A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre

by Christopher Innes (ed)

  ¶ If society won’t let us live morally with them (women), then we’ll have to live with them immorally –

  ¶ Tesman: the new idea in E. L.’s book is that of progress resulting from the comradeship between man and woman.

  ¶ Hedda’s basic demand is: I want to know everything, but keep myself clean.

  ¶ I want to know everything – everything – everything –

  H.: – –

  H. If only I could have lived like him!

  ¶ Is there something about Brabant? B.: What on earth is that? …

  ¶ The wager about the use of both pistols.

  ¶ Miss T: Yes, this is the house of life and health. Now I shall go home to a house of sickness and death. God bless both of you. From now on I’ll come out here every day to ask Bertha how things are –

  ¶ In the third act H. tells E. L. that she is not interested in the great questions – nor the great ideas – but in the great freedom of man …. But she hasn’t the courage.

  ¶ The two ideals! Tesman: What in the name of God does he mean by that? What? What do we have to do with ideals?

  ¶ The new book treats of “the two ideals.” Thea can give no information.

  A complete version of the notes, including detail on their original format, can be found in The Oxford Ibsen, vol. VII, ed. James McFarlane (1966).

  *

  Among “the tendencies of the times” to which Hedda is “demoniacally attracted”, is the whole fin-de-siècle atmosphere, which forms an oblique background to the play (as it does for Strindberg’s Miss Julie, written in 1888). The central icon of Decadent art was Salome, and as a summary of the fin-de-siècle movement points out:

  In literature it led to the characterization of women as passive creatures of emotion and instinct or as dangerously attractive but ruthless dolls, the grown-up children of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, whose instinct is to drag men down to their own biological level. When this predatoriness is consciously aggressive, the ‘femme fatale’ results, the kind of role so enjoyed by Sarah Bernhardt, which, in turn, is easily associated with the ‘gynander’ – the unnatural woman who behaves like a man, that for Strindberg was exemplified by the ‘bluestocking’ heroines of Ibsen.

  The attempt of such women to control or usurp male creativity was emblematized by the Decadents in vampires, sphinxes, maenads, willis, and destructive watersprites, but a particularly apt image was discovered in the symbolic castration afforded by decapitation, or decollation. This became one of the most frequent Decadent topoi, exemplified not only in the central story of Salome – who is very often conflated with her mother, Herodias – but also by the myths of Judith, Taïs, Delilah, Turandot, Rusalka, and the decapitated Orpheus …

  The characteristic Decadent stance towards women, then, was the simultaneous urge to self-abasement and to savage domination that is technically known as ‘sado-masochism’. This definition was introduced … by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in his Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), and was taken from the name of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch who in 1870 had published a celebrated novel about bondage, Venus in Furs, in which sex is not seen as a pleasure but as a demonic source of pain …

  (Brian Parker, in Modern Drama, 32 [1989])

  The image of Hedda given by the notes corresponds closely with such an archetype: “the pale, apparently cold beauty”, over-sophisticated and “demonic”, masculinarized by the association with her father’s pistols, who leads a man to ruin through inspiring an “irresistible craving for excess”. Other elements in the play are the “vine leaves” Hedda envisions in Løvborg’s hair, as well as his slightly displaced castration – shooting himself in the “stomach” through the agency of her pistol. It is also significant that Sacher-Masoch had been a friend of Ibsen’s in Rome.

  However, as with the “MAIN POINTS” listed in the notes, which clearly outline a central concern with the position of women, the fin-de-swcle Salome theme is present only in the subtext. Although in his correspondence Ibsen insisted on a particular actress – Constance Bruun – for the title figure because of her capacity “to express the demonical basis of the character” (letter to Hans Schroder, director of the Christiana Theater, 27 December 1890), his commentary on the play stressed that it had no explicit message. For instance, a letter to Moritz Prozor, his German translator, focussed on the psychological basis of the play and its unity as a whole:

  The title of the play is Hedda Gabler. My intention in giving it this name was to indicate that Hedda as a personality is to be regarded rather as her father’s daughter than as her husband’s wife.

