want to relinquish his idealization of her or to have any flaw in their relationship.
There is an inner conflict in Torvald between his dependency on Nora and his perfectionism. He tries to resolve that conflict by treating her like a helpless, uncomprehending female who was not “able to judge how wrong” her behavior was (act 3). If he continued to condemn Nora, he would lose her. By regarding her as too immature to be held responsible, he is able to forgive her and continue their relationship. He will keep Nora straight, and thus protect himself, by being her will and conscience. He envisions merging with Nora more completely than ever before.
Torvald’s fantasy is profoundly oppressive to Nora, who no longer respects his judgment. When he starts regarding her as his little doll again, “whom you would have to guard more carefully than ever, because she was so weak and frail” (act 3), she realizes the degree to which she has been infantilized and demands to be treated like a real person. This does not produce a sudden leap into maturity for Nora, nor could it. She herself is conscious of her inadequacy and uncertainty. She knows that she is not fit to teach her children, that she does not understand society or religion, and that she is bewildered about ethical questions. What she is clear about is that she is not clear. She knows that she is out of touch with herself and the world and that she must get away from Torvald if she is to “learn to face reality.” She is aware that she is at the beginning of a long process and that she does not “know what sort of person” she will become.
I have suggested that if Nora continued to grow, there might be a chance for her marriage. That would depend on Torvald as well, but he, too, has begun to change and may have as good a chance as she of arriving at the necessary insights. He does not accept Nora’s position that he should have sacrificed honor for love, nor, given his personality, is he ever likely to do so. Nora needs to see the sources of that expectation in her own psychology. Torvald does respond, however, to Nora’s indignation at not having been treated as a person. He understands that there is “a great void” between them and asks Nora to believe that he is capable of change. She thinks that he might be when he “no longer [has his] doll to play with” (act 3). Again she is right. The separation is as essential for Torvald as it is for her. Nora appears to be somewhat vindictive when she says that his inability to endure the thought of parting with her is all the more reason why she should go, but perhaps she recognizes that she must be cruel in order to be kind.
The question we are left with at the end of the play is whether Nora and Torvald can change enough so that their “life together might truly be a marriage” (act 3). Unless this happens, says Nora, they will always be strangers. If it were to happen it would be “the most wonderful thing of all,” but Nora says that she “no longer believe[s] in miracles.” Torvald, however, clings to this hope. The last line of the play is his: “The most wonderful thing of all—?” Given the severity of Nora and Torvald’s problems and the absence of therapeutic help, it would be a miracle indeed.
Hedda Gabler is above all a study of character; to comprehend the play, we must understand Hedda. It is difficult to establish Ibsen’s thematic intentions, but he shows with brilliant psychological insight how Hedda’s plight as a woman in an extremely restrictive society produces inner conflicts that make her life sterile and lead to her destructive behavior. Hedda is not portrayed sympathetically, like Nora, but psychological analysis reveals that beneath her cold, haughty demeanor she is a suffering human being.
As in A Doll’s House, the heroine’s relationship with a man is the focus of the play. Hedda’s most important relationship is not with her husband but with Ejlert Lövborg, whom she had known before her marriage. After the scene is set in act 1, the dramatic action is initiated by Thea Elvsted’s visit, which leads to Lövborg’s reentry into Hedda’s life. Act 2 is focused on Hedda’s rivalry with Thea, as she induces Ejlert to take a drink and go to Judge Brack’s party. Act 3 shows us her disappointment when Ejlert fails to enact the scenario she had envisaged for him, and it ends with Hedda urging him to kill himself beautifully and burning his manuscript. In act 4, Hedda is driven to suicide when all her solutions collapse after Ejlert’s death. If we are to appreciate the subtlety of Ibsen’s psychological portrait and make sense of what happens in the play, we must understand Ejlert’s role in Hedda’s life.
The most widely held view of Hedda’s behavior in act 2 is that she is trying to undo Thea’s constructive influence on Ejlert, who had been leading a wild bohemian life in the days when he and Hedda were friends. Inspired by Thea, he has stopped drinking, has published a highly acclaimed book, and has written another that is more brilliant still. Envious of Thea, Hedda wishes to exercise a more powerful influence of her own by turning Lövborg back into the man he was when she knew him. She seeks to disrupt Ejlert’s relationship with Thea and to replace her as the dominant force in his life. Thea is afraid that Ejlert will be destroyed if he reverts to his old ways, and most people seem to feel that Hedda is trying to undermine him in order to feel that for once in her life she, too, has “the power to shape a human destiny” (act 2).
There is much in this view with which I agree, but I do not think that Hedda induces Lövborg to take a drink and go to Brack’s party in order to undermine him. In response to Thea’s concern about “what will come of all this,” Hedda confidently predicts that “At ten o’clock he will be here, with vine leaves in his hair. Flushed and fearless!” (act 2). She envisions him as a triumphant figure. Hedda is disappointed rather than pleased when she hears from her husband that the drunken Ejlert carelessly dropped his manuscript and learns from Judge Brack that he finally turned up at Mademoiselle Diana’s, where he insisted that he had been robbed, raised a row, and was taken away by the police: “So that’s what happened! Then, after all, he had no vine leaves in his hair!” (act 4). He is behaving like the Ejlert of old, but that is not, evidently, what Hedda had wanted. In order to understand what Hedda was hoping for we must examine her inner conflicts and Ejlert’s role in her effort to manage them.
Some of Hedda’s conflicts are presented quite vividly in her reminiscence with Ejlert about the old days, when there was a “secret intimacy” between them that “no living soul suspected” (act 2). With General Gabler reading his paper in the same room, Ejlert would describe his “days and nights of passion and frenzy, of drinking and madness” to Hedda. She evoked his confessions by boldly asking “devious questions” that he perfectly understood. Rejecting Lövborg’s idea that she was trying to wash away his sins, Hedda explains her motive: “Isn’t it quite easy to understand that a young girl, especially if it can be done in secret . . . should be tempted to investigate a forbidden world? A world she’s supposed to know nothing about?”
Hedda is a socially prominent woman with a very strong sense of propriety who needs to maintain her dignity at all costs and who cannot bear the thought of doing anything that would diminish her respectability. At the same time, she has powerful sexual and aggressive impulses that she wants to express as men do and that she is bitter at having to deny. She lives in a society that imposes enormous constraints upon a woman of her social class, constraints to which she outwardly conforms but against which she inwardly rebels. Her “secret intimacy” with Ejlert Lövborg enabled her to escape these constraints vicariously, since he acted out her forbidden impulses and then told her about it. When Ejlert wonders how she could have brought herself “to ask such questions,” Hedda insists that she did so “in a devious way,” that is, without directly violating decorum (act 2). We see Hedda looking for a similar kind of safe, voyeuristic gratification when she makes oblique references to Judge Brack’s affairs and relishes the thought of his stag party, which she wishes she could attend unseen.
Hedda’s problem, then, is how to satisfy her “craving for life” (act 2), as Ejlert describes it, without sacrificing her position as a lady. Hedda’s need to conform to the rules of propriety is so great that it both alienates her from her real feelings and makes it impossible for her to express the resulting rebellious impulses. It is not a healthy craving for self-actualization but her suppressed neurotic needs that Ejlert Lövborg is acting out. To Hedda, however, he is a man
