Imagined Human Beings. Bernard Jay Paris

stake. The arrival of Thea takes her in a new direction, since Thea announces the presence of Ejlert Lövborg, who had once provided Hedda with a way of dealing with her frustrations and inner conflicts. When she learns that Ejlert is in town she has a vague hope that he can somehow be of help to her, and she immediately asks Jörgen to invite him.

      Upon Lövborg’s arrival, Hedda becomes involved in a competition with Thea for influence over him. Hedda is threatened by Thea and has a powerful need to triumph over her. When they knew each other at school, Hedda used to pull Thea’s hair and once said she was “going to burn it all off” (act 1). Ibsen describes Thea’s hair as “extremely thick and wavy,” while Hedda’s is “not especially abundant.” Thea’s thick hair symbolizes fertility and makes Hedda all the more conscious of the sterility of her own existence, despite her pregnancy. The contrast between the two women is developed throughout the play. Whereas Hedda reveled in Lövborg’s debauchery, Thea inspired him to write books, which he describes as their children. Hedda’s fear of scandal made her afraid of responding to Ejlert’s advances, but Thea leaves her husband in order to follow him to town: “But, Thea, my darling!”—exclaims Hedda—“How did you dare do such a thing?” (act 1; my emphasis). When Thea declares that she will never go back to her husband, Hedda is shocked: “But what will people say about you, Thea?” “They can say,” replies Thea, “whatever they like.” In pursuit of what is really important to her, Thea ignores public opinion in a way that Hedda cannot. Hedda’s envy is exacerbated when Lövborg praises Thea’s “tremendous courage” where her “comrade is concerned”:

      Hedda: God, yes, courage! If one only had that!

      Lövborg: What then?

      Hedda: Then life might perhaps be endurable, after all . . . (act 2)

      Thea is Hedda’s nemesis, the woman who demonstrates that it is possible to have a fruitful life if one has the courage to defy convention.

      There can be no doubt that Hedda manipulates Lövborg into taking a drink and going to Judge Brack’s party in order to disrupt his relationship with Thea and to show that she has more power over him. But she is not yet out to destroy Lövborg, as she is later when she conceals the fact that Jörgen has found his manuscript. At this point in the play she wants Ejlert to enact a scenario she has conceived for him in which he will be a triumphant author who is free of self-doubt and anxiety about himself. She wants “the power to shape a human destiny” in what she regards as a positive way.

      Lövborg’s refusal to take a drink and go to Brack’s party disturbs Hedda because it seems to be motivated by the same kind of fear that has made her life unendurable and filled her with self-contempt. Hedda despises herself for her conformity, her dread of scandal, her cowardice. She taunts Ejlert with not daring to take a drink or go to the party: “Didn’t dare! You say I didn’t dare!” (act 2). She cannot bear to see him afraid and eggs him on because she wants him to lead the free, uninhibited life that she cannot lead herself. She is caught in a crossfire of conflicting shoulds, since she hates herself for her cowardice but knows that she would hate herself even more for any breach of propriety. She wants Lövborg to rescue her from her impasse by being both rebellious and triumphant, by returning “flushed and fearless,” “with vine leaves in his hair.” Then he “will have regained confidence in himself. He’ll be a free man forever and ever.”

      Thea may have reclaimed Ejlert, but she has also tamed him, made him fearful of spontaneity, just as Hedda is. She acts boldly on his behalf but is terribly anxious for him. Hedda feels a similar anxiety for herself at the thought of daring behavior, but she wants to believe that Lövborg can act upon his impulses with impunity. She wants to triumph over Thea, to shape a human destiny, and to gain a vicarious fulfillment of her needs to be independent and courageous by having Lövborg owe his freedom and fearlessness to her. Having no hope of becoming what she wants to be herself, she seeks to escape her impotence and self-hate by making Ejlert into a man through whom she can live and with whom she can proudly identify.

