Ibsen Studies

ISSN: 1502-1866 (Print) 1741-8720 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/sibs20

Reading Ibsen with Irigaray: Gendering Tragedy in

Hedda Gabler

Lior Levy

To cite this article: Lior Levy (2017): Reading Ibsen with Irigaray: Gendering Tragedy in Hedda
Gabler, Ibsen Studies, DOI: 10.1080/15021866.2017.1344379

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15021866.2017.1344379

Published online: 05 Jul 2017.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 8

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=sibs20

Download by: [University of Connecticut] Date: 10 July 2017, At: 09:05

Ibsen Studies, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1080/15021866.2017.1344379

READING IBSEN WITH IRIGARAY:

­GENDERING TRAGEDY IN HEDDA GABLER
Lior Levy

INTRODUCTION
In “Notes for a modern tragedy,” written in preparation for A Doll’s
House, Ibsen offered the following observation on the conditions of
women in his times: “A woman cannot be herself in modern society.
It is an exclusively male society, with laws made by men and with
prosecutors and judges who assess feminine conduct from a mascu-
line standpoint” (quoted in Meyer 1971, 446).1 Written 11 years after
A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler dramatizes this very claim and exam-
ines the dire consequences that women face under such conditions.
Hedda cannot be herself quite literally: she is alienated from herself,
devoid of a feminine self and lacking resources that would allow her
to live as a woman. This inability is an outcome of the fact that she
lives in a society that does not provide her with a law – that is, with
a language, norms, culture, and a symbolic order – through which
she can constitute and understand herself as a woman. Although
her situation is not unique and is shared, as Ibsen says, by women
“in modern society,” she is exceptional – as is suggested by her role
as the eponymous character of the play – in being the one woman in
the play aware of it. Her desire to constitute a viable, feminine sense
of self and her awareness of her inability to do so under the condi-
tions in which she lives lead to a final, and contradictory, attempt at
self-determination – her suicide.
Ibsen’s comment touches upon the issue at the heart of Hedda
Gabler – the critique of the effacement of women’s subjectivity in
Western bourgeois society. A woman’s fate, Ibsen argues, is tragic,

© 2017 The Centre for Ibsen Studies

 Lior Levy
in the sense that her very existence embodies an impassable contra-
diction: she is shaped as an individual by cultural and symbolic con-
ditions that prevent her from having a feminine self. In this respect,
her appearance as a subject marks her death – metaphorically and, at
times, literally – as a woman. Thus, the play weaves together gender
and genre, as Hedda’s story enables spectators to explore tragedy as
a genre that is specifically feminine. Perhaps this is not surprising,
given that the two terms, gender and genre, share an origin in the
French verb engendrer, which means “to beget, engender; to give
birth” (OED).2 Their shared origin invites us to reflect on the inter-
section of the categories of “kind, sort” and “sex, quality of being
male or female” in the play. Consequently, rather than treating gen-
der and genre as two distinct epistemic categories for interpreting
Hedda Gabler, my reading focuses on how the two define the play
and our hermeneutic possibilities.
The analysis that I offer focuses mainly on the opening and closing
scenes, which frame the action and establish its meaning; the open-
ing scene configures our expectations of what is about to take place,
whereas the final scene gathers all that has occurred and affords an
opportunity to reconsider it.3 Set between two scenes that, I shall
argue, draw our attention to Hedda’s absence and the question of
her ability to appear – the beginning of the play is marked by her
delayed entrance and the play’s end is dominated by her death and
lifeless body – the play as a whole displays Hedda as a riddle, an
enigma whose appearance destabilizes and challenges the masculine
logic that governs her existence.4 Her and our inability to solve the
riddle lead to her death.

FROM IBSEN TO IRIGARAY (AND BACK)

Since the publication of the play in 1890, both readers and spectators
have commented on Hedda’s strangeness and her enigmatic charac-
ter. On the occasion of the play’s publication, one critic described
her as “a monster in female form” (quoted in Meyer 1971, 643).
Another bemoaned “the obscurity, the eccentric and abnormal psy-
chology, the empty and desolate impression which that whole way
of life leaves” and determined that “we do not understand Hedda

[ 2 ]
 Reading Ibsen with Irigaray
Gabler” (quoted in Meyer 1971, 643). Monstrous Hedda abuses or
transgresses the boundaries of the human and cannot be under-
stood through shared, ordinary categories.
These male critics took their inability to understand Hedda or
Hedda Gabler as a whole as indicative of Ibsen’s creative failure.
Unlike them, Elizabeth Robins, who produced and acted in the
first English-speaking production of Hedda Gabler in 1891, thought
that the play reflects Ibsen’s genius and that the fault lay with the
critics. In response to their criticisms, Robins sardonically asked,
“How should men understand Hedda on the stage when they didn’t
understand her in the person of their wives, their daughters, their
women friends?” (Robins 1928, 18) Although this question seems to
suggest that women possess the knowledge that men lack and that
this self-knowledge renders them fit to answer the riddle, Robins did
not, at this point, offer an explanation for what critics perceived as
Hedda’s unintelligible monstrosity, her offence to human nature.
Instead, she quotes “one lady of our acquaintance, married and not
noticeably unhappy” who proclaimed “Hedda is all of us” (Robins
1928, 18). Hedda infected women with her enigma, making them
identify with something that in principle – as a riddle or an enigma –
escapes identification. For when the riddle proposes itself, it appears
as a question – “what is x?” – and, until an answer is found, the sub-
stance itself cannot be named.
In the years after the publication of the play, the “riddle of femi-
ninity” became a well-established trope. Three decades after Hedda
Gabler’s male critics expressed their inability to fathom Hedda and
Robins reaffirmed and reclaimed her enigma, Sigmund Freud made
the riddle the subject of his 1932 essay “Femininity.” In this essay,
published in New Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud addresses a fic-
titious audience (despite its title, the text was never delivered as a
lecture) to whom he promises a lecture on a subject “which has a
claim on your interest second almost to no other … the riddle of
the nature of femininity.” The riddle is central to human experience:
“Nor will you have escaped worrying over this problem – those of
you who are men; to those of you who are women, this will not
apply – you are yourselves the riddle” (Freud 1964, 112). For men,
the riddle poses an epistemic problem; their concern is finding an

