Hedda Gabler, Ibsen’s Glorious Creature – Part 1

John Duncan Fergusson, The Blue Hat, Closerie des Lilas, 1909

John Duncan Fergusson, Le voile persan, 1909

John Duncan Fergusson, Anne Estelle Rice, 1908

Having foreclosed the sexual road to self-affirmation, Hedda must seek affirmation elsewhere. But where? Work is not an option: given her standing in society, it’s a non-starter. The arts might offer an avenue, music might soothe the soul—but it’s her body that needs relief. The hinge of her thighs against a hot-blooded horse, that’s what she craves; that, and a pair of dueling pistols to echo the bang of blood in her brain. Her ballroom days are over. Along comes Tesman. Sexy as a man in socks, a doctorate in ancient dust. Between the pages of a book or between a woman’s legs, where do you think he’d prefer to bury his head? Hedda knows the answer. Still, she marries him. Why? One thing led to another, she tells the predator Brack; a bit of idle talk and she ended up in a trap. Now, excluded from culture and creation (or is it she who turned her back on them?), she finds refuge in flirty conversation. So, she’s a cock-teaser—does that mean she’s content? No. Despite that damned cuckoo distending her belly, the heat of her loins still burns a hole in culture: Tesman’s verbiage can’t touch her, nor can Løvborg’s logorrhea. And now, unwilling to be Brack’s mistress, she is looking for a master: not finding one, she determines to sabotage the sexual order by opting out of the game.

Alexej von Jawlensky, Tête inclinée, 1909

Tesman is myopic, Løvborg nostalgic, and Brack a predator in search of prey. For Tesman the house is a display case for Hedda, for Løvborg it’s a cage from which he can help her escape, and for Brack it’s simply a scene for seduction. Where does that leave Hedda? She disdains the beauty Tesman praises, she can’t abide the ‘lust for life’ in which Løvborg would engulf her, and Brack’s vision of sex, coffee and cigarettes is an affront to her need for eros as self-awakening. If she can’t befoul her beauty physically, to spite her suitors she’ll do it metaphorically: to the hilt she’ll play the bitch. The higher Tesman elevates her on a pedestal, the deeper she debases him. The more Løvborg reminds her of what could have been, the more she forecloses the future. And the more Brack closes in on the prey in his trap, the more radically she resolves to escape him. And so for Tesman she poisons her tongue with bile, for Løvborg she sets his magnum opus aflame, and for Brack she turns her litheness into rigor mortis. The baby with the bathwater. And yet, all along, Hedda only wanted to be loved for what she hoped to become: herself. And therein lies the tragic dimension of Hedda Gabler, heroine and play: the sabotage of her investigation of sexual difference by her own alienation from herself.

Alexej von Jawlensky, Schokko, 1910

Matisse, Portrait de Marguerite, 1907

Alone in her bedroom we can suppose Hedda’s hand often finds itself in the hinge of her thighs. We can also suppose she’s crying while she’s doing it. Why? Because she doesn’t like the person she’s become. Every symptom is an attempt at self-cure. Hedda’s attempts to resolve the conflict raging inside her (how to situate herself in sexual difference) preclude her from satisfying her greatest desire: to accomplish an authentic act, to achieve an orgasmic union with a man. Rub-a-dub-dub, Hedda’s in a tub, and who do you think are peeping at her? The butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker, and the general himself, Daddy Gabler. If, with one gunshot, Hedda freed herself from Brack’s trap, in the 29 years that preceded that day, she never managed to free herself from her own. ‘Out of the struggle with others one makes melodrama; out of the struggle with oneself one makes tragedy’. If you want to find the tragic in Hedda Gabler, here is where you must look.

Matisse, Nu à l’écharpe blanche, 1919

As Hedda lies face-down on her bed, her hand between her legs, the gap between hallucinatory wish-fulfilment and kicking her heels till satisfaction is bridged by pain: masochism presides at the ceremony. The play’s circumlocutions, its coy sexual allusions, may lull the lazy spectator into a vision of sex bereft of its diabolical dimension, its potential for disruption: Hedda would never have put a bullet in her brain if her experience of sex was as sanitized as the audience expects. And if, as we may suppose, Hedda is but a vessel for Tesman’s self-relief while Løvborg might have procured her a certain satisfaction, what Hedda needs is a demon lover, a man who can wrench her femininity from her body—a man who can make her a woman. The difference between the sexes is paradigmatic of all differences. Had Hedda come to terms with sexual difference, her life would have been radically altered. Concretely, we may reasonably suppose that her disposition made it very difficult for her to accept penetration. To open herself up, to submit to a man, to feel the sway of sex while being possessed—this she could not do. In the conflict between the demands of her libido and the resistance of her ego, her imperious will to independence did her a disservice: that mysterious strangeness between her legs stood no chance against the armada of her mind’s defences.