  It has not been my desire to deal in this play with so-called human problems. What I principally wanted to do was to depict human beings, human emotions, and human desires, upon a groundwork of certain of the social conditions and moral principles of the present day. When you have read the whole, my fundamental idea will be clearer to you than I can make it by entering into further explanations …

  (4 December 1890)

  Other letters, written while the play was in rehearsal at the Christiana Theater, emphasize the dynamics of the action – in particular the monolithic unity of the society that faces Hedda. Writing to Kristina Steen, an actress in the production, Ibsen commented:

  Jørgen Tesman, his old aunts, and the faithful servant Berthe together form a picture of complete unity. They think alike, they share the same memories and have the same outlook on life. To Hedda they appear like a strange and hostile power, aimed at her very being. In a performance of the play the harmony that exists between them must be conveyed.

  (14 January 1891)

  The same letter stresses that all characters, even an apparently minor figure like the “good-natured, simple, oldish” maid, are equally important and have to be fully realized by the actors to create this unified impression.

  Not surprisingly, Ibsen’s supporters were quick to see the connection between the Hedda and Nora, and to point to the social criticism embodied in the title figure. One of the best commentaries on Hedda Gabler, which analyzes its technique and structure, gives a contemporary reading of Hedda’s character as a “fin de siècle woman“ and identifies its place in the naturalistic movement, is by Edmund Gosse, the English translator of the play

  4.4.2 Ibsen’s new drama

  The Fortnightly, January-June, 1891

  The new drama is the longest which Ibsen has published, with the exception of The Wild Duck. In comparison with the seven social plays which have preceded it, its analogies are rather with A Doll’s House than with the rest. It attempts no general satire of manners, as do The Pillars of Society and An Enemy of the People. It propounds no such terrible questions in ethics as Ghosts; it is almost as perplexing, but not nearly so obscure, as The Wild Duck. In style it is a return to Ibsen’s old realistic manner, without a trace of the romanticism which cropped up so strangely in The Lady from the Sea, and even in Rosmersholm; while the dialogue is more rapid and fluent, and less interrupted by long speeches than it has ever been before. In the whole of the new play there is not one speech which would require thirty seconds for its enunciation. I will dare to say that I think in this instance Ibsen has gone perilously far in his desire for rapid and concise expression. The stichomythia of the Greek and French tragedians was lengthy in comparison with this unceasing display of hissing conversational fireworks, fragments of sentences without verbs, clauses that come to nothing, adverbial exclamations and cryptic interrogatories. It would add, I cannot but think, to the lucidity of the play if some one character were permitted occasionally to express himself at moderate length, as Nora does in A Doll’s House, and as Mrs. Alving in Ghosts. None the less is the feat of combining a story with a play, and conducting both in meteoric bursts of extremely colloquial chat, one which Ibsen deserves the highest praise for having performed. And, on the stage, no doubt, this rapid broken utterance will give an extraordinary sense of reality.

  As is known, Ibsen, like Euripides, does not present his characters to the publi
c until their fortunes are determined. The heightened action of a third act in a “well-made” play is no luxury which he offers himself. But the Norwegian tragic poet cannot present a herald to his audience, or send Hermes down to tell the story in heroic verse. He has to explain the situation out of the mouths of his characters, and this he has an unrivalled adroitness in doing. We are never conscious of being informed, but, as we read on, the situation gradually and inevitably becomes patent to us. In the present case the state of affairs is as follows: A promising young man of letters, George Tesman, has gained a stipend, a sort of travelling scholarship, with the vague understanding that when he returns he will be appointed to the vacant Chair of the History of Civilisation, presumably at the University of Christiania. He is now looked upon as the principal rising authority in that science, a friend or rival of his, of far more original genius, one Ejlert Løvborg, having sunken into obscurity through drink and ill-living. Tesman, a sanguine, shallow youth, proposes to marry the beauty of the circle, Hedda Gabler, the orphan daughter of a late General Gabler. Tesman is himself an orphan, having been brought up by two maiden aunts, one of them a confirmed invalid. Hedda Gabler is understood to express a great desire to live in a certain villa. They marry, and they depart for six months on the Continent. A judge (assessor), Mr. Brack, who has been an intimate friend of both of them, contrives to secure and to furnish this villa for them during their absence. It seems a little rash that, having no income, they should launch into these expenditures, but it is excused on the score of Tesman’s practical certainty of being made a university professor. And their affection is supposed to be, and on Tesman’s side is, of so tender and idyllic a character that it is really cruel to disturb them about money. The reader takes it for granted that they are going to be disappointed of the Chair, and accordingly ruined, but that does not happen. Ibsen does not play these obvious old games of comedy.

