigm by which we
may compare and evaluate the principles of our day.
In approaching this play, it is important
to recall that Hedda was written as a theatrical work in the realm of
contemporary realism, not as a historical curio. While the differences of
culture and period now put a certain distance between ourselves and the
subject, Ibsen was most emphatic that his characters were representative of
actual human beings. Although in his two previous works, Rosmersholm and The
Lady From the Sea, Ibsen had begun exploring the human psyche in more symbolic,
mystical terms, Hedda marked a return to the theatrical style which we term
"realism," a method of playwriting in which the internal motivations
of the personalities in the play are explored within a specific social context.
Other hallmarks of the realistic style
include the avoidance of devices such as soliloquies in favour of more natural
exposition, casually related scenes leading logically to a denouement, and the
creation of individual behaviour directly attributable to the heredity or
environment of the character. All external stage details were authentic to the
specific and current environment; all costumes, dialogue, and settings were
carefully chosen to reveal the characters' more critical psychological
impulses. Though his dialogue may appear to modern readers as somewhat awkward
and even coy, part of Ibsen's genius was the ability to use conventional
surroundings and conversation to express sentiments and circumstances that were
considered unspeakable to the audience of the time. The original spectators
would have been involved in the social, political, and scientific climate of
the moment and thus able to grasp many of the implications of Hedda's
relationship to the prevailing worldview. The filter of the present may prevent
us from realizing that Ibsen was attacking his own social milieu head-on.
Ibsen's views were recognizably part of
the cutting edge of his time. He was well- travelled and read, and acquainted
with the social movements of the period, his reading included the daily,
detailed perusal of a number of newspapers, even as he was up-to- date on
theatrical advancements. Although he himself expressly denied being "a
feminist," such scholars as Elinor Fuchs and Joan Templeton have
convincingly shown that he was at the very least sympathetic to the beginnings
of the women's movement, and was even actively involved in the push to redefine
the role of women in society. Certainly the creator of such seminal feminist
archetypes as Lona Hessell, Nora Helmer,
Helena Alving and Ellida Wangel could not have been blind to
the implications of the plays in which they appeared.
Norway was not so remote that it was
unaffected by the feminist debate of the Victorian age. While in 1871, Denmark
led the Scandinavian countries in initiating an organization for improving
women's status, by the 1880s, Norway had established a woman's rights movement
of its own. Growing economic pressures made it increasingly difficult for the
middle-class family to provide for unmarried daughters in the home, but both
prejudice and legislation barred women from either meaningful education or
dignified employment. Some change was soon forthcoming; women were admitted to
the University of Christiania (Oslo) in 1882, and 1884 saw the founding of
Norsk Kvinnesaksforening (Norwegian Women's Movement Association), a pioneering
liberation coalition that remains active to this day. That same year Ibsen
himself presented a petition to the government demanding that married women be
granted the right to earnings and property.
Victorian attitudes were slower to change.
While the lower class woman had, for sometime, been allowed to work in the
factories, concessions had never been made in the home. Men did not assist with
domestic responsibilities, leaving the women their "natural" duties
in keeping the house and raising the children. This order of affairs had
support in the nineteenth century Darwinian sciences, medical and social
experts alike taught that cultural, physiological, and psychological
differences between genders were caused by evolutionary forces. The belief was
that "women's individual evolution was arrested earlier than men's to
permit the conservation of their energies for reproduction". Women were
considered biologically more intuitive, self-sacrificing, and tender then men,
and thus naturally disposed to choose marriage and motherhood, any other choice
was considered tragic. Even the arts of the day perpetuated this "ideology
of domesticity".
The "angel in the house,"
sexually passive and refined, whose responsibility it was to oversee the provision
of a sanctuary of well-ordered comfort and peace, became the literary ideal for
middle-class women. In all classes of society, hearth and home acquired the
significance of religious symbolism.
Steven Mintz explains in A Prison of
Expectations that a woman was expected to maintain a "walled garden"
of a home, a place where her husband could find refuge and be purified from his
encounters with the harsh realities of his ruthless business world, and a place
where the innocence of her children could be protected. A wife was thought able
to maintain this refuge because of her special virtues of
femininity..."Women, by their very natures, were intended to purify the
sphere of family and home".
The special feminine traits attributed to
women and extolled in literature included a capacity for cheerful docility,
sentiment, delicacy of thought, goodness, unselfishness, joy in serving others,
and tact, all springing from a woman's instinctive moral superiority. Part of
the feminine moral superiority was the self-sacrifice of her own
sexuality..."indeed, the idolised wife of the period was portrayed as
asexual, void of desire herself and loved for her virtue, not her flesh".
Her only passions were to be love of children and home and domestic duties.
