Hedda Gabler (Criticism)

Criticism

John W. Fiero

Fiero is a Ph. D., now retired, who formerly taught drama and play writing at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. In this essay he investigates the significance of the secondary female characters in Hedda Gabler, with a focus on their function both as foils to Hedda and as women who

themselves fail to meet the woman’s primary role as wife-mother in the conventional thinking of the time.

Because the titular character so completely dominates Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, discussions of the play from a gender perspective seem to almost exclusively focus on Hedda. It is easy to understand why. She is clearly the central figure, the one whose grating dissatisfaction arises from a conflict pitting her needs against conventional notions of propriety and female fulfillment as an adoring, dutiful, submissive wife and nurturing, loving mother. She is, moreover, the play’s prime mover, the plot driver, the one who has the most at stake, and the one whose name answers the most important question: whose play is it? It is, of course, her play, pure and simple.

Hedda struggles violently against the conventional wife-mother role, a role she does not want but is mortally afraid to reject. She suffers most from what Gail Finney called in The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen “victimization by motherhood”; she is unable to face or to escape the suffocating reality of marriage and motherhood. That surely is as big a factor in her self-destruction as is her fear of being held sexual hostage to the sinister Judge Brack, who threatens to expose her to scandal, of which she is at least equally terrified.

More is learned about Hedda than any of the other female characters. She alone is prone to self-analysis, to confessing her fears and dissatisfactions, which, ironically, she reveals to the two men besides her husband who have pursued her: Judge Brack and Eilert Lovborg. Hedda has no real female friends, no confidantes with whom she is either close or honest. In fact, she perceives each of the other women as an antagonist. The fact that they seem at peace with themselves profoundly annoys her and contributes to her mounting hysteria. Towards Thea Elvsted, she feigns a friendship, and she quickly betrays what trust Thea places in her. She is also meanspirited towards her husband’s well-intentioned aunt, Juliana, whom she views as an insufferable busybody, an unwelcome intruder, and a possible threat to Hedda’s control of George. She is also determined to rid her house of Berta, the household servant whose loyalty to the Tesman family daunts Hedda as well.

Also, just as there is much more divulged about Hedda’s past, there is also much more implied about Hedda than any other female character in the play. As Finney claimed, “the influence of her motherless, father-dominated upbringing is everywhere evident.” Her inheritance reveals itself in her masculine traits, her fondness for horses and pistols, for example, or her excitement over the impending contest between Eilert Lovborg and her husband George, or her interest in manipulating George into the male arena of politics, where she might exercise some real power. In some ways, she seems more masculine than George, the fussy foster-child of two maiden aunts who is uninterested in politics and is afraid of Hedda’s handling of her father’s pistols.

George also seems prone to what from a male point of view seems to be a typical female trait: excited chatter about trivial matters. His ubiquitous “fancy that” seems more appropriate to the tea table than the smoking room, saloon, or other haunt that in Ibsen’s time were visited exclusively by men, unless, as in some saloons, disreputable females women like the unseen “singing woman,” Mademoiselle Diana, were allowed. To Hedda, the masculine ideal is represented by her father General Gabler. His portrait, a constant reminder of his influence, hangs in a prominent place in her inner sanctum, her room adjoining the drawing room. There are hints of an Electra complex, a deeply-rooted but repressed incestuous and terrorizing desire that is an important strain in Hedda’s enigmatic character. Under her father’s tutelage, she had become a fit masculine companion for him, but not one suited for her husband, who merely bores her. As for the woman’s world, the society of the tea table, she is clearly a pariah, though certainly by willful choice.

The other women in Hedda Gabler, even those unseen, have one thing in common with Hedda. They are women who have either failed to meet the male ideal of woman as wife-mother or have rejected it, as Hedda, the least suited to the task, desires to do. They also differ from Hedda in a vitally significant way: they have made peace with themselves. And therein they represent some of the limited alternatives to what society at large viewed as a woman’s primary goal — marriage and motherhood. George Tesman’s two aunts are maiden aunts, Thea Elvsted has fled a brutal and loveless marriage, and Berta, having given her life over to service, remains, presumably, unattached outside the Tesman family. Their relative contentment speaks volumes about Hedda’s discontent, but they are, of course, very different kinds of women, interesting in their own right and not just because as foils they set off Hedda’s more complex character.

Like so many secondary characters in drama, the other women of Hedda Gabler run much closer to stereotypes than the play’s enigmatic protagonist.

Two of them, Aunt Rina and Mademoiselle Diana, are superb examples of offstage characters whose presence is felt but never seen. The one is George Tesman’s dying aunt; the other, “a mighty huntress of men,” is a lady of pleasure for those who can afford her.

The unseen Diana is, in fact, one of those notorious fallen women. Talk about her is strained through polite euphemisms which only thinly veil that she is a prostitute, though not of the crass sidewalk variety. She and her friends entertain gentlemen, both in salons and boudoirs, with the implication, too, that they are under some protection from the authorities, thanks to a double standard that permitted respectable men a sexual license denied to respectable women. Judge Brack tells Hedda that Eilert Lovborg had formerly been one of Diana’s “most enthusiastic protectors,” even before his dissolution and disgrace. The implication is that during his wooing of Hedda, frustrated by her repression of sexual passion, Eilert had found easy solace in the ready arms of Mademoiselle Diana. Lovborg’s renewed association with Diana helps ignite Hedda’s perverse desire to see Eilert redeem himself through a triumphant and majestic suicide, a kind of ersatz expression of the sexual freedom Hedda had repressed in herself, if only because, unlike Mademoiselle Diana, she could never thumb her nose at respectability.

