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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
A striking similarity in the choice of characters (a beautiful young wife; a former schoolmate; a rather commonplace husband; a husband's friend, the wife's secret admirer) and in the handling of plot (a threat of blackmail, a struggle for power, a plan for suicide) suggests that Hedda Gabler is to a remarkable degree a more complex manifestation of A Doll's House. Even more intriguing is the heroines' shared aspiration to achieve vicarious fulfillment through an admired man's heroic act. And most significant of all is the identity of their reactions when the man fails. Though Nora finally no longer believes in miracles nor Hedda in vine leaves, each is still pursuing—whether with determination or destructiveness— her ideal (and Ibsen's) of the realized self. Examining the equivalences of character in these works reveals how Ibsen's vision became richer, darker, more ambiguous even as his concerns remained essentially the same.
1 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Die Menschen in Ibsens Dramen,” trans. Carla Hvistendahl and James McFarlane, in Henrik Ibsen: A Critical Anthology, ed. James McFarlane (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1970), pp. 135, 140.
2 Though F. L. Lucas has suggestive references to Hedda as “a grimmer counterpart, and opposite, of Nora Helmer” and as “a doll turned monster,” they are no more than isolated phrases in his discussion of Hedda Gabler. See The Drama of Ibsen and Strindberg (London: Cassell, 1962), pp. 221, 240. Even so intriguingly titled an article as Viva Schatia's “Hedda Gabler's Doll's House” only briefly addresses itself to some of the first points of comparison suggested in this essay and then offers mechanical analyses of the psychological and environmental obstacles eventually overcome by Nora, while concluding that Hedda's “neurotic conflicts … had … imprisoned her in the Doll's House of her childhood fixations from which the only possible escape was death,” Psychoanalytic Review, 26 (1939), 38.
Certain of the more practical linkages were evidently worked out some years ago when A Doll's House was staged in New York City with Claire Bloom as Nora. After the success of the initial production, stimulated in part by the interest in women's liberation, the producers went on to present Hedda Gabler, realizing no doubt that they could easily do so since the cast was almost identical.
3 The often told details of Ibsen's relations with these and other young women, and the frustrations they produced, are well presented in Michael Meyer's Henrik Ibsen (New York: Doubleday, 1971), pp. 611 ff.
4 All quotations are from the text of The Oxford Ibsen, ed. James Walter McFarlane (London: Oxford Univ. Press). A Doll's House, trans. McFarlane, appears in Vol. v (1961), and Hedda Gabler, trans. Jens Arup, in Vol. vn (1966).
5 Benedetto Croce, European Literature in the Nineteenth Century (London: Chapman and Hall, 1924), p. 336.
6 This phrase becomes a subtly developed leitmotiv in Hedda Gabler, with the process of verbal elaboration only fully apparent in the original. (Quotations in Norwegian are from Henrik Ibsen, Samlede Verker [Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1941]. A Doll's House [Et dukkehjem] is in Vol. iv, Hedda Gabler in Vol. v. Page citations following my translations of the Norwegian text refer to these volumes.) It first expresses Hedda's distance from society and family in her annoyance at Aunt Juliane's leaving her hat in the salon. “Man bruger ikke det” ‘One doesn't do it’ (p. 93), then her pretended distance from Thea's story of the mysterious woman in Lövborg's past who had threatened him with a pistol, .“Sligt noget bruger man da ikke her” ‘That sort of thing one certainly doesn't do here’ (p. 102). Then it is transformed into Brack's deprecatory claim, “Sligt noget siger man. Men man g⊘r det ikke,” ‘That sort of thing one says. But one doesn't do it’ (p. 156), and finally his horrified “Men, gud sig forbarme, sligt noget g⊘r man da ikke!” ‘But, God be merciful—that sort of thing one certainly doesn't do!‘ (p. 158), so precise a verbal echo of Krogstad's “Sligt noget g⊘r man ikke, fru Helmer” (p. 45). (The translations are unidiomatic because of an attempt to approximate the original word order.)
7 For the story of Ibsen's friend Laura Kieler, which he drew on for A Doll's House, see Meyer, pp. 443–45; for the sources of Hedda Gabler, see pp. 646–47.