[ 3 ]
 Lior Levy
answer to it, a solution to the conundrum. Women, on the other
hand, are free of such concerns, as this epistemic uneasiness “will
not apply” to them. Yet, their problem is even more profound, for it
becomes an existential issue. They are this riddle.5
Freud’s riddle is the starting point of Luce Irigaray’s Speculum
de l’autre femme (first published in 1974), which problematizes the
Freudian conception of women’s experience as determined by their
penis-envy, and thus, as founded on a fundamental lack. According
to Irigaray, the riddle of the “otherness” of women’s sexuality, “boils
down to being plus or minus one sex organ: the penis” (Irigaray 1985,
52).6 Furthermore, she argues, Freud understands female bodies and
desires as manifesting a lack because his cultural imaginary schemes
allow for only one form of body and way of being – that of the male.
The basic lack through which women are identified does not really
render them different from men; they are defined and understood
precisely in relation to the latter.
Because of this, she continues, ours is “a civilization without any
female philosophy or linguistics, any female religion or politics”
(Irigaray 1996, 44).7 Our notion of “the woman,” as well as our expe-
riences as women, is hollow and diminished. In a sense, Freud’s image
of women as enclosing an enigma or a lack accurately captures their
condition. Without a feminine culture, women are doomed to repli-
cate men’s values, knowledge, and experiences. They lack a culture
that could provide them with resources for constituting themselves
as women. Recalling – and subverting – Freud’s advice in the same
lecture to “turn to the poets” to understand women, Irigaray revisits
canonical literary texts that reinforce the patriarchal order and dis-
tribute the ideals that make up its imagery. Because she holds that
“[T]­he symbolic order is an imaginary order which becomes law,”
she insists on the importance of questioning “the foundations of our
symbolic order in mythology and in tragedy, because they deal with
a landscape which installs itself in the imagination and then, all of a
sudden, becomes law” (Baruch and Serrano 1988, 159).
In her readings of the Greek tragedies, Irigaray identifies the
source of the tragic fates of their heroines – think of Antigone,
Jocasta, Clytemnestra – in the fact that they both find themselves and
act in a masculine world, where the relationship between mothers
and daughters has already been severed, where they are commodi-
[ 4 ]
 Reading Ibsen with Irigaray
ties transferable between fathers and brothers in order to strengthen
the bonds between men. Her analyses of the ancient texts show that
the power relations between women and men permeate tragedy to
its core. In fact, it reveals that the source of the tragedy – Antigone’s
death is a clear example – lies in these systems of power that are
bound to eradicate the heroine. In her reading, tragedy represents
the fate of women, whose death and demise attest to the inability to
represent themselves as women in the phallocentric culture, which,
as Ibsen notes, does not allow women to be themselves.
In this respect, Irigaray inverts Freud’s reading of the Greeks. For
whereas he projected the Oedipal narrative onto the experiences
of both women and men, positing Oedipus’ tragedy as thoroughly
human, she shows the investment in Oedipus constitutes a very par-
ticular, sexed tragedy in the guise of a universal one.8 The erasure
of feminine culture, the loss of a sexual difference, “makes its mark
on ancient tragedy,” says Irigaray (1993, 134). To borrow the title of
one of Irigaray’s recent texts, the tragedy of the feminine is located
“Between Myth and History,” where the subjectivity of women,
their ability to assert themselves as women both vis-à-vis others and
in their own self-understanding, is effaced and denied.9 Ancient trag-
edy both circulates and reaffirms the stark fate of women, and turns
it into their story, into the history of femininity.
My reading of Hedda Gabler draws on Irigaray’s reading of the
Greek tragedies, such as Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Sophocles’ Antigone,
Oedipus the King, and Oedipus at Colonus, and Euripides’ Electra. These
provide a broad comparative framework for interpreting the play,
the only one of Ibsen’s works named, like the ancient tragedies,
after its female protagonist.10 Building on her work, I set out to show
how by probing the trope of the riddle and problematizing it, Hedda
Gabler also positions women’s destiny at the intersection of gen-
der and genre, engendering the tragedy of femininity. At the same
time, the play offers the possibility of envisioning what Irigaray’s
calls “… another dramatic play through which we can relate to each
other as different” (2010, 199). Thinking of the relationship between
tragedy and gender from an Irigaraian perspective, we can see how
Hedda Gabler, which genders tragedy through the story of a specific
woman, engenders in the spectators the realization for the need for
projecting new images and modes of feminine existence.
[ 5 ]
 Lior Levy
HEDDA AS A RIDDLE
Hedda’s puzzling figure is the starting point of many interpretations.
Stein Olsen (1985) focuses on her decision to marry Tesman, a decision
that seems “improbable and odd” (592) not only to critics of the play,
but also to other characters in it. Ellen Mortensen (2007) describes her
as a “paradoxical figure” who is “disturbingly enigmatic, even today”
(178) and whose “enigmatic and allegedly incomprehensible charac-
ter” is a “stumbling block” to our ability to understand her behavior,
which “does not make sense” (179). Toril Moi’s (2013) subtle reading
of Hedda’s silences aims at what is not articulated in language and so
admits that her speech does not, and perhaps cannot, explain what
she does and, ultimately, who she is. And finally, Elin Diamond calls
Hedda “an unreadable text” (2006, 26), which destabilizes the theatri-
cal promise of a realistic and truthful representation of life.
Riddles, however, presuppose answers and solicit solutions.
Responding to the urge to solve the enigma, Olsen, for example,
offers an explanation for Hedda’s seemingly inexplicable decisions.
According to him, Hedda constitutes herself as an aesthetic object
committed to aesthetic rather than moral values. Since the only one
who can preserve her existence as an aesthetic object is Tesman, she
marries him. Yet, although Olsen does not explicitly say so, his expla-
nation implies that she is also an aesthetic subject, whose actions –
from her decision to marry Tesman, to her staging Løvborg’s death,
and finally, her suicide – express the ideals to which she adheres.
Since she lives according to aesthetic rather than rational or moral
values (such as Tesman’s), her acts are paradoxical and contradictory.
Her desire to preserve her aesthetic existence leads to her self-anni-
hilation and ultimately even to the destruction of her existence as
such an object (by shooting herself in the temple, she mutilates her
face). In the binary opposition of values that Olsen sets up there
are clear winners and losers: “the characters representing positive
moral values have been brought together, and the characters repre-
senting a threat to the moral order are dead” (1985, 609). He argues
that spectators and readers who make sense of the plot share Tes-
man’s and Thea’s moral, conventional ethos and thus identify Hed-
da’s actions and ideals with “cowardice, insensibility, and contempt”
(1985, 610).11

[ 6 ]
 Reading Ibsen with Irigaray
What if, rather than searching the play for clues to Hedda’s enig-
matic figure, we come to see it as exposing the limits of the logic
under which such clues can be provided and understood? If we take
this route, then the key to making sense of Hedda Gabler lies, paradox-
ically, in Hedda Gabler’s senselessness. I develop this line of thinking
by reading the play in light of Irigaray’s feminist interpretations of
the Greek tragedies. According to Irigaray, discourse is marked by
gender, which expresses “the subjectivity and the ethical responsi-
bility of the speaker” (1993, 169). The symbolic world consecrated
by our languages structures our becoming and defines our possibili-
ties for being and acting as subjects. The myths that were handed to
us, she argues, prevented the creation of sexually differentiated sub-
jects – women and men – for “language is the tool of the universal”
(1993, 111). Building on Irigaray’s work – though never connecting it
directly to Hedda Gabler – Elin Diamond also constructs Hedda as an
enigma, arguing that she, like Freud’s hysterical patients, embodies
an undecidable state.12 Crucial to Diamond’s account is the claim
that Hedda’s referent is a kind of woman who exists only in feminist
theory, that she represents a woman who dissolves the binary oppo-
sitions between masculine and feminine (2006, 6). Thus, Diamond
leaves open the possibility that the play offers women spectators a
positive image of femininity in the figure of Hedda, whose hysteri-
cal symptoms enable spectators to enter “… pleasurably, knowingly,
into the hysteric’s undecidability …” (2006, 31). Unlike Diamond, I
understand the play as offering a pessimistic, even dystopian vision
of the fate of women under a patriarchal order that prevents them
from forming viable subject positions. The play itself, I argue, defers
our ability to pleasurably experience Hedda’s riddle, her unrepre-
sentability. Instead, it leaves us with the responsibility of constituting
a new feminine experience, one which the play itself cannot contain.

HEDDA’S ABSENCE
When the curtain opens and the attractive Tesman villa is revealed,
Hedda, who is soon to be identified as the mistress of the house,
does not appear. Moreover, she remains absent during a substantial
part of first scene and her absence is accentuated by the dialogue

[ 7 ]
 Lior Levy
between the characters onstage, which often refers to her and her
whereabouts, sleeping or resting in an interior room. Although
delayed entrance is often used as a dramaturgical device to incite
anticipation and curiosity, and although many other characters are
mentioned but not introduced in the first scene – Berte and Miss
Tesman refer to Aunt Rina and Tesman when they are convers-
ing alone; Tesman and his aunt mention Judge Brack and Eilert
Løvborg; Hedda and Tesman talk about Thea Elvsted; and finally,
when Thea arrives, she, Hedda and Tesman speak extensively again
about Løvborg – there is something particularly perplexing about
Hedda’s absence.13 It is puzzling first and foremost since the title
identifies her as the main protagonist in the play, suggesting that
she is essential to the plot that revolves around her. Indeed, Hedda
Gabler stands out among Ibsen’s plays, by bearing its heroine’s name
as a title.14 Furthermore, in the opening dialogue between Berte
and Miss Tesman, Hedda is described as an agent of change, whose
arrival on the scene (of Berte and Miss Tesman’s lives) marks great
transformation; as the new mistress, she imposed a painful separa-
tion upon the two. Hedda is active; she is the one who does all the
talking in her new household – telling Berte about Tesman’s doctor-
ate, informing her about changes in the arrangement of the villa.
Her portrayal as active and vocal stands in sharp contrast with the
two women’s reports on Tesman’s silence (on these two matters,
“The master – the doctor – he didn’t say anything,” says Berte; “For
han selv, – doktoren, – han sa ingenting” [1971, 266; 1914, 195]). By
placing Hedda in the paradoxical position of being at once central to
the action (hence the main topic of conversation) and absent from
the scene, Ibsen draws attention to the question of her appearance
and presence.
Hedda is first identified as the “young mistress” (1971, 264; 1914
193) of the house, the mistress of whom Berte the maid is speaking,
when Aunt Julle calls her “General Gabler’s daughter” (1971, 265;
1914, 194). Addressing Berte’s fear of not being able to accommo-
date the terribly fine ways of her new mistress, Aunt Julle replies:
“You can understand that, can’t you, with General Gabler’s daugh-
ter! Think of what she was accustomed to in the General’s day. Do
you remember her riding along the road with her father? In that long