  It must now be explained that during the honeymoon of the Tesmans an event has occurred in the literary world. Ejlert Løvborg, who was supposed to have become submerged for good and all, and who was hidden in a mountain parish, has suddenly published a volume on the progress of civilisation which surpasses all his previous writings, and which creates a wide sensation. It is whispered that a lady up there in the mountains, Mrs. Elvsted, the wife of a sheriff of that name, has undertaken his social restoration. Løvborg is once more a dangerous rival to Tesman, who, however, with generous enthusiasm, hastens to pay his tribute of praise to the new publication. The play opens on the morning after the arrival of the Tesmans at their villa, and the action occupies forty-eight hours, the scene never changing from the suite of apartments on the ground floor. It may be conceived from these brief preliminaries that action, in the ordinary sense, is not the strong point of the drama, the interest of which, indeed, is strictly psychological. It consists, mainly, of the revelation of the complex and morbid character of Hedda Gabler, attended by the satellites of Mrs. Elvsted, Brack, and Løvborg, the husband, Tesman, being in reality a semi-comic character, not much more subtle than Helmer in A Doll’s House, but no whit the less closely studied.

  Hedda is one of the most singular beings whom Ibsen has created. She has a certain superficial likeness to Nora, of whom she is, indeed, a kind of moral parody or perverted imitation. Hedda Gabler is a spoilt child, whose indulgent father has allowed her to grow up without training of any kind. Superficially gracious and pleasing, with a very pretty face and tempting manners, she is in reality wholly devoid of moral sense. She reveals herself, as the play proceeds, as without respect for age or grief, without natural instincts, without interest in life, untruthful, treacherous, implacable in revenge. She is a very ill-conditional little social panther or ocelot, totally without conscience of ill or preference for good, a product of the latest combination of pessimism, indifferentism and morbid selfishness, all claws and thirst for blood under the delicate velvet of her beauty.

  […]

  Hedda Gabler is a more pronounced type of the fin de siècle woman than Ibsen has hitherto created. She is not thwarted by instinctive agencies beyond her authority, like Ellida Wangel; nor drawn aside by overmastering passion, like Rebekka West; personal refinement distinguishes her from Gina Ekdal, and deprives her of an excuse; she is infinitely divided from the maternal devotion of Helene Alving. As I have hinted before, the only figure in Ibsen’s rich gallery of full-length portraits which has even a superficial likeness to her is Nora Helmer. But Nora is intended; or else the play is a mere mystification, to be a sympathetic individual. Whatever view we may take of her famous resolve and her sudden action upon it, we have to understand that ignorance of life and a narrow estimate of duty have been the worst of her defects. In her child-like or doll-like sacrifice of principle for her husband she has acted with a native generosity which it would be monstrous to expect husbands, at any rate, wholly to disapprove of. But Hedda Gabler has no such infantile unselfishness; no such sacrifice of self even upon a squalid altar. Curiously enough, when confronted with the terrible act, the destruction of Løvborg’s manuscript, which she has committed purely to revenge herself on that personage, she deftly adopts Nora’s excuse for the forgery – she has done it for her husband’s sake. Here, and not for the first time, Ibsen seems to be laughing, if not at himself, at those fanatic disciples who take his experiments in pathology for lectures on hygiene.