In order for a woman to preserve this
"moral superiority," she had to be kept in her place, away from the
manly affairs of economics and politics. In his book Victorian People and
Ideas, Richard Altick concludes:
"Putting aside woman's lack of sexual
passion, which... was universally accepted as a biological fact because to
assume otherwise was indecent, there was the wider implication that woman was
inferior to man in all ways except the unique one that counted most (to man):
her femininity. Her place was in the
home, on a veritable pedestal if one could
be afforded, and emphatically not in
the world of affairs."
The realm of womanly affairs, both
literary and social, included motherhood. A mother was accountable for the
health, manners, and morals of her children. She was to be conscientious in
training her daughters to assume future angelic duties. In addition to passing
along the complex body taboos designed to defend purity from earthly animal
passions, the middle-to-upper- class mother was to drill her girls in the
niceties of the intricate feminine social duties that marked her place in the
pecking order of bourgeois society. An unfortunate error in either discipline
could destroy the young woman's reputation, and bar her from the polite circles
that were her only outlets. Mothers were not as responsible for the daughters'
intellectual education.
Schooling was often seen as of secondary
importance to the influence of the home in the education of middle-class girls.
The more prosperous families might send their daughters to expensive and select
boarding schools for a while; the less wealthy were more likely to patronize
small homely "academies" which aimed to foster those same ideals of
bourgeois that were nurtured in the middle-class home. An examination of the
curriculum (both formal and informal) of the majority of girls' boarding
schools of the period will show that social values and objectives took
precedence over academic goals: girls were educated with their marriage
prospects and the ideal of the "cultivated homemaker" in mind.
Keeping in mind the ultimate goal of a
"good marriage," both parents and schools tended to strongly
discourage bookishness, vocational aspirations, and other unfeminine behaviour.
Instead, young women of all classes "expected to look after their families
and hoped above all for a 'good' husband; that is, a good provider". Such
would be the education that Hedda and Thea received both in society and at the
school where they were classmates.
Viewed in the context of Ibsen's era,
Hedda becomes the embodiment of the identity crisis facing the middle-class
woman during that transitional time. If women were to modify the accepted,
limiting codes of behaviour, what rules would the "new woman" follow?
Hedda herself is unable to solve the dilemma, and in belonging to both the old
and the new, is torn apart.
Raised by a privileged father in the
unlanded Norwegian upper class, Hedda is seasoned in freedoms more typical of
males of the period, including experience with rough horsemanship and guns. Her
guns, however, are not tools but mementos and dangerous toys. She has been
granted masculine leisure and tastes, but not corresponding responsibilities or
a useful education. She can never be the son that the Victorian General would
have wanted.
Neither can she be her mother's daughter.
Significantly, Hedda's mother is completely absent from the narrative, whether
destroyed by the loss of the old values, the coming of the new, or merely by
childbirth, the reason is unknown. The system designed to transmit traditional
values has broken down. There is no one to teach Hedda the specifics of the
feminine codes in behaviour or etiquette. The only inheritance, which may have
come from her mother, is a shabby old piano, a possession she both values and
disdains. She will not discard it, but neither will she put it on public
display, as she wills the pistols and the portrait of her father.
Hedda seems reluctant to face either the
passing of the old ways or the changes she faces in marrying Tesman. She
dislikes the smell of the decaying potpourri, and spends her time reminiscing
and re-enacting portions of her past relationship with Lovborg. Having out of
necessity achieved her destiny of a respectable marriage, she sees no hope for
the future of that union. Sighing over September, she seems to have somehow
missed her own summer, Salome remarks
"Hedda is not unripe, but rather is
like an all-too-early decayed Autumn, as she returns to the narrow perspectives
of a child and its playful selfseeking".
Certainly she does not look forward to the
birth of the child whose presence in her womb propels her inevitably towards a
future of either death in childbed, or life as a mother (which, in her
childhood situation, also meant absence or death). She has no alternative. By
temperament and upbringing she is as unsuited for Thea's work as she is for
Diana's. As a female, she can only covet parasite Judge Brack's male
prerogatives. While she professes a desire to control destiny and make some
real difference in a life, she sees no value in wife and motherhood, so
vicariously participates in the romance of Lovborg's dissipations. Endowed with
a taste for the trappings of wealth (such as servants and expensive clothes),
and ambitious to make her mark in social circles, she lacks both the social
training and the inherited money to advance beyond her bourgeois desires. She
clings to the fading glories of her fame as the dashing Miss Gabler and seethes
in impotent jealousy.