[ 8 ]
 Reading Ibsen with Irigaray
black habit? And feathers in her hat?” (1971, 265) (“Det kan du vel
tænke. General Gablers datter. Slig, som hun var vant til at ha’ det,
mens generalen leved. Kan du mindes, når hun red med sin far ud
over vejen? I den lange sorte klædeskjolen? Og med fjær på hatten?”
[1914, 194]).
Aunt Julle explains to Berte that she cannot expect common
behavior from the general’s daughter, whose familial affiliation
entails that she belongs to a different social stratum. Hedda cannot
behave like ordinary people because she has lived most of her life
in the world of military elite, which is governed by different norms
and etiquettes. This world is represented to the audience by the por-
trait of her father the General, which, Ibsen specifies, is visible in the
inner room (“Over this sofa hangs a portrait of a handsome elderly
man in a general’s uniform”; “Over denne sofa hænger portrættet
af en smuk ældre mand i generalsuniform” [1971 263; 1914, 193]).
At this point the man in the portrait is identified as Hedda’s father.
Because Hedda herself is not yet seen, the image of her father
functions as a substitute for her.
The association between Hedda and her father, the fact that when
she is first “encountered” her presence is mediated by his image, led
many to see her as a masculine woman. Ibsen is known to have said
that the title of the play emphasizes that Hedda is first and foremost
her father’s daughter. Following these lines, interpreters assign the
general’s masculine traits to Hedda, speaking, for example, of her
“unusual independence and strength of will” (Finney 1989; 156) and
her refusal to “serve the patriarchy” as a subordinate wife (Norseng
1999, 12). Joan Templeton concludes that Hedda “does not want to
live for a man, but like one, i.e., for herself ” (1989, 230).
Some support for this reading is provided by the second image
through which Hedda’s character is conjured. This image is evoked
by Aunt Julle’s question to Berte, mentioned above. In the image
evoked by the aunt’s question, Hedda is remembered as equal to
her father, as an amazon warrior riding her horse alongside the
general.15 But the representation of Hedda as an amazon does not
fully exhaust the image that the description evokes. Imagining
her silhouette – for the audience has seen nothing more of her to
guide their imagination – the feathered, cloaked Hedda appears as

[ 9 ]
 Lior Levy
a hybrid creature, part equine, part human, part bird. If we let this
image ­linger, we see that Hedda appears in it, however briefly, as
neither ­masculine nor feminine; in fact, her silhouette does not fit
any human figure. Between the horse, the long black habit, and the
feathers she is a hybrid creature of sorts. Berte’s emphatic response,
“Jo-jo, – det skulde jeg mene!” “My, yes! I should think so!” (1914,
194; 1971, 265), reinforces the sense of amazement that this strange
image evokes.
The image of Hedda’s father, which is mentioned first in the
exchange between Berte and Aunt Julle and which is physically pres-
ent onstage, looms over the second image. Hedda is remembered
through and in relation to her father – both in the past, when the
two were riding in public together and now, when she is discussed
but her father is the one that is made visible. I think, therefore, that
we need to understand the second image in light of the first. We
need to approach Hedda’s appearance both as a masculine woman
and as the unidentifiable creature through the association that Ibsen
creates between Hedda and her father’s portrait.
At this point, I find Irigaray’s analysis of another literary figure
whose only familial relationship is to her father particularly illumi-
nating. In her study of Nietzsche, Irigaray discusses the figure of
Athena, who is “Well born – without a mother” (1991, 94). Athena,
like Hedda, lacks a feminine genealogy; she does not have a mother,
as she was “engendered by the father alone” (94). Irigaray under-
stands Athena’s divinity as setting a “female ideal.” Yet, this ideal
itself is the product of male fantasy; Athena is “conceived in the
head of the God of gods” (94). However, both the female ideal and
its reversal, the masculine woman, are products of masculine law. In
other words, both the reassuring dream of the chaste, just, loving,
and maternal woman and the nightmare of the masculine, cold, and
rebellious woman are part of the same economy. Thus, according to
Irigaray, the various faces that women wear are “part and parcel of
the patriarchal order. Woman is hidden in the thought of the father.
When she gives birth to herself fully equipped – even with weapons
… Only the shape appears anymore. Therefore, not the woman”
(96). Irigaray argues that women cannot appear and be present as
such because the logic and the laws that govern ­appearances are

[ 10 ]
 Reading Ibsen with Irigaray
­ asculine. Instead of a woman, an appearance appears, an image
m
onto which different contents could be projected. Hence, this
appearance stands for “… every woman, all together, the female one
and the other with no differentiation or distinction” (96).
Returning to Hedda Gabler – and to Hedda herself, who – at this
point in act one – is still absent and vacillating between the two
images of the masculine woman and the unidentifiable creature –
Irigaray’s reading of the Greek myths suggests that the image of
the father determines the sense and the form under which she can
appear. Indeed, Hedda appears (or disappears) in a world where
bonds between mothers and daughters have been disrupted. Schol-
ars have pointed out that mothers are absent from the play alto-
gether: neither Hedda nor Tesman have mothers. She is her father’s
daughter; he “had neither father nor mother,” (1971, 271) (“Du, som
hverken har havt far eller mor at holde dig til” [1914, 200]) and has
been raised by an aunt who has been both a father and a mother
(“Du, som har vaeret mig bade I fars og I mors sted.” “You who’ve
been my father and my mother” [1914, 197; 1971, 267]). Hedda bla-
tantly denies that she might be pregnant. But even if she were to
embrace that pregnancy, she would be doomed to being treated as
a container for Tesman’s child; suspecting that Hedda is pregnant,
or wishing she would be, Ms. Tesman wishes her well “for Jorgen’s
sake” (1971, 275) (“gud velsingne og bevare Hedda Tesman. For
Jorgens skyld” [1914, 204]). The list of broken, disrupted, or nonex-
istent maternal lineages in the play is long: Thea Elvsted mentions
children, but then quickly notes that they are her husband’s, not hers.
When she later reclaims motherhood, her child is a spiritual object,
a manuscript composed (begotten) by Løvborg, a man. Finally, this
child is “murdered” by Hedda, in whose murderous action Medea’s
vengeful acts are combined, as she sets fire to someone else’s chil-
dren and object of love.

IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER

By associating Hedda with the image of General Gabler, the play
represents the law of the father as conditioning her appearance.
She first appears as her father’s daughter, in her father’s image.

[ 11 ]
 Lior Levy
­ hroughout the play, Hedda’s only resort in moments of boredom
T
and annoyance are her family heirlooms, passed down from her
father: his guns, the piano. Her father pervades even her most inti-
mate encounters with Løvborg, who describes the general’s loom-
ing presence: “When I came up to see your father in the afternoons
… and the General used to sit right over by the window reading the
papers, with his back to us” (1971, 316) (“Når jeg kom op til Deres
far sådan om eftermiddagen –. Og generalen sad borte ved vinduet
og læste aviserne – med ryggen imod” [1914, 239]).
Yet, though the image of Hedda the amazonian or unwomanly
woman permeates the audience’s imagination in the first scene
and is reinforced by much that follows, the fact that Hedda does
not appear in person in the first scene of the play is suggestive. The
absence of the actual woman subverts the presence of the image of
the masculine woman. This, together with the reference to Hedda
on horseback, which engenders the flickering image of her hybrid-
ity – that is, her transgression of shapes – indicates that under the
law of the father, the rules of patriarchy, it is precisely Hedda herself
who cannot appear in person. She does not appear because she can-
not be represented as a woman within the existing conceptual and
imagistic economy. Or, to put it in Irigaray’s terms, she can appear
only as appearance – in the shape of the masculine woman – a shape
given to her by others. Existing only in the shadow of the father,
lacking a mother, that is to say, lacking images and vocabulary that
are truly her own, Hedda is first encountered as unrepresentable.
When Hedda eventually emerges on stage, her speech, behavior,
and interaction with others determine who she is. Even then, how-
ever, her appearance as an individual is not cohesive; it seems to con-
sist of various paradoxes and contradictions. She expresses disdain
for the mundane and despises daily routines and repetitious, monog-
amous life. To Judge Brack, for example, she says: “what’s the most
intolerable thing of all […] Everlastingly having to be […] with one
and the same person” (1971, 198–199) (“som er det aller u-udholde-
ligste … – evig og altid at skulle være sammen med – med én og den
samme” [1914, 224]). Yet, despite her disdain she remains committed
to the social order and affirms this order through her actions. She
tells Brack that she will not cheat on her husband – “I never jump

