Hedda Gabler – Henrik Ibsen, 1890 ★★★½

Armed and Dangerous

Is Hedda Gabler a woman misunderstood, or a sociopath who can’t deny herself her own darkest impulses? I won’t play it safe: Whatever makes her tick, she’s one nasty broad.

And nasty is good when served up as Ibsen does here, with subtlety, compassion, and buckets of jet-black humor so dark as to be indistinguishable from despair. While it is hard fixing exactly who Hedda Gabler is, or why she does what she does, there’s no taking your eyes off the stage or the page while she holds court.

The daughter of a famous general and quite a sought-after beauty not long ago, Hedda has little patience for her boring husband or his well-meaning worrywart of an aunt. When she’s not firing her father’s pistols at passersby, she’s pressing people’s buttons and sneering at the results. Her unfriendly attention focuses on Ejlert Lövborg, a struggling scholar she once knew; and a woman Hedda used to bully in her youth who has rescued fragile Ejlert from alcoholic despair.

“For once in my life I want to feel that I control a human destiny,” Hedda exclaims. When she does, it’s bad news for all concerned.

Coming to this play after having recently read A Doll’s House caught me flatfooted. Hedda, like Nora in A Doll’s House, is one of the great female roles in modern drama. Given they were created by the same playwright, I expected some commonalities. Big mistake.

Ibsen was in a different head space when he came to write Hedda Gabler, and it shows. In the 1870s, the decade that produced A Doll’s House, Ibsen established himself as a social critic, railing at conservative convention. By 1890, Ibsen had different objectives. He wanted to probe the mysteries of the human mind.

When it comes to gun safety, Hedda's no model for trigger discipline. Rosamund Pike plays her in a 2010 British production. Image from http://conorfryan.blogspot.com/2010/02/hedda-gabler.html.

Hedda Gabler is built for such examination. Unlike Nora, a victim of a selfish husband whose domestic peace is under attack by outside forces, Hedda is her own worst enemy, not to mention everyone else’s. The widespread view of Nora is that of a 19^th-century feminist; finding common cause with Ibsen’s other most-famous female is not so easy. He keeps reminding you of those pistols.

Ibsen establishes Hedda’s challenging character before she even says a word, when he describes her entrance on stage early in Act One:

HEDDA comes in from the left of the back room. She is a lady of 29. Her face and her figure are aristocratic and elegant in their proportions. Her complexion is of an even pallor. Her eyes are steel grey, and cold, clear, and dispassionate. Her hair is an attractive medium brown in colour, but not particularly ample. She is dressed in a tasteful, somewhat loose-fitting morning gown.

Leave aside for the moment the particulars of her physical description, which must give casting directors fits. [“You’re perfect for Hedda, except your eyes are brown. Next!”] The general tone established here is of a person not brimming with warmth. “Aristocratic,” “dispassionate,” “steel,” and of course “cold” all have pejorative connotations. They fit her well.

We then watch Hedda interact with her husband Tesman and his Aunt Julle. Ibsen made a conscious decision to call his main character by her maiden name, less to establish her independence than because he saw her more as daughter of the late General Gabler than the wife of a mild-mannered scholar. In our first moments with her, she puts off Aunt Julle’s attempts at pleasantry as we learn what a housemaid might have meant when she called Hedda “ever so particular”:

TESMAN: Couldn’t you bring yourself to give her a kiss when you meet? For my sake, Hedda? Eh?

HEDDA: Oh, don’t ask me, Tesman, for God’s sake. I’ve told you before I just couldn’t. I’ll try to call her Aunt. And she’ll have to be content with that.

TESMAN: Oh well…I just thought, now that you belong to the family, you…

HEDDA: Hm…I’m not at all sure…

In another play, Ibsen might have worked at giving us deeper context into Hedda’s particularness, what makes her stiff and cold. A director can stage it so Aunt Julle comes across as more overbearing or smothering in her manner, thus sparking some audience resentment. But there’s little on the page to explain Hedda’s abrupt manner. Like Shakespeare’s Iago, she is who she is. Let scholars argue why.

And do they!

Earlier I mentioned subtlety in describing Ibsen’s approach in Hedda Gabler. That may seem off, as Hedda’s as subtle in places as a Patton tank. But Ibsen does work at developing mood and character in ways that seem a long ways from the in-your-face approach he took in Ghosts.

