Thea may have reclaimed Ejlert, but she has also tamed him, made him fearful of spontaneity, just as Hedda is. She acts boldly on his behalf but is terribly anxious for him. Hedda feels a similar anxiety for herself at the thought of daring behavior, but she wants to believe that Lövborg can act upon his impulses with impunity. She wants to triumph over Thea, to shape a human destiny, and to gain a vicarious fulfillment of her needs to be independent and courageous by having Lövborg owe his freedom and fearlessness to her. Having no hope of becoming what she wants to be herself, she seeks to escape her impotence and self-hate by making Ejlert into a man through whom she can live and with whom she can proudly identify.
Hedda’s is an impossible dream. Since Lövborg is an alcoholic, freeing him of his fears and inhibitions is bound to destroy him. When he refuses to join the other men at the punch bowl, Judge Brack says, “Why, surely, cold punch is not poison.” “Perhaps not for everyone,” Ejlert replies, with the implication that it surely is for him (act 2). Thea is so anxious because she understands Ejlert’s vulnerability. Desperate, Hedda blinds herself to his condition and constructs a scenario that will satisfy her contradictory needs but that he cannot possibly fulfill.
When Ejlert has not returned by the next morning Thea is in panic, but, holding onto her dream, Hedda envisions him at Judge Brack’s “sitting with vine leaves in his hair, reading his manuscript” (act 3). Tesman comes back with a glowing account of the new work, but finds it “appalling” that Lövborg, “with all his great gifts, should be so utterly incorrigible.” “Because he has more daring,” Hedda asks, “than any of the rest of you?” This is Hedda’s idealized image of Lövborg. It is Ejlert’s excessive drinking, however, to which Jörgen is referring, since it has led him carelessly to drop his precious manuscript. Jörgen has found it and leaves it with Hedda when he is summoned to the bedside of the dying Aunt Rina.
Judge Brack’s account of the evening shatters Hedda’s dream of living through a liberated Lövborg. Having conceived of Lövborg as a kind of romantic hero, an untamed superior being, she is sickened by his sordid fight with Mademoiselle Diana and his arrest. If Hedda had simply wanted to show her power over Lövborg and break up his relationship with Thea by inducing him to revert to bohemian ways, she would have been pleased by his night of drinking and madness.
It is at this point that Hedda turns destructive. Since she has not been able to make Ejlert into the hero of her dreams, she exerts her power in a different way by first concealing and then burning his manuscript. Ashamed to confess that he has lost their “child,” Lövborg tells Thea that he has torn the manuscript into a thousand pieces and that he will “do no more work, from now on” (act 3). Thea “despairingly” asks what she will “have to live for,” accuses him of “child-murder,” and sees “nothing but darkness” before her. Lövborg is also in despair, for he knows “it won’t end with last night,” and debauchery no longer appeals to him: “she’s somehow broken my courage—my defiant spirit.” “To think,” says Hedda, that that pretty little fool should have influenced a man’s destiny.” Hedda might have been able to save Lövborg had she revealed that she was in possession of the manuscript, but she allows him to believe it is lost. When he announces that he wants “to make an end of it,” Hedda does not try to dissuade him or produce the manuscript but instead gives him a pistol, urges him to use it, and enjoins him to “let it be beautiful.” After Ejlert leaves, she burns the manuscript, calling it his and Thea’s child.
Hedda’s behavior can be explained as a continuation of her rivalry with Thea and of her desire to shape a man’s destiny—for ill if not for good; but these are not her only motivations. With the collapse of her dream of triumph for Lövborg, and vicariously for herself, Hedda is confronted once more by her contradictory needs, which she now has no hope of fulfilling. She, too, is in despair, and wishes to make an end of it. She is afraid to commit suicide, however, partly because, as Brack says at the end, “people don’t do such things!” After Lövborg disappoints her, she develops a new scenario in which he will commit suicide in just the way that she would like to do, and she will glory in this new form of freedom and daring and in her own contribution to it. When Brack announces that Lövborg has shot himself through the heart, Hedda is exultant: “It gives me a sense of freedom to know that an act of deliberate courage is still possible in this world—an act of spontaneous beauty” (act 4). Hedda feels herself to be incapable of such an act, but Lövborg has done it for her, she thinks. Judge Brack destroys her “beautiful illusion” by revealing that Ejlert was accidentally shot in the bowels while demanding his “lost child” in Mademoiselle Diana’s boudoir. “How horrible!” exclaims Hedda. “Everything I touch becomes ludicrous and despicable!—It’s like a curse!”
Hedda is driven to kill herself by the collapse of all her solutions. She can no longer hope to gain a sense of freedom and to satisfy her suicidal impulses vicariously through Lövborg, and she is put into an impossible position by Judge Brack’s effort to blackmail her.
As soon as she returns from her wedding journey, Brack begins pressing for “a triangular friendship” in which he will be her lover (act 2). Hedda welcomes Brack’s attentions, but given her fear of scandal, an affair is unthinkable. This is the same Hedda who had drawn a gun on Ejlert Lövborg when he wanted to bring their relationship down to earth. After confessing to Ejlert that she does not love her husband, she hastens to add, “All the same, no unfaithfulness, remember” (act 2). Brack welcomes Lövborg’s disgrace after he is arrested at Mademoiselle Diana’s because he senses Ejlert as a rival and hopes that Hedda’s home will be closed to him, like other “respectable house[s]” (act 3). His aim is to be “cock-of-the-walk,” and “for that,” he tells Hedda, “I will fight with every weapon I can command.” Hedda realizes that he is “a dangerous person” and is “exceedingly glad” that he has “no sort of hold” over her.
Brack gains a hold over Hedda, however, when he recognizes the pistol with which Lövborg was shot. Hedda is now faced with three possibilities, all of which are unbearable. Brack suggests that she can declare the pistol to have been stolen, but she says that “it would be better to die” than to do that (act 4). Brack dismisses her speech: “One says such things—but one doesn’t do them.” Why the threat of suicide here? Because lying about having given Lövborg the pistol is an act of cowardice that would exacerbate her self-hate? I have no better explanation. If the police trace the weapon to Hedda, says Brack, she will have to appear in court with Mademoiselle Diana and explain why she gave it to Lövborg: “think of the scandal .... of which you are so terrified.” If Brack keeps quiet, however, the weapon will not be traced, and Hedda will neither have to lie nor be exposed to scandal. This means, however, that she will be in Judge Brack’s power: “Subject to your commands and wishes. No longer free—not free! . . . No, I won’t endure the thought. Never!”
Given her psychological needs, Hedda can neither defy Brack nor submit to him. Hedda strikes us as a masterful person who knows how to get what she wants, but the fact is that she is extremely compliant where propriety is concerned. She could not endure the loss of respectability that would result from her defiance of Brack. Confined to the narrow range of activities suitable to a woman of her station, Hedda compensates for her lack of control over her destiny by manipulating the people around her, and especially by seeking to influence the fate of an important man. Being subject to Brack’s wishes and commands would render her utterly powerless and would be as unendurable as the consequences of defiance.
Hedda’s need for freedom is as compensatory as her craving for power. The product of a highly restrictive environment that has allowed her few choices, she has a suppressed desire to rebel and a longing for liberty. As is typical of detached people, she is hypersensitive to anything that seems to impinge upon her, such as the expectations of others, the march of time, or being touched. She recoils from the gentle embrace of Aunt Juliane: “Please! Oh, please let me go!” (act 1). She cannot bear being pregnant or the responsibilities that parenthood will entail. She pursues a freedom from constraint rather than