Jan Sluijters, Nu debout (fond jaune), 1911

How might Hedda have found a way out? How might she have averted suicide? The answer, dear reader, is love. Was there not a single man from her ballroom days who she might have loved? A man smart enough to see that beneath her manly facade is a woman struggling to be set free? Women submit out of love. In order for Hedda to love, she’d have to find a man who would see her neither as Madonna nor Whore; not two-bit bitch, not haughty aristocrat, but simply the woman she is in her moments of lucidity alone. Making love with the man she loves, Hedda would offer him her submission, that libidinal submission that is the key to her satisfaction. Instead of tilting at windmills by adopting manly attitudes, she could fight the good fight of female sexuality, confronting the conflict that lies at its core. It wouldn’t be easy—the ego detests being defeated, the magic between her legs demands defeat—scandalously, it demands the masochism that procures orgasm. The conflict between the mind detesting defeat and the body craving it, had Hedda fully engaged it, would have made her not only a woman, but her own person. Nobody’s fool but her own, it would have ‘unfooled’ her. By affirming the difference between the sexes, she might have found vast vistas of pleasure; by denying sexual difference, she foreclosed such a perspective. She never put herself in a position to learn that, for her, when it comes to sex, power lies in surrender, pleasure in the abolition of limits, and self-assurance in loss of control.

Kees van Dongen, Femme au chapeau vert, 1907

Hedda Gabler’s first victim, then, is none other than Hedda herself. She is, I maintain, a glorious creature, one who fascinates us because the way she negotiates sexual difference compels us to examine how we do the same. For a man, she is fascinating because she offers a window into female sexuality. For a woman, because ‘the work of femininity’ is a never-ending task, she fascinates no less. In the course of a life the vicissitudes of fucking, for both man and woman, entail an alertness to the evolution of the other’s erotic scenario as well as a reconfiguration of one’s own. In these adaptations that lovers are called upon to make, Hedda’s investigations into her sexuality—however violent, awkward and indirect—are stimulating. Yes, I contend, there’s something to be said for a bullet to the brain, a bonfire of words, and a radical intransigence; there’s something to be said for Hedda’s hand between her legs, her placing Mount Ortler on her mound of Venus, her taking Miss Tesman’s hat for the maid’s. And there’s something to be said for an allumeuse in the guise of a mal-baisée. Many find Hedda hard to love. I don’t. There’s something to be said for a ‘beautiful loser’.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fränzi, 1910 (detail)

I end this essay with a citation from Richard Eyre’s introduction to his adaptation/translation of Hedda Gabler.¹

In the summer of 1889, when he was 61, Ibsen was on holiday in a South Tyrolean village. He met an 18-year-old Viennese girl called Emilie Bardach and fell in love. He’d dedicated himself to his art like a monk, for ‘the power and the glory’, and he’d renounced spontaneous joy and sexual fulfilment. Emilie became the ‘May sun of a September life’. She asked him to live with her; he at first agreed but, crippled by guilt and fear of scandal (and perhaps impotence as well), put an end to the relationship. Emilie, like Hedda, was a beautiful, intelligent, spoilt, bored upper-class girl with ‘a tired look in her mysterious eyes’, who wanted to have power and was thrilled at the possibility of snaring someone else’s husband. The village in which they met in the Tyrol – Gossensass – was mentioned specifically in an earlier draft of the play when Hedda and Løvborg are looking at the honeymoon photographs in the second act, and fragments of dialogue in Ibsen’s notes from the play appear to be derived directly from his conversations with Emilie.

While the suggestion that Emilie Bardach was a model for Hedda Gabler has been much discussed and contested,² Eyre’s portrait of her still drives home the point that Hedda’s psychosexual dynamics are as active as ever in real women’s lives. Speaking of women’s lives, readers will have noticed that I’ve avoided both socio-economic and socio-cultural contextualization of the play. Besides the fact that Ibsen criticism abounds in such perspective, I’ve deliberately avoided it because, at bottom, it is irrelevant to my argument. For those readers who might disagree, I will take up the issue in Part 2* of this series.