8 Aunt Juliane Tesman echoes these words when she says to Hedda, “I also do need to have someone to live for” (p. 253). Ibsen's divided view is expressed here by his fine discrimination of Aunt Juliane's goodness as well as her sentimentality and intrusiveness. Few daughters- in-law would be as sharp with a surrogate motherin- law as Hedda is over Aunt Juliane's hat, but hardly any would be pleased at receiving an unsolicited visit the morning after returning from a wedding trip and at seeing her domestic authority eroded in the matter of a husband's bedroom slippers.
9 These children may be no more than a device to account for Lövborg's presence in the Elvsted household, but Thea's desertion of them curiously echoes Nora's abandonment of her children. (When he chooses to, Ibsen can take the relationship between stepmother and children very seriously indeed, as in The Lady from the Sea.) That we are not tempted to denounce Thea as an unworthy mother should suggest that the matter is one of dramatic emphasis rather than moral judgment. Such an emphasis here should make us cautious about echoing the shock of Ibsen's first audiences or about seeing Nora in the grip of a “tragic” dilemma at the end of the play. The children are a trump card for Torvald but not for Ibsen. (For examples of Ibsen's annoyance at being forced to concoct the “German” ending of a A Doll's House, in which Nora cannot bear to leave her children “mutterlos,” see The Oxford Ibsen, v, 286 and 454-56.)
10 Rolf Fjelde, who describes Torvald as “the puppet of others' expectations,” uses the term “doll” to designate both Torvald and Nora in their conventional male and female roles as beings “without the hard-won, distinctively human attributes.” See the Foreword to Henrik Ibsen: Four Major Plays (New York: NAL, 1965), p. xxvii.
11 Weigand, The Modern Ibsen (New York: Dutton, 1960), p. 269. Weigand notes a similarity in the characteristic language of the two husbands, pointing out that Tesman's shocked reaction to Hedda's news that she has burnt the manuscript, “it's misappropriation of lost property!” is couched “in language suggestive of Torvald Helmer” (p. 270).
12 Although the context is different, this exchange is reminiscent of a moment near the end of A Doll's House when Torvald offers what he supposes is the ultimate explanation for Nora's resolve to leave him. “You don't love me anymore,” he exclaims grandiloquently. “Exactly,” Nora replies (p. 283). The translators' choices have suggested more of a verbal similarity than actually exists between Hedda's “Nej, ikke ganske” ‘No, not quite’ (p. 123) and Nora's “Nej, det er just tingen” ‘No, it is just the thing’—more idiomatically, ‘No, that's exactly the point’—(p. 68). The collapsing of the male assurance is the same, however.
13 The translator has rendered as “lust for life” two slightly different terms: “livsbegaeret” ‘life desire’ and then “livskravet” ‘life demand.’ He may have wished to catch the echo of the “livsglaede” ‘life joy’ of that other tragic debauchee in Ibsen's drama, Captain Alving of Ghosts. (In all these instances the terms have been translated unidiomatically to emphasize the impulses as integral to life itself.)
14 Had these lines been included in Le Gallienne's translation, they would have been found on p. 45 of Six Plays by Henrik Ibsen (New York: Modern Library-Random, 1951).
15 “Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work,” On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement … and Other Works, Vol. xiv of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1957), pp. 324–31.
16 Letter to Count Moritz Prozor, 4 Dec. 1890, The Oxford Ibsen, VII, 500.
17 Georg Brandes' argument that General Gabler represents the lack of genuine military and aristocratic traditions in Norwegian society is hardly borne out by the text, which establishes him as a brooding ancestral presence, akin to those whose portraits line the walls of Rosmersholm (Henrik Ibsen: A Critical Study [1899; rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1964], p. 104).
18 Ibsen does not limit such repressions, and even involvements with a surrogate man, to women. From one point of view The Wild Duck may be regarded as the centerpiece of a trilogy of plays in which an obsessed idealist looks to a man to justify his dream by performing a transcendent act. It should also be noted that the idea of sacrifice is even more destructive here than in A Doll's House.
19 Northam, Ibsen: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1973), p. 185.