Discontented as she is, Hedda's suicide is
still unexpected. One explanation of the violent act can be discovered in the
Ibsen's own pattern of playwriting, shaped in part by the world that shaped the
playwright. As Charles Lyons explains in Hedda Gabler: Gender, Role, and World,
"The dramatic character, Hedda, is
not determined merely by the social restrictions imposed upon the female at the
end of the nineteenth century as that world is represented by the social
dynamics of the play; the character is also configured by the social dynamics
of Ibsen's basic sexual paradigm, a sexual paradigm that voices the
male-dominated sexual ideology of Ibsen's moment in history mediated through
the idiosyncrasies of his own psyche".
Conscious as he was of the changing world
around him, Ibsen could not help be influenced by the literary constructs that
in part framed his developing intellect. Hedda, as well as Thea, may be seen as
children of those literary constructions. According to the prevailing
literature, if a woman was unable to succeed as an angel, she must be dealt
with as a monster. And Ibsen not only attacked such a notion, in some ways, he
can be seen as perpetuating it.
"Angelic" was indeed the term of
the day, as reflected and reinforced by Coventry Patmore's immensely successful
poem "Angel in the House." Published in 1854, this poem
"describes the bliss that comes from marrying the pure, self-sacrificing
Victorian maiden...and describes the bride-to-be in 'other worldly'
terms":
"A rapture of
submission lifts Her life into celestial rest...
And round her happy
footsteps blow The authentic airs of Paradise"
Patmore was by no means alone in comparing
the Victorian wife and mother with angels. Poems, books, and plays of the day
used the term and description freely, depicting heroines that "codified
the womanly ideal...(as they) conform to the idealised stereotype of
self-effacing, self-sacrificing 'helpmeets'". And, in opposition to these
heroines, were "wicked step-mothers," or other monster women, the
independent and unfeminine characters who suggest, as Thackeray implied in
Vanity Fair, that "every angel in the house...'proper, agreeable, and
decorous,' 'coaxing and cajoling' hapless men, is really, perhaps a monster,
'diabolically hideous and slimy." Victorian "angels in the house,"
were expected not only to have power to run the house but the power to use
their suppressed sexuality to give birth, which denotes power over the male. As
Gilbert
and
Gubar explain, the angel of life is also an angel of death, she may deny life
or give death. The angel may be a much-repressed demon who wants out.
In Hedda Gabler, wife Hedda becomes just
such a death-giving fiend. Masculinised out of her angelhood, she turns her
powers to malevolent manipulation, pitching family members against each other,
dominating her friends, burning the fruits of Lovborg's labours before driving
him to emasculate himself, and finally murdering her own child. Unlike most of
Ibsen's heroines, she makes no real self-discovery and achieves no growth. Like
the wicked queen of "Snow White" fame, she destroys herself in the
mad pursuit of malignant "beauty." Her suicide accomplishes nothing.
Is Thea, therefore, the real heroine of the play? She is the one with the
courage to ignore respectability, to change her life and leave her passionless
marriage in pursuit of the man she loves. It would seem that Thea is as
deserving the death sentence as surely as Hedda.
Thea's abandonment of her role as
stepmother can be construed as a drive to actually fulfil her destiny as the
snow-white angel. It is her purity that has reformed Lovborg, it is her
presence that has so inspired him to write his masterpiece; the book is
acknowledged as Lovborg's and Thea's sexless "Brain child." Thea, of
course, did none of the actual writing, as the ingrained belief of the Medieval,
Romantic, and Victorian eras was in the actual "sonship" of the
written text. According to that belief, an author literally fathered, with his
female muse, a posterity of "brain children." The power to create was
thus exclusively male, and women attempting to write were considered
presumptuous, freakish, unnatural, and subject to various health problems.
Thea accomplished her angelic potential
while actually in the Elvsted home, surviving in a dual marriage as she kept
house and raised one man's children while supporting another man with her love
and inspiration. When that double-husband divided, and Thea was forced to
divide her devotions and chose to leave the home, disaster ensued. She could
neither keep Lovborg from falling back into evil ways, nor protect their
literary child. In fact, Lovborg blamed her distrust of him for driving him
back to drink. Thea could only redeem herself by offering to sacrifice herself
in resurrecting Lovborg's book. The play seems to suggest that she will
additionally serve Tesman as a far superior replacement for Hedda. Once Hedda
is destroyed, and Thea suitably paired Tesman, literary moral order will once
again be restored.
Hedda Gabler is not only a fascinating
play in itself, but it also serves as a reminder of a blind spot in our own
day. Here in today's world, at the centre of a community of people who
sometimes succumb to the tendency to confuse Victorian cultural values with the
teachings of the Restored Gospel, it can be helpful to recall the unhappy
results of expecting women to conform to a social code that blames women for
the failures of men, and expects young women to define themselves and their
abilities solely within the parameters of patrocentric marriage.
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