      Hedda’s is an impossible dream. Since Lövborg is an alcoholic, freeing him of his fears and inhibitions is bound to destroy him. When he refuses to join the other men at the punch bowl, Judge Brack says, “Why, surely, cold punch is not poison.” “Perhaps not for everyone,” Ejlert replies, with the implication that it surely is for him (act 2). Thea is so anxious because she understands Ejlert’s vulnerability. Desperate, Hedda blinds herself to his condition and constructs a scenario that will satisfy her contradictory needs but that he cannot possibly fulfill.

      When Ejlert has not returned by the next morning Thea is in panic, but, holding onto her dream, Hedda envisions him at Judge Brack’s “sitting with vine leaves in his hair, reading his manuscript” (act 3). Tesman comes back with a glowing account of the new work, but finds it “appalling” that Lövborg, “with all his great gifts, should be so utterly incorrigible.” “Because he has more daring,” Hedda asks, “than any of the rest of you?” This is Hedda’s idealized image of Lövborg. It is Ejlert’s excessive drinking, however, to which Jörgen is referring, since it has led him carelessly to drop his precious manuscript. Jörgen has found it and leaves it with Hedda when he is summoned to the bedside of the dying Aunt Rina.

      Judge Brack’s account of the evening shatters Hedda’s dream of living through a liberated Lövborg. Having conceived of Lövborg as a kind of romantic hero, an untamed superior being, she is sickened by his sordid fight with Mademoiselle Diana and his arrest. If Hedda had simply wanted to show her power over Lövborg and break up his relationship with Thea by inducing him to revert to bohemian ways, she would have been pleased by his night of drinking and madness.

      It is at this point that Hedda turns destructive. Since she has not been able to make Ejlert into the hero of her dreams, she exerts her power in a different way by first concealing and then burning his manuscript. Ashamed to confess that he has lost their “child,” Lövborg tells Thea that he has torn the manuscript into a thousand pieces and that he will “do no more work, from now on” (act 3). Thea “despairingly” asks what she will “have to live for,” accuses him of “child-murder,” and sees “nothing but darkness” before her. Lövborg is also in despair, for he knows “it won’t end with last night,” and debauchery no longer appeals to him: “she’s somehow broken my courage—my defiant spirit.” “To think,” says Hedda, that that pretty little fool should have influenced a man’s destiny.” Hedda might have been able to save Lövborg had she revealed that she was in possession of the manuscript, but she allows him to believe it is lost. When he announces that he wants “to make an end of it,” Hedda does not try to dissuade him or produce the manuscript but instead gives him a pistol, urges him to use it, and enjoins him to “let it be beautiful.” After Ejlert leaves, she burns the manuscript, calling it his and Thea’s child.

      Hedda’s behavior can be explained as a continuation of her rivalry with Thea and of her desire to shape a man’s destiny—for ill if not for good; but these are not her only motivations. With the collapse of her dream of triumph for Lövborg, and vicariously for herself, Hedda is confronted once more by her contradictory needs, which she now has no hope of fulfilling. She, too, is in despair, and wishes to make an end of it. She is afraid to commit suicide, however, partly because, as Brack says at the end, “people don’t do such things!” After Lövborg disappoints her, she develops a new scenario in which he will commit suicide in just the way that she would like to do, and she will glory in this new form of freedom and daring and in her own contribution to it. When Brack announces that Lövborg has shot himself through the heart, Hedda is exultant: “It gives me a sense of freedom to know that an act of deliberate courage is still possible in this world—an act of spontaneous beauty” (act 4). Hedda feels herself to be incapable of such an act, but Lövborg has done it for her, she thinks. Judge Brack destroys her “beautiful illusion” by revealing that Ejlert was accidentally shot in the bowels while demanding his “lost child” in Mademoiselle Diana’s boudoir. “How horrible!” exclaims Hedda. “Everything I touch becomes ludicrous and despicable!—It’s like a curse!”

      Hedda is driven to kill herself by the collapse of all her solutions. She can no longer hope to gain a sense of freedom and to satisfy her suicidal impulses