Imagined Human Beings. Bernard Jay Paris

Envious of Thea, Hedda wishes to exercise a more powerful influence of her own by turning Lövborg back into the man he was when she knew him. She seeks to disrupt Ejlert’s relationship with Thea and to replace her as the dominant force in his life. Thea is afraid that Ejlert will be destroyed if he reverts to his old ways, and most people seem to feel that Hedda is trying to undermine him in order to feel that for once in her life she, too, has “the power to shape a human destiny” (act 2).

      There is much in this view with which I agree, but I do not think that Hedda induces Lövborg to take a drink and go to Brack’s party in order to undermine him. In response to Thea’s concern about “what will come of all this,” Hedda confidently predicts that “At ten o’clock he will be here, with vine leaves in his hair. Flushed and fearless!” (act 2). She envisions him as a triumphant figure. Hedda is disappointed rather than pleased when she hears from her husband that the drunken Ejlert carelessly dropped his manuscript and learns from Judge Brack that he finally turned up at Mademoiselle Diana’s, where he insisted that he had been robbed, raised a row, and was taken away by the police: “So that’s what happened! Then, after all, he had no vine leaves in his hair!” (act 4). He is behaving like the Ejlert of old, but that is not, evidently, what Hedda had wanted. In order to understand what Hedda was hoping for we must examine her inner conflicts and Ejlert’s role in her effort to manage them.

      Some of Hedda’s conflicts are presented quite vividly in her reminiscence with Ejlert about the old days, when there was a “secret intimacy” between them that “no living soul suspected” (act 2). With General Gabler reading his paper in the same room, Ejlert would describe his “days and nights of passion and frenzy, of drinking and madness” to Hedda. She evoked his confessions by boldly asking “devious questions” that he perfectly understood. Rejecting Lövborg’s idea that she was trying to wash away his sins, Hedda explains her motive: “Isn’t it quite easy to understand that a young girl, especially if it can be done in secret . . . should be tempted to investigate a forbidden world? A world she’s supposed to know nothing about?”

      Hedda is a socially prominent woman with a very strong sense of propriety who needs to maintain her dignity at all costs and who cannot bear the thought of doing anything that would diminish her respectability. At the same time, she has powerful sexual and aggressive impulses that she wants to express as men do and that she is bitter at having to deny. She lives in a society that imposes enormous constraints upon a woman of her social class, constraints to which she outwardly conforms but against which she inwardly rebels. Her “secret intimacy” with Ejlert Lövborg enabled her to escape these constraints vicariously, since he acted out her forbidden impulses and then told her about it. When Ejlert wonders how she could have brought herself “to ask such questions,” Hedda insists that she did so “in a devious way,” that is, without directly violating decorum (act 2). We see Hedda looking for a similar kind of safe, voyeuristic gratification when she makes oblique references to Judge Brack’s affairs and relishes the thought of his stag party, which she wishes she could attend unseen.

      Hedda’s problem, then, is how to satisfy her “craving for life” (act 2), as Ejlert describes it, without sacrificing her position as a lady. Hedda’s need to conform to the rules of propriety is so great that it both alienates her from her real feelings and makes it impossible for her to express the resulting rebellious impulses. It is not a healthy craving for self-actualization but her suppressed neurotic needs that Ejlert Lövborg is acting out. To Hedda, however, he is a man who has “the courage to live his life” as he sees fit (act 3), in a way that she cannot live hers. It is not only his escapades that she vicariously enjoys but also what they symbolize, his freedom from the constraints by which she feels herself to be suffocated.

      Ejlert provides a solution to Hedda’s problem until he drags their intimacy down to reality by making sexual advances. Hedda is so alarmed by this that she threatens to shoot him, but she is afraid to do so because she has “such a fear of scandal” (act 2). When Lövborg accuses her of being “a coward at heart,” she wholeheartedly concurs: “A terrible coward.” She confesses that her “greatest cowardice that evening” was in not responding to his advances.

      Hedda is caught in a conflict between a desire to act out her rebellious aggression by leading a wild, free, bohemian life, like Lövborg, and an even stronger need to comply with the norms of her society, to be a refined, respectable lady, the proper daughter of an eminent general. To escape the agony of this conflict, she becomes cold, aloof, detached, out of touch with her own emotions and indifferent to other people. She does not believe in love, marries for convenience, and then is terribly oppressed by the boredom of her empty existence. When she returns from a lengthy wedding trip with a husband she cannot bear, she wants a butler, a saddle horse, a new piano, and an active social life partly for reasons of status and partly because she is spoiled, but mostly because she feels desperate and is searching for distractions. She becomes even more frustrated when she learns that they will have to curtail their expenses.

      Hedda’s plight is vividly depicted in her conversation with Judge Brack at the beginning of act 2. After greeting him with pistol shots and explaining that she is “just killing time” because she doesn’t know “what in heaven’s name” she is to do with herself “all day long,” Hedda complains about the boredom of her wedding trip. She makes it clear that she does not “love” Jörgen (“Ugh! Don’t use that revolting word!”), and that she married him because he had a promising career and she “wasn’t getting any younger.” Hedda is twenty-nine and has a dread of aging. Brack and Hedda then engage in a devious exchange in which Brack proposes an affair and Hedda makes it clear that she would rather continue her tête-à-tête with Jörgen than enter into a triangle that would compromise her respectability. She has no objection to Brack’s coming over to amuse her, however.

      In response to Hedda’s complaint about how “incredibly I shall bore myself here,” Brack suggests that she find “some sort of vocation in life,” but Hedda cannot imagine a vocation that would attract her. Perhaps she could get Jörgen to go into politics, despite the fact that he is completely unsuited for such a career. Like most of the women in Ibsen’s plays—and in his culture, no doubt—Hedda can find an outlet for her expansive tendencies only through identification with or manipulation of a man. There are variations on this theme in A Doll’s House (as we have seen), The Master Builder, and Rosmersholm.

      Hedda feels that life is “so hideous” because of her “genteel poverty”; but, sensing her detachment, Judge Brack astutely observes that “the fault lies elsewhere,” in the fact she has never “really been stirred by anything.” He suggests that this may change when she finds herself “faced with what’s known in solemn language as a grave responsibility.” Hedda angrily replies, “Be quiet! Nothing of that sort will ever happen to me.” She is already pregnant, however, and is trying to deny her condition, both to herself and to others. Not only is she confined to a woman’s narrow sphere in life, but she can find no satisfaction in what her culture regards as feminine joys. She puts off marriage as long as she can, partly because its restrictions do not appeal to her and partly because the men who attract her are not eligible and the men who are eligible do not attract her. She is appalled by the prospect of motherhood, again because of her detachment: “That sort of thing doesn’t appeal to me, Judge. I’m not fitted for it. No responsibilities for me!” Terribly frustrated herself, she has nothing to give a child, who will further limit her freedom. In rebellion against the feminine role but unable to find any other, she tells Judge Brack that the only thing she is “really fitted for” is “boring myself to death!”

      Hedda is in despair about her life. From the beginning of the play, she is full of frustration, irritability, and anger, which she displaces at first onto the self-effacing Aunt Juliane, who lets in too much sunlight, thus revealing Hedda’s aging face and filled out figure, and whose hat Jörgen has indecorously left on a drawing room table. When Judge Brack scolds her for tormenting “that nice old lady,” Hedda explains that she suddenly gets “impulses like that” and cannot “control them” (act 2). She is not callously amusing herself, but is compulsively discharging some of her pent-up rage, just as she does when she fires off her father’s pistols, those symbols of male power.

      Constantly looking for