Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler is a psychological portrait of the central character, a young wife tortured by the restraints of social expectation, bored silly by married life and dreading the future. She attempts to find relief from her stifling marriage – even though this is a life of privilege compared to those of many – by manipulating the weaker minds around her, not least her rather dim husband. The play opens with Hedda and Jorgen Tesman arriving home from an extended honeymoon. They are soon visited by Tesman’s aunt, Julle (in many translations this is written as Julie), who is her sister’s carer, and soon thereafter by Mrs Elvsted, a friend whose marriage is in trouble. Later Judge Brack, a friend of Tesman’s, comes to invite him to a drinking party. The ensemble is complete by Ejlert Lovborg, (“a poor depraved creature”) a writer, reformed alcoholic and former lover of Hedda’s, who is now in a new relationship with Mrs Elvsted.
In other hands this would be the stuff of drawing room comedy. But Ibsen’s vision is dark, and things start to get complicated very quickly. From the moment she is introduced it is clear Hedda is what we would now call ‘high maintenance’. She complains that there are too many flowers in her sitting room and she bosses Berte the maid around: “All the things the young mistress wanted unpacked before she could get off to bed”. She tells Berte off for forgetting to use her husband’s academic title and is then sharp with her husband’s aunt, saying “Such an early visit” and teases her quite cruelly about her new hat, pretending to mistake it for the maid’s. But she reserves her seriously sadistic side for her ‘friend’ Thea Elvsted.
Thea’s story is an important analogue of Hedda’s. She was once romantically involved with Jörgen. Thea is now trapped in a loveless marriage, to a man twenty years her senior, looking after his children by his first wife who she was originally employed to care for. By her marriage she has simply become an unwaged servant. Lövborg came to their house in the country as a tutor for the children and they quickly became romantically involved. When the play opens Thea has left her husband to join Lovborg, ignoring the inevitable scandal that will follow. She went to school with Hedda – this is a close knit community – where Hedda obviously bullied her, pulling her hair. She reminds Hedda that “you once said you were going to burn it off”. Later Hedda says “I think I’ll burn your hair off after all“. Is this a sick joke, or a serious threat? Thea has the courage to do what Hedda seemingly cannot, that is to leave her unhappy marriage and follow her lover.
Hedda is jealous of and angered by Thea’s relationship with Lovborg. When she and Lovborg were lovers, he lived a life of excess, and she lived vicariously through him. But now he has found some stability with Thea, has sobered up, and has published a successful book, with another nearly complete. Hedda attempts to undermine this relationship, goading him into drinking despite his well-known struggles with his sobriety. Initially she tries this by offering him punch, which he declines. When he proves strong enough to resist this temptation she argues that he should drink “otherwise people might so easily get the idea that you are not…not really confident, really sure of yourself“. In other words you need to drink to show you are not an alcoholic! This distresses Thea, causing her to cry “Oh God, Oh God, Hedda! What are you saying? What are you trying to do?” I think it is very clear what she is trying to do – she is pulling the wings off flies, just because she can. Hedda may not be a monster, but she does some monstrous things. At the end of the Act the Judge, Tesman and Lovborg head off for a party at the Judge’s house, while the womenfolk stay at home, waiting for them to return.
Act Three opens the morning after the party – ‘almost an orgy’, in Tesman’s eyes at least, but clearly the scene of some excess. Hedda and Thea have been up all night, waiting for their men to return in good time, as promised. Some of the members of the party, Lovborg included, have headed off to a brothel to continue drinking (and, it is implied, so on.) Tesman comes home, but quickly goes out again on receipt of news about his ailing aunt. He only has time to give Hedda the manuscript of Lovborg’s brilliant new book, which he has lost during the night’s bacchanalian excesses. (When I go drinking I always take with me the only copy of a precious manuscript for some light reading). Lovborg does not know he has found the manuscript. He leaves Judge Brack and Hedda to chat. She tells him that she understands that he has aspirations to be “the only cock in the basket” an expression meaning dominant male in a group of females. He admits “Yes, that’s what I want. And I’ll fight for that end with every means at my disposal“. Hedda responds “I’m content, so long as you don’t have any sort of hold over me“. As Brack goes to leave, this innuendo-laden (and at the same time ominous) exchange concludes their conversation:
“Hedda: [Rising.] Are you going through the garden?
Brack: Yes, it’s a short cut for me.
Hedda: And then it is a back way, too.
Brack: Quite so. I have no objection to back ways. They may be piquant enough at times.
Hedda: When there is ball practice going on, you mean?