[ 12 ]
 Reading Ibsen with Irigaray
out” (1971, 301) (“Jeg hopper aldrig ud” [1914, 226]); “I prefer remain
sitting where I am, alone with the other person” (1971, 301) (“Da blir
jeg heller siddende, – hvor jeg nu engang er. På tomandshånd” [1971,
301]). Her aversion to the scandalous leads her to obey the values
that are laid out for woman – order, fidelity, and chastity. At the same
time, she describes her attraction to the world of men of which she
“isn’t allowed to know about” (1971, 317) (“som en ikke har lov til
at vide besked om” [1914, 240]). Her interest in public life manifests
itself both in her curiosity and in her wish to get Tesman to go into
politics. Nonetheless, she does not show any particular interest in
Tesman’s or Løvborg’s scholarship, and unlike Thea she does not
wish to share in their work and thus participate in intellectual life.
She admires beauty, but abhors the erotic (Moi 2013, 447; Mortensen
2007, 179). Her rejection of sexuality and motherhood reinforces her
position as her father’s daughter, an asexual virgin. She is virile and
strong and consequently threatening, castrating, and even murder-
ous – she brings about Løvborg’s death from a self-inflicted wound
to his genitals and she kills both metaphorical and actual children.
She is conceived as intimidating – Berte the maid dreads her, as does
Thea, whose hair she threatens to burn. Yet, at the same time she is
also childish, overwhelmed by impulses that she cannot resist (as she
tells Brack when describing the incident of Aunt Julle’s hat).
Hedda embraces the contradiction at the heart of her life, rather
than solving the riddle or settling the paradox inherent in her per-
sonality. When she describes her life as unlivable, it is not because
she is miserable – though her expressions of boredom and ennui cer-
tainly reveal her misery – but, as she confesses to Thea and Løvborg,
because she lacks courage (“Ah, courage. Yes. If one only had that
… Then perhaps one could live at last.” “Ja, mod – ja! Den, som bare
havde det … Da kunde en kanske endda leve livet” [1971, 319; 1914,
242]).
Hedda, Løvborg says, and she is quick to agree, is a coward at
heart (“De er fejg i grunden” says Løvborg, and Hedda responds
“Forfærdelig fejg” [1914, 240]). It is difficult to determine the mean-
ing of this cowardice or lack of courage (is it simply fear of scandal?
Her provocative hat exchange with Aunt Julle and her description of
her pre-marital life suggest that she perhaps does not always shun the

[ 13 ]
 Lior Levy
scandalous), but she seems to detest it because it prevents her from
acting. It stopped her, for instance, from both shooting Løvborg and
responding to his advances. Something in her – she and Løvborg call
it cowardice – diminishes her agency. And yet, no one would call
Hedda passive; she attracts and manipulates everyone in the play (as
the eponymous protagonist, it is precisely she who joins the story
together). Løvborg, for example, directly describes the power she
possesses over him (“Å, Hedda, – hvad var det dog for en magt i
Dem, som tvang mig til at bekende sligt noget?” [1914, 239]). She
has the power to make him confess not through imperatives, but by
questions asked in roundabout ways. These oblique questions them-
selves indicate cowardice, thus defining Hedda – even at her most
active – through her relation to some fundamental lack (of knowl-
edge, of courage) and it is through this relation to lack that she also
understands herself.
Shortly after the exchange with Løvborg takes place, Hedda
accepts Thea’s observation that her insistence that Løvborg attend
Brack’s party is grounded in ulterior motives. Ultimately, she desires
to shape human life: “I want, for once in my life, to have power over
a human being’s fate” (1971, 324) (“Jeg vil for en eneste gang i mit liv
ha’ magt over en menneskeskæbne” [1914, 246]). The desire to mold
human destiny is the desire to have control over life, to endow it
with meaning and sense. Throughout the play, Hedda expresses her
interest in molding people’s lives – from her idea of assigning Tes-
man a career in politics, to her experiments with staging Løvborg’s
death. Yet, she lacks such power first and foremost with regard to
her own life. With respect to that she is very “poor” (fattig [1914,
246]), as she complains to Thea.
Hedda desires to mold her life in a process that is truly creative.
Just before she kills herself, Hedda plays music on her piano, thus
trying to express herself through art. Her obsession with beauty
(Løvborg’s beautiful death; the Dionysian vine leaves she imagines in
his hair) reveals her fascination with captivating and alluring appear-
ances, whose appeal cannot be explained by reason alone. Further-
more, her contempt toward traditional bourgeois life demonstrates
that she is not content with replicating or mimicking the roles that
masculine culture has assigned her. Her contempt stems from her

[ 14 ]
 Reading Ibsen with Irigaray
desire to bring something new into being. But Hedda cannot see
herself as the creator of her own life first and foremost because she
lacks the power to mold it, both socially and more crucially, psychi-
cally.
Think, for example, of how she explains her marriage to Tesman.
She seems to have had no choice; having exhausted her financial
options, she had to marry someone and Tesman offered more by
way of financial security than other suitors. Hedda says that there
was nothing strange (“underligt” [1914, 225]) or out of the ordinary
about her decision. Yet, in being pushed by existing social dynamics
into marriage, by complying with the existing order, Hedda reveals
her decision as completely random, and so neither truly a decision,
nor truly her own. Setting out the premises in her syllogism – her
time was up (“Min tid var omme” [1914, 225]), she was too old to con-
tinue living on her own, too poor as well, Tesman promised to pro-
vide her needs (“he insisted with might and main on being allowed
to support me”; “Og da han så gik der og endelig med vold og magt
vilde få lov til at forsørge mig” [1971, 309; 1914, 225]) – Hedda avoids
drawing the conclusion. Instead, she ends with a question: “I don’t
know why I shouldn’t have accepted the offer?” (1971, 309) (“Jeg véd
ikke, hvorfor jeg ikke skulde ta’ imod det?” [1914, 225]). The ques-
tion is normative – was my decision not grounded in reasons? Yet,
just a few seconds beforehand, she has flippantly dismissed reason,
from which all reasons emanate, saying “oh, reason” to Brack (1971,
309) (“Ah, - grund -.” [1914, 225]).16
Reasons fail Hedda. They fail those who try to make sense of her
too. She is alienated from her decisions, actions, speech, and behav-
ior. Her existence is determined by values, meaning, and norms
that are not hers to begin with. Within the existing framework,
she can be feminine or virile, docile or rebellious; switching from
one position to another, she only obeys the masculine structures of
sense. Indeed, throughout the play she experiments with an array
of behaviors – seductive, aggressive, childish, reasonable – though
remaining aware, on some level, that none of the roles that she plays
out are really hers.
Perhaps, however, Hedda’s position is not unique after all. If
the reach of the masculine signifying order is all encompassing, it

[ 15 ]
 Lior Levy
prevents every woman from being herself. Indeed, the other women
in the play are also confined to a limited repertoire of roles. Hedda
does not differ from them in this respect, but rather in being the only
one who is aware of the fact that no role is truly hers. Berte, Thea,
and the aunts diligently perform their roles, utterly identifying with
them, becoming them in the sense that they constitute their identi-
ties. The aunts are self-sacrificing; Thea is motherly, first toward her
stepchildren, then Løvborg, and finally his manuscript.17 Ibsen deals
with Hedda’s tragic fate rather than Thea’s or Aunt Julle’s because
she is the only one cognizant of the fact that the existing cultural,
social, and political frameworks prevent each of these roles from
being her own. In other words, Hedda’s tragedy is rooted in her
awareness of her impossible position, and later, in her impossible
desire to carve a place for herself in a world that prevents her from
doing so.
Hedda’s unique position with regard to the other women in the
play is highlighted by the analogy that Ibsen creates between her
and Thea. The two are first defined as complete opposites: Thea,
with her abundant hair, typifies the ideal of “palpitating femininity,”
whose “fecundity is indefatigable” (Mayerson 1965, 133); Hedda’s
hair is “not noticeably abundant” (1971, 272) (“ikke synderlig fyldigt”
[1914, 201]); her “steel-grey; cold, clear and calm” eyes are not par-
ticularly feminine (“Øjnene er stålgrå og udtrykker en kold, klar
ro” [ibid.]). Thea assists men in procreating, in keeping the human
race alive, whereas Hedda refuses her role as a mother; she burns
the manuscript, resisting her own prospective motherhood. Thea’s
value and worth is measured by and in relation to men – Sheriff
Elvstad, Løvborg, and finally Tesman; Hedda refuses love, calling it
a “sentimental word” (1971, 299) (“klissede ord” [1914, 225]).
Yet, despite their radical differences, Hedda and Thea are also por-
trayed as analogous, similar in some crucial respect. Løvborg, with
whom both have their most intimate relationship, addresses them
both by the same term – “comrade” (1971, 315, 317) (“kammerat”
[1914, 239, 240]). He first uses this term to indicate his unique and
intimate relationship with Hedda, but then replicates this unique
relationship with Thea, referring to her by the same designation.
Though Hedda and Thea are seemingly utterly different – the one