  […]

  In depicting Hedda Gabler, Ibsen seems to have expended his skill on the portrait of a typical member ofthat growing class of which M. Jules Simon spoke so eloquently the other day in his eulogy on Caro. To people of this temperament – and it is one which, always existing, is peculiarly frequent nowadays – the simple and masculine doctrines of obedience to duty, of perseverance, of love to mankind, are in danger of being replaced by “a complicated and sophisticated code which has the effect of making some of us mere cowards in the face of difficulty and sacrifice, and of disgusting all of us with the battle of life.” In Hedda Gabler we see the religious idea violently suppressed under the pretext of a longing for liberty. She will not be a slave, yet is prepared for freedom by no education in self-command. Instead of religion, morality, and philosophy her head is feverishly stuffed with an amalgam of Buddhism and Schopenhauer. Even the beautiful conventions of manners are broken down, and the suppression of all rules of conduct seems the sole road to happiness. In her breast, with its sickly indifferentism, love awakens no sympathy, age no respect, suffering no pity, and patience in adversity no admiration.

  […]

  In Hedda Gabler, I believe it will be admitted that Ibsen has gone further than ever before in his disdain for the recognised principles of scenic art. In this connection, it is amusing to note that the situation on which his new play is based has a very curious resemblance to that of M. Henri Becque’s much-discussed comedy of La Parisienne. As in that play, so in Hedda Gabler, the three central figures are a wife of seductive manners and acute perceptions, devoid of all moral sense; a husband, who is a man of letters in search of a place; and a lover, who is the sympathetic friend of the husband, and even his defender against the caprices of the wife. The difference between French and Scandinavian convention is shown, indeed, in the fact that while Clotilde is pre-eminently unfaithful, Hedda has no virtue left but this, the typical one. Through the tempest which has raged in her moral garden, elle a sauvé sa rose. But in each play the tame lover, Lafont or Brack, eadeavours to restrain the tendresse of the wife, Clotilde or Hedda, for an unseen or suspected second lover, Sampson or Løvborg, and to prevent a scandal in the interest of the husband. I do not push the parallel further than this, nor would I affront convinced Ibsenites by comparing so serious a work as Hedda Gabler with La Parisienne, which is doubdess a trifle, though a very brilliant trifle. But this accidental resemblance to the work of Henri Becque turns up again in the last act of Hedda Gabler, where all the personages appear in deep mourning, and irresistibly remind “the inner eye ” of the lugubrious mise-en-scène of Les Corbeaux
. Probably the reason why the name of Becque occurs to us once and again as we turn the pages of Ibsen’s last drama is, not so much these superficial resemblances of situation as the essential identity of the theatrical ideal in these two dramatists. Each is fighting, in defiance of the Clement Scotts and the Francisque Sarceys, against the tradition of the “well-made” play; each is trying to transfer to the boards a real presentment of life, or of a fraction of life. It is therefore curious, to say the least, to find them hitting upon forms of expression so similar. Unless my memory fails me, a piece of Becque’s was acted at the Théâtre Libre in Paris on the same night, or nights, on which Ghosts was performed there. It must have been very interesting to compare work so like and yet so essentially dissimilar. […]

  What the moral of Hedda Gabler is, what “gospel” it preaches, and what light it holds out to poor souls tossing in our sea of “hysterical mock-disease,” I will not pretend to conjecture. Doubtless there will be scarcely less discussion over the ethics of Hedda’s final resolve than there was over those of Nora, when she slammed the front-door so vigorously eleven years ago. These are matters which, I conceive, interest the great magian at Munich less than they do his disciples. He takes a knotty situation, he conducts it to its extreme logical conclusion, he invites the world to fight over it, and then he retires for another two years of solitary meditation.

  Hedda Gabler: chronology of major early performances January 1891 Residenztheater Hedda: Clara Heese

  Munich

  February 1891 Lessing Theatre Hedda: Anna Haverland

  Berlin

  February 1891 Royal Theatre Hedda: Betty Hennings

  Copenhagen

  April 1891 Vaudeville Theatre Hedda: Elizabeth Robins

  London

  December 1891 Théâtre du Vaudeville Hedda: Mme. Brandes