A sickly invalid, Rina is most important because she is her sister’s main burden. Since Juliana is a selfless and loving person, she bears the burden with affection, dignity, and grace, all to Hedda’s annoyance. To her, Rina’s death only means that Juliana may become a more frequent and trouble-some visitor, even though Juliana confides to both Hedda and George that she plans to devote herself to caring for some other sickly person. She tells them that “it’s such an absolute necessity for me to have one to live for.” Juliana, a dedicated nurse, is simply beyond the selfish Hedda’s comprehension. Juliana lives only for others, but Hedda lives only for herself. From Hedda’s perspective, Juliana is both a fool and a threat.

Juliana is more than a nurse, however. For good or ill, she has also been a surrogate mother and father to George, as he cheerfully admits in the opening of the play. She and her sister helped shape her nephew’s adult character, explaining why George utterly lacks the strong-willed and arrogant hardness of his wife. Unwittingly, they turned George into someone safe for Hedda. She can easily manipulate him, verbally beating down whatever objections the docile and compliant fellow raises. As regards Hedda, George is “correctness itself’ not only because he is a respectable man with good prospects but because he lacks the intestinal fortitude to challenge her. She has none of the fear of George that Lovborg and Brack inspire in her.

Berta is another selfless woman who finds meaning and satisfaction in her service to others. In Act One, it is disclosed that she has been a loyal retainer in the Tesman family for years, and that with George’s marriage to Hedda, she has come to the newlyweds’ villa as servant and caretaker. Nothing is disclosed of her private life, but she speaks of “all the blessed years” that she spent with the Tesmans, suggesting that she has found fulfillment only in their employ and that she has had neither husband nor children. George and Juliana both treat her with affection and respect. Also, as if she were a member of the family, they confide in her, something that Hedda cannot do. That and her overly-protective behavior towards George irk Hedda, who wants to rid the house of Berta and threatens to do so with a petty complaint about her carelessness. Like Juliana, Berta represents a threat to Hedda’s control over George, something that she will not tolerate noblesse oblige(“nobility obligates,” a notion that those of high social standing were required to behave in an honorable manner) and familial gratitude be damned.

Hedda’s most troubling female adversary is, of course, Mrs. Elvsted. She does not stand in Hedda’s way of controlling George; she stands in Hedda’s way of a greater challenge, controlling Eilert Lovborg. Hedda’s frightful dislike of Thea is mixed with intense jealousy. It goads her that someone who seems like such a simpleton has been able to redeem Lovborg from his recklessness and inspire his work. Thea, for all her experience, acts like an innocent compared to Hedda. She is gullible and vulnerable, easily duped by Hedda into believing that Hedda is her friend, believing that Hedda’s girlhood antagonism had been entirely vitiated over the years. She does not sense Hedda’s spite and is both surprised and hurt when Hedda betrays her confidence.

Thea is, however, both a wholly sympathetic character and unlike Hedda — a survivor. She has devoted herself to redeeming the dissolute Lovborg with a love that he cannot fully return, even though she has sacrificed her reputation in the process by fleeing from her loveless and enslaving marriage to Sheriff Elvsted. It is her admirable courage and devotion that make Lovborg seem like an arrogant ingrate, someone at least partly deserving of his inept death. In fact, apart from his genius, nothing about his character is quite so memorable as his insufferable dismissal of Thea as being “too stupid” to understand the kind of love that he believes he has shared with Hedda.

Thea’s eagerness to immerse herself with George Tesman in an effort to reconstruct Lovborg’s manuscript has the aura of a magnificent obsession about it and argues that it is Thea who sees the truth about Eilert that the man’s ideas are both more admirable and important than his life. Ironically, too, it is she who triumphs over her rival, Hedda, winning not Eilert but George, making him her co-conspirator in their efforts to breathe new life into Thea and Eilert’s destroyed child, Lovborg’s brilliant work. As much as Hedda’s own unborn child and Brack’s endgame sexual advantage, Thea’s triumph drives Hedda to despair and suicide, proving that even in Ibsen’s stark realism there is adequate room for at least a modicum of poetic justice.

Source: John W. Fiero, for Drama for Students, Gale, 1999.

What Do I Read Next?

• Madame Bovary(1857), by Gustave Flaubert, is one of the important early works of French realism. The novel offers a brilliant and fairly sympathetic portrait of a shrewd and ambitious woman who attempts to better her circumstances by marrying and manipulating a country physician.
• The Awakening(1899), Kate Chopin’s long neglected novel of feminine self-consciousness offers a portrait of a woman defying conventional morality, including marital fidelity and taboos against miscegenation.
• Sister Carrie(1900), Theodore Dreiser’s first novel, depicts an immoral, self-serving woman with an unusual degree of sympathy.
• Margaret Fleming(1890), by James A. Herne, is the first genuinely realistic play in America. Although now considered sentimental, it depicts a woman who defies convention in undertaking to care for the illegitimate child of her husband.
• The Quintessence of Ibsenism(1913) may be more about George Bernard Shaw, its author, than it is about Ibsen, but it gives considerable insight into how Shaw and the British intelligentsia were attempting to transform theater into a vehicle for social improvement. The work grew out of a lecture Shaw gave in 1890, the same year that Ibsen published Hedda Gabler.
• Women in Modern Drama: Freud, Feminism, and European Theater at the Turn of the Century(1989), by Gail Finney, offers an excellent survey of the depiction of women in European drama towards the end of Ibsen’s career.