[ 16 ]
 Reading Ibsen with Irigaray
masculine, the other feminine, etc. – they occupy the same role
in Løvborg’s life. For their male interlocutor, Hedda and Thea are
utterly interchangeable, replaceable, and in this sense, identical. As
Løvborg’s good comrade, both Hedda and Thea occupy the same
position or function (Hedda suggests to Thea that the term to think
of her relationship with Løvborg is “Like two good comrades,” to
which Thea replies “eagerly”: “Comrades! Why, Hedda, that just
what he called it!”; “Hedda: Som to gode kammerater altså. Fru
Elvsted (livfuldt): Kammerater! Ja tænk, Hedda, – så kaldte han det
også!” [1971, 288; 1914, 214]). Nothing in their comradery, in the
position that they assume vis-à-vis the other, marks it as truly their
own.
Only Hedda is aware of this fact; Thea thinks that the term com-
rade describes her unique position in Løvborg’s life, while Hedda
realizes that the “comradeship” that she thought was singular and
intimate has been easily applied to another. This makes her painfully
aware that her role as Løvborg’s comrade is hollow and meaning-
less. Consequently, whereas Thea gives herself to the male other
and adapts to the male perspective,18 Hedda persistently resists the
phallocentric order and expresses her disdain for the norms and val-
ues that govern it.
However, Hedda cannot resist this order in the language available
to her.19 Consider, for example, her exchange with Tesman, when
she tries to explain to him her defiant act of burning the manuscript.
She is unable to articulate what she wants to say and speaks in cryp-
tic remarks: “Oh well, you’d better know, then that – just at present –
[breaking off, violently.] No, you can go and ask Aunt Julle. She’ll tell
you all about it” (1971, 350) (“Nå, så er det bedst du får vide da – at
just i denne tid – (heftigt, af brydende.) Nej, nej, – du kan spørge dig
for hos tante Julle. Så gir hun dig nok besked” [1914, 268]). Hedda
seems to be talking about her pregnancy, though she never confirms
that she is indeed pregnant.20 Because of this, Tesman, and the audi-
ence as well, can only “nearly” understand her (“Å, jeg tror næsten
jeg forstår dig, Hedda!” [1914, 268]). When Hedda continues to say,
clenching her hands in desperation, “Oh, it’ll be the death of me.
It’ll be the death of me, all this!” (1971, 351) (“[knuger hænderne
som fortvilet]. Å, jeg forgår, – jeg forgår i alt dette her!” (1914, 268)],

[ 17 ]
 Lior Levy
it is not at all clear that the pregnancy is the thing that is killing her. It
is unclear because Tesman himself neither mentions the pregnancy
at this point nor later in the conversation, and further because, when
pressed to tell just what is killing her, she points to “the absurdity”
(“I alt dette – løjerlige, – Jørgen” [1914, 268]). The ellipses in Hed-
da’s speech and her reference to the absurd are crucial. Something
is killing Hedda quite literally; she is about to take her own life. Yet,
at the heart of this act are not reasons or choices, but an absurdity,
something that defies reason altogether.
Hedda cannot express her awareness of the lack of a feminine self
in the language that is available to her. Indeed, the difficulty of locat-
ing a position from which the masculine order could be criticized is
central in critiques of Irigaray’s feminist position. As Shoshana Fel-
man points out, if language always excludes women, then it cannot
be used to articulate and criticize this exclusion.21 Irigaray herself is
aware of this problem, when she says, for example, that “women
exchange bits and pieces of games that have already been played.
They rarely invent new games, games of their own” (1993, 181). At
times, she explicitly says that propositional language cannot articu-
late sexual difference and express the feminine. She then calls for the
invention of “another dramatic play through which we can relate
to each other as different” (2010, 199). Hedda Gabler offers, I think, a
glimpse of such a different dramatic play. Instead of speaking of the
impossible position that she occupies as a woman, Hedda performs
it. Her suicide, and the actions that precede and succeed it, enact this
contradiction and offer an ingenious process in which to explore the
problem of the articulation of feminine subjectivity.

HEDDA’S DEATH
Taking place behind closed curtains in the inner room, Hedda’s
suicide marks a change in Ibsen’s depiction of death. Both before
Hedda Gabler, in Brand (1866) and after, in The Master Builder (1892)
and When We Dead Awaken (1899), he represents death on stage.22
His decision to place Hedda’s suicide behind the scenes recalls the
tradition of the Greek tragedies, where female heroines – Jocasta,
Phaedra, Antigone, to name but a few – took their lives offstage,

[ 18 ]
 Reading Ibsen with Irigaray
hidden in inner rooms or caves.23 As Nicole Loraux demonstrates,
in Greek tragedies the violence that characterizes women’s death
is also what allows them to master their death and make it truly
their own. Furthermore, the fact that in tragedy women can choose
between feminine and masculine deaths, a choice that is not open to
men, provides them with freedom, so much so that “[F]­or woman
there is liberty in tragedy – liberty in death” (Loraux 1987, 17). But
then again, they can exercise their freedom only in the narrow space
of the home, unfree to escape the place to which their lives, as wives,
daughters, and mothers, have been confined. Accordingly, “the death
of women confirms or reestablishes their connection with marriage
and maternity” (23), two institutions that define women’s identities
from the outside, through their relations to men. Placed in this tradi-
tion, we can see that the meaning of Hedda’s suicide is ambiguous;
it fluctuates between a victorious bid for freedom and an externally
defined defeat.
Unlike the other characters who enter and leave the Tesman villa,
Hedda stays in the house for the entire duration of the play. Yet,
although she is visible and vocal, and thus could not be called pas-
sive in the full sense of the word, she is hardly agential, performing
very few actions throughout the play. She might manipulate others
to take action, but her own actions are so limited that they can be
enumerated: she shoots at Judge Brack, burns the manuscript, gives
Løvborg a gun, opens and closes the curtains to the inner room,
plays the piano, and finally kills herself. The first four actions on this
list are directed toward others, either in being performed for and
before them, or in being meant to directly affect them. Paradoxically,
her suicide (and to some degree the two actions that precede it), the
act by which she cancels her agency, is the only act by which she
tries to determine herself, to express that which constitutes her as an
agent, her freedom.
Hedda explicitly refers to death by a gun as an ultimate expression
of self-determination. While still thinking that Løvborg died from
a gunshot to the head, she tells Brack that it gives her “a feeling of
release, in knowing that there really can be such a thing in the world
as free and fearless action. Something irradiated with spontaneous
beauty” (1971, 357) (“En befrielse at vide, at der dog virkelig kan

[ 19 ]
 Lior Levy
ske noget frivilligt modigt i verden. Noget, som der falder et skær
af uvilkårlig skønhed over” [1914, 274]). Such an act provides a feel-
ing of release or deliverance from the daily grind of bondage and
constraint because it brings together spontaneity and beauty. In fact,
one could say that the beauty of the deed stems from its spontaneity,
from being freely chosen, undetermined by external circumstances
or other people.
Yet, Hedda does not think of herself as free or courageous; she
explicitly denies that she has courage in conversations with Løvborg,
Brack, and Thea. Nonetheless, she reacts with dread to Brack’s
attempts to blackmail her precisely because she understands them
as impinging on her freedom: “I am in your power, all the same. At
the mercy of your will and your demands. And so a slave! A slave!
[Getting up impatiently.] No! That thought I cannot tolerate! Never!”
(362) (“I Deres magt lige fuldt. Af hængig af Deres krav og vilje. Ufri.
Ufri altså! [rejser sig heftigt] Nej, – den tanke holder jeg ikke ud! Ald-
rig” [278]). Her suicide is at least in part a reaction to Brack’s attempt
to blackmail her. Temporally, it succeeds Brack’s re-invocation of his
earlier threat, now veiled under a cheerful promise to keep her com-
pany while Tesman is working with Thea on Løvborg’s manuscript.
Hedda first answers his threat “clearly and distinctly” (“klart og lyd-
eligt” [1971, 363; 1914, 279]) with her own mocking words: “Yes,
that is what you are looking forward to, isn’t it, Mr. Brack? You, as
the only cock in the yard” (1971, 363) (“Ja, nærer De ikke det håb,
assessor? De, som eneste hane i kurven” [1914, 279]). The sound of
the gunshot that follows is a direct continuation of the verbal refusal
to become enslaved. Escaping enslavement through death, the goal
of her act is freedom. Thus, her suicide becomes an act of self-de-
termination, an act by which she defines herself and does so outside
the reach of others.24 She has been excluded from the public, visible
space by Tesman and Thea, who in their devotion to knowledge have
no need for her riddles, for her absurd and senseless kind of being.
She has been further driven out by Brack’s threats, and her retreat
to the back room positions her as a marginalized or defeated char-
acter. But killing herself is her act, an act by which she declares that
she will determine her own exclusion. At this point, Hedda reminds
us of that ancient Greek heroine who, imprisoned in a dark tomb,
decides to die by her own hand rather by the king’s decree and force.
[ 20 ]
 Reading Ibsen with Irigaray
Yet, by shooting herself with her father’s gun, Hedda fails to trans-
gress the masculine order that dominated her appearance, the order
that determines who she is. In fact, using the gun as a weapon, she
utilizes what has until then been only a symbol of masculine power
as a concrete tool to demolish her own agency. Even her yearning
for freedom takes the form of a desire to be self-governing, and in
this sense the attempt to escape the masculine law is nevertheless
molded and shaped by its form. Hence, Hedda’s death, like her first
appearance onstage, is dominated by the rule of the father. Both in
the first and last scenes, she is hidden from sight and the question
of her presence, or indeed the possibility of her own existence, is
mediated by the father – his portrait, his guns. And once dead, she
is again in the grasp of the father, lying inert and passive on the sofa
below “the portrait of a handsome, elderly man in a general’s uni-
form” (1971, 264). The same ancient heroine comes to mind again.
For does not Hedda, like Antigone, die because she was constantly
deprived “of the surroundings that permit her to live”? (Irigaray
2010, 204).25 In other words, does her death truly belong to her, or
does the act merely duplicate and magnify the position in which she
was put by others?
Hedda’s suicide is volatile; its meaning is unstable. Crucial to the
deed are also its location and the actions that frame it: she takes her
life in a dark, small inner room, out of the sight of other characters
and spectators alike. In the opening stage directions, the room is
described thus: “På bagvæggen er en bred døråbning med tilbag-
eslåede portièrer. Denne åbning fører ind i et mindre værelse, der er
holdt i samme stil som selskabsværelset” (1914, 194) (“In the back
wall there is a wide doorway with its curtains pulled back. This
opening leads into a smaller room decorated in the same style as the
drawing-room” [1971, 263]). But her withdrawal to the room, and
thus the act that takes place in it, is framed by repeated acts of open-
ing and closing its curtains, through which she peeps her head at
one point. The drawing of the curtains functions meta-theatrically,
drawing attention to the “show” that is about to appear. Yet, nothing
appears. Thus, we confront the conditions of appearance itself, the
questions of what we can make sense of, and why.