Henrik Ibsen as he appeared late in life. Hedda Gabler was written when the playwright was well in his sixties, and began his final active decade of writing. It saw some of his most highly regarded and introspective work. Image from http://www.wmky.org/post/reader-s-notebook-henrik-ibsen.

The slyest character we meet, the lawyer Brack, is also one of the most compelling. Alone among the other characters, he seems to understand the chaotic forces raging for control over Hedda’s heart. His logical, socially correct manner is the opposite of Hedda’s, but as he makes a play at forming a “triangle” with her behind her husband’s back, we perceive a core root of darkness they have in common.

Hedda is not the rational player Brack is, however. While she hurts others, it is without a clear objective in mind: “…these things just suddenly come over me. And then I can’t resist them.”

What exactly Hedda does in the play is something I’m dancing around. It’s a good play, and deserves its surprises. It is revealed she has a particular interest in Lövborg, though the nature of this interest may vary depending on who is staging the play, or else reading it.

I chanced upon a 1963 BBC production of Hedda Gabler on YouTube starring Ingrid Bergman. This production leans on a suggestion Hedda had a serious fling with Lövborg (played by Trevor Howard in this production) she regrets ending. We get dewy-eyed close-ups of Bergman when his name is mentioned. Bergman’s Hedda is clearly jealous of Lövborg’s present relationship with Mrs. Elvsted, who has run away from her husband to be at Lövborg’s side.

Ingrid Bergman, in the foreground, as Hedda, with Dilys Hamlett as Mrs. Elvsted, in the 1963 television version. Other famous actors to take on the role: Eleonora Duse, Alla Nazimova, Diana Rigg, Glenda Jackson, and Cate Blanchett. Image from www.youtube.com.

Some today say Mrs. Elvsted’s leaving her husband is at the core of Ibsen’s message here. Hedda wishes she could likewise flee matrimony and enjoy freedom. But Ibsen doesn’t promote this argument much. Tesman is an easy-going, pathetically uxorious husband. A more socially-directed Ibsen might have had Hedda make use of Mrs. Elvsted’s marriage to frustrate her relationship with Lövborg, and have at domestic entanglements that way. But the subject is not raised.

What does motivate Hedda? Perhaps it is not love but a mix of anger and fear, anger over her present domestic state and fear over what the future holds. While still a young woman, even within the conventions of her day, Hedda clearly hears the hoofbeats of time. She sounds a very old 29 as she tells Brack about the bargain she made marrying Tesman: “I’d really danced myself tired, my dear sir. I had had my day…”

Under this interpretation, one might see Hedda’s actions in the play as a kind of frantic railing at life, fed by a diabolic quality that she was able to work better into her everyday behavior when she was younger and had men begging for her chastest attentions. “So many admirers she always had around her!” Tesman’s aunt recalls. Now, the admirers have all gone, except for one old roue after some side nookie.

Why does a person so rotten (Hedda does very rotten things in this play, no question) impel such lasting interest? I see Ibsen’s play serving a purpose similar to his countryman Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream. It presents a kind of protest, inchoate in its aimless fury, against existence itself. In Hedda’s cruel despair, and the marks she leaves on others, we recognize a core bleakness in the human condition.

Edvard Munch's The Scream, detail from his first version (of four) painted three years after Hedda Gabler's debut. Image from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/mysterious-motives-behind-theft-scream-180964531/

Hedda herself tells us she craves “liberation” and “spontaneous courage.” “An act that has something of unconditional beauty,” she calls it. But what she brings about is not what many would mistake for liberation, courage, or beauty. Not unless you are mad.

Much no doubt depends on the translation. My Oxford World Classics edition uses one by Jens Arup; I noticed another translator was credited for the Bergman BBC adaptation. In that version, which was also edited for television, Hedda speaks more openly of her romantic past with Lövborg, tying it to an image of him “wearing vines in his hair.” In the Arup translation, this image comes up only in a somewhat more ironic context, and the nature of Hedda’s past with Lövborg is more muted.

Was he a real lover of hers, sometime ago? Or another victim she played with when the world was her oyster, and over whom she wants to exert control just to feel young again? The first interpretation suggests more daylight in Hedda’s character, a lost human connection she is trying to retrieve in her warped way. But Ibsen may well have meant for us to see something bleaker.

I don’t love Hedda Gabler the play – as a dramatic story it is fairly inert, and the characters apart from Hedda and Brack come off a bit bland – but it is a brilliant and enjoyable slice of period melodrama in its openness to interpretation, as well as the repulsive magnetism of its title character.