Imagined Human Beings. Bernard Jay Paris

begins pressing for “a triangular friendship” in which he will be her lover (act 2). Hedda welcomes Brack’s attentions, but given her fear of scandal, an affair is unthinkable. This is the same Hedda who had drawn a gun on Ejlert Lövborg when he wanted to bring their relationship down to earth. After confessing to Ejlert that she does not love her husband, she hastens to add, “All the same, no unfaithfulness, remember” (act 2). Brack welcomes Lövborg’s disgrace after he is arrested at Mademoiselle Diana’s because he senses Ejlert as a rival and hopes that Hedda’s home will be closed to him, like other “respectable house[s]” (act 3). His aim is to be “cock-of-the-walk,” and “for that,” he tells Hedda, “I will fight with every weapon I can command.” Hedda realizes that he is “a dangerous person” and is “exceedingly glad” that he has “no sort of hold” over her.

      Brack gains a hold over Hedda, however, when he recognizes the pistol with which Lövborg was shot. Hedda is now faced with three possibilities, all of which are unbearable. Brack suggests that she can declare the pistol to have been stolen, but she says that “it would be better to die” than to do that (act 4). Brack dismisses her speech: “One says such things—but one doesn’t do them.” Why the threat of suicide here? Because lying about having given Lövborg the pistol is an act of cowardice that would exacerbate her self-hate? I have no better explanation. If the police trace the weapon to Hedda, says Brack, she will have to appear in court with Mademoiselle Diana and explain why she gave it to Lövborg: “think of the scandal .... of which you are so terrified.” If Brack keeps quiet, however, the weapon will not be traced, and Hedda will neither have to lie nor be exposed to scandal. This means, however, that she will be in Judge Brack’s power: “Subject to your commands and wishes. No longer free—not free! . . . No, I won’t endure the thought. Never!”

      Given her psychological needs, Hedda can neither defy Brack nor submit to him. Hedda strikes us as a masterful person who knows how to get what she wants, but the fact is that she is extremely compliant where propriety is concerned. She could not endure the loss of respectability that would result from her defiance of Brack. Confined to the narrow range of activities suitable to a woman of her station, Hedda compensates for her lack of control over her destiny by manipulating the people around her, and especially by seeking to influence the fate of an important man. Being subject to Brack’s wishes and commands would render her utterly powerless and would be as unendurable as the consequences of defiance.

      Hedda’s need for freedom is as compensatory as her craving for power. The product of a highly restrictive environment that has allowed her few choices, she has a suppressed desire to rebel and a longing for liberty. As is typical of detached people, she is hypersensitive to anything that seems to impinge upon her, such as the expectations of others, the march of time, or being touched. She recoils from the gentle embrace of Aunt Juliane: “Please! Oh, please let me go!” (act 1). She cannot bear being pregnant or the responsibilities that parenthood will entail. She pursues a freedom from constraint rather than a freedom to fulfill herself. She is much too alienated from herself and dominated by her culture to know what she really wants to do with her life. Driven as she is by both social and psychological coercions, Hedda’s sense of freedom is an illusion, of course, but it is essential to her to preserve it. Given her phobic reaction to ordinary intrusions, expectations, or constraints, we can imagine her desperation at the prospect of being at Brack’s “beck and call from now on” (act 4).

      When Hedda says that she “won’t endure” the thought of not being free, Brack “half mockingly” replies, “People manage to get used to the inevitable” (act 4). But since Brack threatens Hedda’s compulsive needs for respectability, for power, and for freedom, she cannot possibly get used to this situation.

      To make matters worse, Jörgen and Thea begin reconstructing Lövborg’s manuscript, depriving Hedda of her triumph over Thea and putting her even more into Brack’s hands. Like Hedda, Thea has been trying to live through Lövborg. He acknowledges her as the co-creator of his new book, and she follows him to town partly out of anxiety and partly because she wants to be with him when it is published: “I want to see you showered with praise and honors—and, the joy! I want to share that with you too!” (act 3). When Ejlert announces that he has destroyed his manuscript and will do no more work, Thea feels she has nothing to live for. Her reaction to the news of Ejlert’s death is remarkable. Instead of being stupefied by shock and grief, she digs his notes out of the pocket of her dress and immediately begins rewriting the book with Jörgen. Ejlert may be dead, but Thea’s search for glory is alive. She has gotten from him what Hedda never could and in the process has thwarted Hedda’s effort to gain a sense of power by burning the manuscript.

      Thea’s triumph is all the more complete because she has now begun to influence Jörgen, who says he will devote his life to rewriting Ejlert’s book. Thea will move in with Aunt Juliane, and Jörgen will spend his evenings there working with her on the project. When Jörgen asks Brack to keep Hedda company while he is away, Brack readily agrees, anticipating “a very jolly time” (act 4). “That’s what you hope,” says Hedda from the next room, “Now that you are cock-of-the-walk.” Then she shoots herself.

      Hedda’s suicide is a desperate act of escape—from the collapse of her efforts to fulfill her neurotic needs for respectability, power, and freedom, and from the unresolvable conflict between these needs that had led her to try to live vicariously through Ejlert Lövborg. She is fleeing her self-hate, her boredom, her marriage, her unwanted pregnancy, and the prospective burden of motherhood.

      From Hedda’s perspective, her suicide is also a triumph, of the sort she thought had been accomplished by Lövborg. Her response to Brack’s initial report that Ejlert had shot himself through the heart gives us her view of her own act. “At last,” she exclaims, “a deed worth doing!” “I know that Ejlert Lövborg had the courage to live his life as he saw it—and to end it in beauty.” He has “made up his own account with life” and done “the one right thing” (act 4). When Hedda learns the truth about Lövborg’s death, she realizes that if an act of “deliberate courage” and “spontaneous beauty” is to be performed, she must do it herself. She has not had the courage to live her life as she saw it, but she escapes her self-contempt by defying public opinion and behaving with daring at last. She would be pleased by Brack’s comment that “people don’t do such things.” She ends her life beautifully, by her standards at least, with a shot in the temple. She thwarts Judge Brack, who had counted on her cowardice, and punctures her husband’s complacency. In the last fleeting moment of her life, she actualizes an idealized image of herself and becomes a person she can respect.

      Ibsen has painted a brilliant portrait of a neurotic woman, a product of her restrictive society, who can escape her problems and attain the glory for which she is searching only by killing herself.

      As we can see from the preceding discussions, although characters can be identified as displaying one or another of Horney’s defensive strategies, they are mixed cases, not to be thought of simply in terms of one personality type. Nora Helmer is strikingly self-effacing through much of the play, but when her predominant solution fails, her aggressive and detached trends emerge, revealing inner conflicts that have been there all along. The domineering, perfectionistic Torvald has dependency needs that make him cling to Nora at the end. Conflicting trends are so evenly balanced in Hedda Gabler that it is difficult to say which is her predominant solution. She is extremely detached, but she is also very compliant in relation to social conventions, and there is so much aggression in Hedda that she is most commonly thought of as manipulative and domineering. All categories are reductive, of course. Horney’s are least so when they are used not to classify characters but to reveal their individuality and inner conflicts.

      We can also see from our analyses of A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler that a Horneyan approach enables us to understand motivation and explain behavior even when we have little or no knowledge of a character’s childhood. We know most about Nora’s history because of her references to her life with her father. We can utilize the information she supplies, but we are not overly dependent upon it, and we do not have to inflate its importance. We know nothing about Torvald’s early life and not much about Hedda’s. Hedda’s problems derive in part from the restrictions that her culture