[ 21 ]
 Lior Levy
Both Moi and Diamond comment on the meta-theatricality of
this scene, but understand it in different terms. According to Moi,
by having Hedda draw “the (theatre) curtains,” Ibsen places the act
“offstage, away from theatricality” (2013, 448). Contrary to that,
Diamond interprets this moment as drawing attention to theatri-
cality itself. In evoking “the stage within a stage” and letting Hedda
use the curtain as a prop, through which she “pops her head out
[…] Ibsen comes close to translating the ‘impossible’” (2006, 28). In
other words, Ibsen closely represents the conditions for representa-
tion itself, the conditions that ground realism’s promise of truth. My
own interpretation is somewhat of a synthesis of Diamond’s and
Moi’s. While I agree with Diamond that this scene is meta-theatrical
in nature, like Moi I see it as attesting to the conditions of meaning
production offstage.
Hedda’s suicide, by which she attempts to escape her oppres-
sion and achieve freedom, is also the act by which she eradicates
her agency. This paradox develops and magnifies the riddle that she
embodies. Nevertheless, the contradictory nature of the act cannot
be the reason for its concealment, for none of her other absurd,
capricious, or senseless behaviors were hidden away in the back
room. This act differs, in that with it Hedda tries to assume the
position of an agent tries to be self-determining. No one is there to
act, however, for she has no genuine feminine sense of self that can
stand in the subject position. Her suicide is therefore not merely a
heroic act, as some have suggested, because this act is both the cause
and the outcome of her utter inability to live as woman.26 This act,
therefore, must remain unrepresentable.
In her study of Nietzsche, where tragedy is an explicit theme,
Irigaray notes:

The/a woman never signs up for the game without losing herself.
And as she does not know how to play: losing radically. She must give
up her gender, or die “in actual fact.” Which can happen to her. One
might write: it is “her” happening. (Irigaray 1991, 84)

By entering into culture, acquiring an appearance and meaning, that

is, acquiring a position in the symbolic order, women must give up
their personhood. When they do that – and they must do that to
[ 22 ]
 Reading Ibsen with Irigaray
exist at all – they die as women and emerge as men’s other. Hed-
da’s symbolic death becomes concrete at the exact moment that she
chooses not to participate in the game. But since no other game
exists, since she cannot appear except through the mediation of
existing structures of sense, she must die. Her death marks the fail-
ure of her attempt to emerge as a woman.
The play does not end with Hedda’s unrepresentable act. Her sui-
cide is followed by the exposure of her body and by Brack’s excla-
mation at the sight of her dead body – “one doesn’t do that kind of
thing!” (1971, 364) (“sligt noget gør man da ikke!” [1914, 279]). The
ending revisits the conditions that determine Hedda’s appearance
and confer meaning on her being, eventually leading to her death. It
revisits, in other words, the opening scene, where Hedda’s absence
was governed by her father’s portrait. When Hedda’s dead body is
revealed, it is stretched on a sofa in the interior room, right below
the portrait of General Gabler. Her body is displayed to the specta-
tors once the curtains that separate the inner and outer rooms are
opened. The exposure of her dead body is a commentary on the con-
ditions that govern appearances, which make what is seen onstage
visible and intelligible. In contrast to the acting Hedda, who tries to
determine her being and cannot be represented as such, her inert
and lifeless body is represented; it becomes fully visible. In other
words, by opening the curtains on dead Hedda, Ibsen lets us see
what we are ready to see – in the theater and in the world – women
who can no longer resist, who are static and self-identical. In other
words, we see the sheer opposite of active and self-making men. The
Hedda who desired to create herself is bound to die behind closed
doors; she can be seen, represented, and also evaluated only after
her death. Indeed, the sight of her body triggers the voice of the
law: Brack’s exclamation that “one” doesn’t do such things. In Nor-
wegian, as in other languages, the anonymous subject, the neutral
“one” (man) is connected to the gendered noun “man” (mann).27
Indeed, it is assumed men do not do such things, but women do – for
they are presumed to be irrational, passive, and identical to nature
and death. With this, nature’s equilibrium is restored, and women
are once again the visible opposite of men. Under the grasp of the
masculine order, Hedda can appear and be made sense of again.

[ 23 ]
 Lior Levy
A DIFFERENT FUTURE – A FUTURE OF DIFFERENCE
In Irigaray’s reading of the Greek tragedies, the disappearance of
matriarchal culture brings about both the symbolic and the literal
death and demise of the female heroines. Antigone, Iphigenia,
Clytemnestra, and Electra operate in social and cultural worlds that
manifest and obey patriarchal meaning and values. Because of this,
they lack access to their pre-patriarchal maternal lineages, to a past
when women had languages and imageries of their own. In this
pre-patriarchal world, women were part of their own genealogies,
had a relationship to their mothers, and were not merely seen – like
Hedda Gabler – as daughters carrying their fathers’ and then their
husbands’ names. There is little trace of these maternal genealogies
left in our cultural images. Even a myth like Demeter and Perse-
phone, in which mother and daughter have a strong relation to each
other, already bears the mark of the masculine order – Persephone is
abducted as a result of a transaction between the male gods (among
them Zeus, her father) and this transaction “takes place without the
consent of either his daughter or her mother” (Irigaray 1994; 103).
When Persephone returns from the Underworld and reunites with
Demeter, her mourning mother, she tells her mother what hap-
pened to her in the Underworld. She does so, says Irigaray, “begin-
ning at the end. In a way, she goes back in time, as must any woman
today who is trying to find the traces of her estrangement from her
mother” (1994, 107).
The task that women face in establishing identities of their own
is akin to remembering; retrieving a lost past. But this past cannot
be accessed with the aid of existing language and images, in which
women as such cannot appear. Since this past is inaccessible, women
must recreate it, and they can do so by envisioning a different future
for themselves. As Gail Schawb says, women must “project the lost
utopia of relations between and among women into the future, and
[…] (re)create it themselves” (2010, 91). Irigaray suggests that we
perform creative acts that, existing outside the frameworks of iden-
tity, truth, and stability, cannot be defined in advance and cannot
be said to be universal and self-identical. Rather than retrieving a
pre-existing and fixed notion of female identity, we must create a
dynamic and living ideal through our lives.

[ 24 ]
 Reading Ibsen with Irigaray
Hedda Gabler genders tragedy, presenting a bleak image of the
fate of women in the modern world. Yet, this tragedy also engen-
ders a different horizon, offering a mode of resistance to univer-
salizing, gender-indifferent existence. Just before she dies, Hedda
herself attempts to create something. Unable throughout the play
to express herself in a language that constrains her, in which she
can only reiterate a meaning that is not her own, Hedda resorts to
music; she plays a wild dance on the piano.28 Her music – emanat-
ing from the inner room, a space that is now invisible and can only
be envisioned – is a new, and different from of expression. None-
theless, Hedda’s attempt fails; Tesman soon silences her, asking her
to respect the memory of his dead aunt and Løvborg. This act of
silencing and others that preceded it is not gender neutral; they are
part of broader cultural and social orders in which women are made
devoid of a voice through which they can articulate themselves. She
is silenced by her husband, in the name of the “dead” – the past
and tradition. Unable to create a new future for herself, Hedda’s fate
is death. Irigaray’s invitation to establish new feminine existence
encourages us to hear the promise in Hedda’s music. It bids us to
see, to imagine really, how from the tragedy of the feminine new
women will be born.