1 – Richard Eyre, ‘Introduction’, Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler, tr. Richard Eyre (London: Nick Hern Books, 2005).

2 – See  Joan Templeton, Ibsen’s Women (Plunkett Lake Press, 2015) chapter 10.

* Hedda Gabler posts 2 & 3 will be published by the end of December 2022.

Cuno Amiet, Le chapeau violet, 1907

The theoretical underpinning of this essay, as well as a number of its formulations, are derived from the work of three French psychoanalysts (who, be it said in passing, all happen to be women):

Murielle Gagnebin, L’Irreprésentable ou les Silences de l’œuvre (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1984) pp. 34-57

Jacqueline Schaeffer, ‘The Riddle of the Repudiation of Femininity: The Scandal of the Feminine Dimension’, in Leticia Glocer Fiorini & Graciela Abelin-Sas Rose, editors, On Freud’s ‘Femininity’ (London: Karnac Books, 2010) pp. 129-143

Maria Torok, ‘The Significance of Penis Envy in Women’, in Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Female Sexuality: New Psychoanalytic Views (London: Karnac Books, 1970) pp. 135-170

RICHARD JONATHAN, ‘MARA, MARIETTA: A LOVE STORY IN 77 BEDROOMS’  —  READ THE FIRST CHAPTER

RICHARD JONATHAN, ‘MARA, MARIETTA: A LOVE STORY IN 77 BEDROOMS’ | AMAZON PAPERBACK OR KINDLE

RICHARD JONATHAN, ‘MARA, MARIETTA: A LOVE STORY IN 77 BEDROOMS’ | APPLE iBOOK

I’ve referred to Hedda Gabler—the literary figure on the page, the dramatic figure on the stage—as ‘Ibsen’s glorious creature’. I’ve tried to show why she fascinates. Only a poetic discourse, however, not a discursive one, can convey her raging glory. In Part 3* of this series you will find my essay on the Norwegian National Ballet’s version of Hedda Gabler. It brilliantly conveys Hedda’s ‘dark sublime’ in the poetic discourse that is contemporary dance. As a teaser for another kind of poetic discourse, I offer these Four Rhymes for Hedda Gabler, adapted from my literary novel, Mara, Marietta: A Love Story in 77 Bedrooms.

* Hedda Gabler posts 2 & 3 will be published by the end of December 2022.

Kees van Dongen, Portrait de Fernande, 1905

John Cale’s ‘Hedda Gabler’ captures the hellish majesty of Ibsen’s heroine. The song is a dark hymn to Hedda, at once transcendent and sepulchral, eerie and stately. With its evocation of high culture and its intimation of horror, only a European could have written the song. It has something of Rilke’s ‘beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror’; it is, indeed, an elegy, a lament for the dead. In its long coda I see Hedda alone, a corpse crying cold tears in an empty universe. Testifying to the music’s power, the song—at once a paean to nihilism and a prayer for redemption—fills that vast sidereal void where Hedda, akin to the living dead, searches in vain for sleep.

Kees van Dongen, Femme lippue, 1919

The song is not available on Spotify, but you can listen to the original recording on youtube. Youtube also offers several versions with orchestra; all, unfortunately, with poor sound and video. The best, which I nevertheless recommend for the innovative arrangement and the scintillating guitar, is the one from John Cale’s 2010 Norwich concert. Note how—like brisk diagonals tearing into a staid rectangle—the strident bowing of the strings, the hit-and-run guitar licks, and the off-kilter drum fills punctuate the keyboard ground, adding just the right touch of violence and menace to the calmness of the keys. (Scroll down to read the lyrics and watch the videos.)

Frantisek Kupka, Le goût Gallien, 1919

HEDDA GABLER: IBSEN’S GLORIOUS CREATURE – PART 2: POSTMODERNISM VS. NATURALISM – A CRITIQUE OF FOUR PRODUCTIONS (1980-2016)

HEDDA GABLER: IBSEN’S GLORIOUS CREATURE – PART 3: TRAGEDY VS. MELODRAMA – A CRITIQUE OF FOUR PRODUCTIONS (1963-1975)

HEDDA GABLER: IBSEN’S GLORIOUS CREATURE – PART 4: THE NORWEGIAN NATIONAL BALLET’S ‘HEDDA GABLER’: ANALYSIS – 1

HEDDA GABLER: IBSEN’S GLORIOUS CREATURE – PART 5: THE NORWEGIAN NATIONAL BALLET’S ‘HEDDA GABLER’: ANALYSIS – 2