Brack: [In the doorway, laughing to her.] Oh, people don’t shoot their tame poultry, I fancy.
Hedda: [Also laughing.] Oh no, when there is only one cock in the basket—“
The Judge is quickly replaced by Lovborg and then Thea. The Tesman’s drawing room is the centre of much coming and going throughout the play – the only person who never leaves is Hedda, emphasising how trapped she is. Lovborg confesses he has lost his manuscript, although he lies to Thea saying he has deliberately destroyed it. When she leaves Hedda gives him one of her pistols, explicitly encouraging him to kill himself. When he then leaves, she quickly and impulsively burns the manuscript, saying “Now I am burning your child, Thea!—Burning it, curly-locks!… Your child and Eilert Lovborg’s. [Throws the rest in.] I am burning—I am burning your child”
Act Four sees Hedda face the consequences of her actions.When told of Lovborg’s suicide (between the acts), she initially celebrates:
Hedda. [In a low voice.] Oh, what a sense of freedom it gives one, this act of Eilert Lovborg’s.
Brack. Freedom, Mrs. Hedda? Well, of course, it is a release for him—
Hedda. I mean for me. It gives me a sense of freedom to know that a deed of deliberate courage is still possible in this world,—a deed of spontaneous beauty.
But when Brack reveals he knows that she gave Lovborg the pistol, and that he intends to use this knowledge to exert control over Hedda, effectively to blackmail her, she realises she is running out of options:
Hedda. [Looks up at him.] So I am in your power, Judge Brack. You have me at your beck and call, from this time forward.
Brack: [Whispers softly.] Dearest Hedda—believe me—I shall not abuse my advantage.
Hedda. I am in your power none the less. Subject to your will and your demands. A slave, a slave then! [Rises impetuously.] No, I cannot endure the thought of that! Never!
I won’t spoil the ending, just in case you haven’t seen or read it, but it won’t come as a surprise.
So that’s what happens. But is it any good? Is the play entertaining, thought provoking, profound? Is Hedda theatre’s ‘female Hamlet’, as often claimed? (Incidentally I haven’t been able to find a source for this much-repeated claim). Is Ibsen really one of modern theatre’s greatest playwrights? There is no question of his dominant status in modern theatre. Equally there’s no question that the play is densely packed and full of incident, complex characters, drama and back-story. Yet the same time it is very static, set in just the one location. Many of the play’s most dramatic incidents occur off-stage. And the complex web of relationships between the characters has little time to further develop – the total elapsed time in the play is at most forty-eight hours.
Ultimately, the play stands or falls on whether the reader/audience finds the ending convincing or not. Is Hedda driven to such a state of extreme distress that she sees no way out, or is her decision (like many of the others she takes in the course of the play) taken capriciously? On the page, I didn’t find her decision was understandable. That may well be my problem – a failure to fully empathise with the character – rather than Ibsen’s. I also completely recognise that on the stage this concern could be swept away by a compelling portrait of Hedda and the rest of the cast. But in the absence of those factors, on the page alone, Hedda is hard to empathise with and even harder to understand. I recognise that the impact of the play on a Victorian audience would of course have been dramatically different to the way the play lands today. All stories age and change with time, and I can’t begin to imagine how a Victorian audience would have reacted to Hedda, other than it would almost certainly have been very different. (Of course I don’t need to guess because the contemporary reaction is fairly well recorded, but empathising with that reaction is almost impossible). Can the play be brought up to date in production? Well it continues to be performed at the highest theatrical level, so this surely isn’t a text that has aged badly. I confess that as of now, not having seen the play on the stage, the secret of what makes it so highly regarded eludes me.
Finally, a quick word on translation. I used two different translations in preparing this post: the Gutenberg project ebook translated by Edmund Gosse and William Archer, and the World’s classics edition translated by James McFarlane and Jens Arup. The internet tells me that the Archer translation is one of the oldest available, but neither of these appear when searching for the ‘best’ translation. But I make no comment on the value of either of these translations – I am the last person who could comment on such matters – the point is they are strikingly different. The Gosse/Archer translation uses the phrase ‘cock of the basket’ to translate Hedda’s last words; the McFarlane/Arup version translates this idiomatic phrase as “the only cock in the yard”. Neither phrase means very much in English – cock of the walk probably comes closest, but it means dominant in any group rather than a dominant male amongst a group of females. It is difficult to imagine the performance making the meaning of the phrase much clearer. If therefore any of the quotes used above do not appear in your copy of Ibsen, I blame the translation!
The Reading Bug 