NOTES
  1. I presented a draft of this paper at the “Ibsen and Genre” conference at the Uni-
versity of Zurich in 2016. I would like to thank Klaus Müller-Wille and the partic-
ipants of conference for their useful questions and suggestions. I am also grateful
to Vered Lev-Kenaan for her fascinating readings of Greek myths as well as her
illuminating comments on the relationship between Ibsen and tragedy.
 2. “Gender, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2016. Web. 27 May 2016.
  3. Ibsen said that “the whole play was written just for the sake of that final scene”
(quoted in Meyer 1971, 653).
  4. A riddle is a question that draws on familiar, given frameworks of sense, but reveals
their insufficiency, their inability to express or convey the meaning that they are
meant to convey. It functions differently than a mere question. Whereas questions
might require gathering more information than what is supplied in them in order
to arrive at the answer, riddles imply that the questions themselves provide the
basis for their resolution, yet they hide or mask the needed information.
  5. Freud finds the answer to the riddle in women’s development. Sharing the early
phases of libidinal development with boys – clitorises are “small penises,” grant-

[ 25 ]
 Lior Levy
ing young girls the same pleasures as boys; like boys, their first object of love is
the mother – a girl must when growing up “pass from her masculine phase to the
feminine one to which she is biologically destined” (Freud 1964, 118). In other
words, in order to develop into healthy young women, girls must change their
erotogenic pleasures and the object of their love. The essay ends with an apology
for its incompleteness and an invitation to those who want to know more about
femininity to “turn to the poets, or wait until science can give you deeper and
more coherent information” (Freud 1964, 134).
  6. Analyzing the psychoanalytic notion of feminine penis-envy, Irigaray notes that
the term envy itself enabled Freud to construct women as lacking and to describe
female sexuality as “merely the other side or even the wrong side of male sexualism”
(Irigaray 1985, 51).
  7. Irigaray uses “female” and “male” as fundamental categories. She insists, however,
that these categories are irreducible to biological distinctions: “the word sex is
used in regard to male and female persons and not just male and female genital
organs” (Irigaray 1993, 128, f.2). I used the notion of “gender” rather than “sex”
and with it “feminine” and “masculine” rather than “female” and “male” through-
out this paper for two main reasons. First, I was following Irigaray’s own usage
of the term, mainly in Sexes and Genealogies, where the “female gender” desig-
nates the cultural, social, and psychical realities of women. Second, in using gen-
der, I was trying to avoid the connotation between Irigaray’s vision for feminism
and essentialism. Building on Naomi Schor’s analysis of Irigaray’s work (1994), I
understand it as plural articulations of difference, rather than an attempt to turn
the different into the same. In other words, “woman” is an empty category, des-
ignating something that does not yet exist, and cannot be defined with existing
conceptual and cultural schemes. Its meaning will have to be invented or created
by women. Also useful is Joyce Davidson and Mick Smith’s use of Wittgenstein’s
notion of language-game to rethink Irigaray’s concept of “the woman” as “… a
variable and emergent collection of relations among women” (1999, 77).
  8. Sarah Winter identifies in Freud’s reading of Oedipus the staging of “a tragedy of
gender” (Winter 1999, 55).
  9. According to Irigaray, gender “is not just a question of biology and physiology, a
matter of private life, of animal habits or vegetal fertility” (1993, 169–170). Con-
sequently, gender cannot be thought of through a biological lens, for it is “one
constituent of the human race, not only in reproduction but also in spirit” (1993,
132). Despite the fact that she uses images of the female body to approach femi-
nine subjectivity – from the auto-eroticism of the two lips that touch, to the bodily
fluids’ flow within and without women – she does not identify femininity with
female bodies. Rather than using and abusing female bodies, she borrows their
language to suggest that the essence of femininity is itself difference.
10. The connection between Hedda Gabler and Greek tragedy did not escape Ibsen’s
contemporaries. After seeing the play in London in 1891, Thomas Hardy said: “I
felt pity and terror as though the play had been Greek” (quoted in Meyer 1971,
665). Although I do not base my comparative reading on evidence that Ibsen knew

[ 26 ]
 Reading Ibsen with Irigaray
the ancient texts, such evidence apparently exists (see Gjesdal 2013, 391–413). On
the relationship between Hedda Gabler and Greek tragedies, see Rhodes (1995,
158–159) and Mortensen (2007, 170–176). Even C. W. Mayerson’s curious com-
ment, which downplays this relationship, points to its existence: “Ibsen with dia-
bolical irony arranged a situation which bears close superficial resemblance to the
traditional tragic end” (Mayerson 1965, 137).
11. Although Ellen Mortensen and Toril Moi certainly do not share Stein Olsen’s
moral condemnation of Hedda and differ in their understanding of the play, they
too ascribe her erratic behavior to a positive, albeit hidden, motive or a character
trait. Mortensen suggests that it is her repressed homosexuality; Moi sees it as her
“refusal of sexuality itself ” (2013, 447). Their nuanced interpretations are attentive
to the gendered aspects of the play; however, they provide a line of thinking that
allows us to make sense of Hedda, and thus do not address the ways in which
meaning production itself partakes in structuring her as unfathomable. Elin Dia-
mond highlights the instability of Hedda’s character and so refuses to provide a
definite answer to her enigmatic figure, which she connects to the figure of the
hysteric. I discuss her interpretation later in the article.
12. Diamond argues that by bearing her father’s name, Hedda is too close to patri-
archy to represent femininity in the figure of the dutiful wife. At the same time,
nor can she can represent masculinity, for in firing at Løvborg and Brack, she uses
“phallic power to destroy phallic power” (Diamond 2006, 27). Hence, Hedda
causes a crisis of representation.
13. One possible exception is Løvborg, whose arrival everyone, including Hedda,
seems to await. However, he is more intriguing than the other characters because
he is presented as having played a crucial part in Hedda’s life. Thus, the desire to
know more about him is related to the desire to better understand her.
14. The earlier Norma or a Politician’s Love explicitly identifies the heroine in the title in
terms of her relationship with a male other. Lady Inger of Østraat uses the name of a
historical figure as a title, perhaps in line with the ancient tragedies whose heroines
were mythical, if not historical figures, known to spectators from the myths. How-
ever, Hedda Gabler lacks a formal title, which in Lady Inger of Oestraat specifies the her-
oine’s social class and status. Elisabeth Robins, though not classifying the play itself as
a tragedy, connects it to the genre by describing Hedda’s character as tragic (1928, 26).
15. The “child of the horse-loving Amazon queen” is how Phaedra describes Hippoly-
tus in Euripides’ tragedy (Euripides 1992, 44).
16. It is hard to tell just what she rejects with “Oh, reasons.” The exchange is as
follows:
[Hedda] I had positively danced myself tired, my dear Judge. My day was
done – (with a slight shudder). Oh no – I won’t say that; nor think it either!
[Brack] You have assuredly no reason to. (1971, 309)
Does she shudder over the thought that her glory days are gone? Or that she had
no choice but to marry Tesman? Accordingly, does Brack affirm that she has no

[ 27 ]
 Lior Levy
reason to think that her life is over, or that she has no reason to think that her
marriage was not a matter of choice? How are we to understand her dismissal
of reasons? Does she think that reason plays no part in how she faces her life, her
time? Or does reason not partake in the social injunctions that push young women
into marriage? Perhaps reason has no room in her life altogether?
17. One can argue that Løvborg too claims paternity over the manuscript, his “child.”
Unlike Thea, however, his relation to this role is ambiguous. Losing his “child,”
Løvborg fails as a father, describing himself, in fact, as a kind of child murderer.
Thea, on the other hand, does not give up on her child – or on her role as a mother
– giving birth to the manuscript hidden in the pockets of her dress.
18. As Joan Templeton demonstrates, Thea’s unconventional act of leaving her hus-
band is “the approved sort for women; she risked her own reputation for a man”
(1997, 219).
19. Tanya Thresher presents an elaborate and illuminating account of Hedda’s rela-
tionship to language, which is conditioned by patriarchy (2008, 73–83). The scope
of this essay does not allow me to address Hedda’s use of language and with it
much of Thresher’s account. Our readings differ in that whereas Thresher under-
stands Hedda’s suicide as a triumphant act that liberates Hedda from the existing
limiting linguistic medium and allows her to affirm her own freedom and ideals, I
understand it as a symbol of her inability to express herself, indeed her inability to
have a self which can express itself at all.
20. Ellen Mortensen is not sure that Hedda is in fact pregnant (2007, 178).
21. Felman notes that if language is always masculine, this might negate Irigaray’s
own critique of the masculine order, for it would cast doubt on the authenticity of
her own womanly critical voice. Moreover, in criticizing the phallocentric order
and speaking for women who are silenced, is not Irigaray performing “a precise
repetition of the oppressive gesture of representation, by means of which […] man
has reduced the woman to the status of a silent and subordinate object?” (1975, 4)
In the theater, where actors mimic and perform human action, this question gains
new force. Does Hedda’s death replicate or challenge the masculine order? Is she
able to escape it, or can a woman never break its grip? I turn to these questions in
the final section of the paper.
22. The stage directions for Solness’ death in the The Master Builder specify: “A human
body, with planks and fragments of wood, is vaguely perceived crashing down
behind the trees” (2008, 354); in When We Dead Awaken, Ibsen notes: “Suddenly
a sound like thunder is heard from high up on the snow-field, which glides and
whirls downwards with headlong speed. PROFESSOR RUBEK and IRENE can be
dimly discerned as they are whirled along with the masses of snow and buried in
them” (2000, 267).
23. Nicole Loraux discusses the historical reasons for the fact that women’s deaths
in tragedy are articulated in words, described, but not represented: “It was in the
depth of the house that a Greek woman was supposed to live out her existence as
young girl, as wife, and as mother; and it was shut up in her house, far from the

[ 28 ]
 Reading Ibsen with Irigaray
gaze of others, that she had to end her life” (1987, ix). Yet, she thinks that such
reasons do not exhaust what is at stake with this dramatic convention. When a
messenger describes the death of a woman, she argues, sexual difference is pro-
claimed and (male) spectators are given an opportunity to reflect on it.
24. Toril Moi understands Hedda’s suicide as an expression of an existential yearning
for freedom (Moi 2013, 448). Joan Templeton goes even further and sees it as a
heroic act through which Hedda strives to articulate her difference, her refusal
to succumb to “the norms of proper feminine behavior” (Templeton 1997, 230).
I agree with them that Hedda identifies suicide with freedom and self-determina-
tion, and that her act is not merely a symptom of neurosis, as Gail Finney argues
(1994, 100). However, I think that this act does not manifest freedom univocally.
25. In an earlier reading of Hegel’s reading of Antigone in Sexes and Genealogies,
Irigagary argues that Antigone’s values and acts, which seem to defy the laws of
men, the laws of the state, actually embody her “fidelity to the male gods and to
war among men” (1993, 111).
26. Reading the suicide as a heroic act, Toril Moi argues that the meaning of the play
is universal, not gendered. Moi sees Hedda as “both a woman and a human being”
(2013, 438) and views her suicide as an expression of a yearning shared by every
human – the desire for freedom and beauty. Unlike Moi, I hold that Hedda’s trag-
edy lies in the fact that she can only be a human being, and thus never a woman.
Moi, influenced by Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist project of social and political
gender equality, maintains Hedda’s particularity, her womanhood, within the uni-
versal. Following Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference, I argue that the logic
of universality, with its uniform, indifferent, human beings, leads to the death of
women as particular, the effacement of their difference. Hedda dies because she
can only be human, not a woman.
27. The pronoun “man” originated in the Altnordisch “mand.” Thus, though “man”
differs from “mann” in being unmarked with respect to gender, the etymology of
the first term hints at the gendered nature of the allegedly universal term (Falk
and Torp 1960, 693). Indeed, we are reminded by Simone de Beauvoir that being
situated as an individual “beyond” sex and gender is a privilege saved only for men
(De Beauvoir 2011, 5). Irigaray studies the various ways in which both the syntax
and the semantics of languages express the gendered specify of their speakers.
With regard to that, she argues that “everyone claims neutrality without noticing
that he is talking about one neuter, his, neuter, and not an absolute neutrality”
(1993, 117).
28. Ibsen claimed that “women have something in common with the true artist,”
something that they share with youth too (quoted in Meyer 1971, 449). Youth have
a close relation to the future, which materializes in their lives. Linking women to
artists and youth, Ibsen suggests that they are imaginative and responsive to the
future. Perhaps in their ability to imagine lies the potential to transform the world
and bring about a different – and better – future.

[ 29 ]
 Lior Levy
References
Baruch, Elaine Hoffman, and Lucienne J. Serrano, eds. 1988. Women Analyze Women.
New York: New York University Press.
Davidson, Joyce, and Mick Smith. 1999. “Wittgenstein and Irigaray: Gender and Phi-
losophy in a Language (Game) of Difference.” Hypatia 14 (2): 72–96.
De Beauvoir, Simone. 2011. The second sex. Translated by C. Bordo and S. Malovany-
Chevallier. New York: Vintage Book.
Diamond, Elin. 2006. Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater. London:
Routledge.
Euripides. 1992. Hyppolytos. Translated by Robert Bagg. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Falk, H. S., and Alf Torp. 1960. Norwegisch-Dänisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, Vol. I.
Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
Felman, Shoshana. 1975. “Women and Madness: The Critical Phallacy.” Diacritics 5
(4): 2–10.
Finney, Gail. 1989. Women in Modern Drama. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Finney, Gail. 1994. “Ibsen and Feminism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen, edited
by James McFarlane, 89–105. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Freud, Sigmund. 1964. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sig-
mund Freud, Vol. XXII (Translated by James Strachey). London: The Hogarth Press
and the Institute of Psycho-analysis.
Gjesdal, Kristin. 2013. “Tragedy and Tradition.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 34
(2): 391–413.
Ibsen, Henrik. 1914. Samlede Værker. Kristiania: Ottende Bind, Gyldendalske Boghan-
dels Forlag.
Ibsen, Henrik. 1971. Hedda Gabler and Other Plays. Translated by Una Ellis-Fermor.
Middlesex: Penguin Books.
Ibsen, Henrik. 2000. When We Dead Awaken. Translated by Michael Meyer. London:
Bloomsburry Methuen Drama.
Ibsen, Henrik. 2008. Four Major Plays: Doll’s House; Ghosts; Hedda Gabler; The Master
Builder. Translated by James McFarlane. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Irigaray, Luce. 1985. Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press.
Irigaray, Luce. 1996. I Love to You. Translated by Alison Martin. New York: Routledge.
Irigaray, Luce. 1991. Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche. Translated by Gillian C. Gill.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Irigaray, Luce. 1993. Sexes and Genealogies. Translated by Gillian C. Gill. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Irigaray, Luce. 1994. Thinking the Difference: For a Peaceful Revolution. Translated by
Karin Montin. London: Athlone Press.
Irigaray, Luce. 2010. “Between Myth and History: The Tragedy of Antigone.” In Inter-
rogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism, edited by S. E. Wilmer and
Audrone Zukauskaite, 197–212. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[ 30 ]
 Reading Ibsen with Irigaray
Loraux, Nicole. 1987. Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman. Translated by Anthony Forster.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mayerson, Caroline W. 1965. “Thematic Symbols in Hedda Gabler.” In Ibsen: A Collec-
tion of Critical Essays, edited by Rolf Fjelde, 131–138. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice
Hall.
Meyer, Michael. 1971. Ibsen: A Biography. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Moi, Toril. 2013. “Hedda’s Silences: Beauty and Despair in Hedda Gabler.” Modern
Drama 56 (4): 434–456.
Mortensen, Ellen. 2007. “Ibsen and the Scandalous: Ghosts and Hedda Gabler.” Ibsen
Studies 7 (2): 169–187.
Norseng, Mary Kay. 1999. “Suicide and Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler.” Scandinavian Studies 71
(1): 1–40.
OED Online. 2016. Oxford University Press. March. Accessed 27 May 2016. https://
ssl.haifa.ac.il/view/Entry/,DanaInfo=www.oed.com+77468?rskey=U6FPuK&re-
sult=1#eid.
Olsen, Stein Haugom. 1985. “Why Does Hedda Gabler Marry Jorgen Tesman?” Mod-
ern Drama 28 (4): 591–610.
Rhodes, Norman. 1995. Ibsen and the Greeks. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.
Robins, Elisabeth. 1928. Ibsen and the Actress. London: Hogarth Press.
Schor, Naomi. 1994. “This Essentialism Which Is Not One: Coming to Grips with
Irigaray.” In Engaging with Irigaray, edited by Carolyn Burke, Naomi Schor, and
Whitford Margaret, 57–79. New York: Columbia University Press.
Schwab, Gail. 2010. “Mothers, Sisters, and Daughters.” In Rewriting Difference: Luce
Irigaray and “the Greeks”, edited by Elena Tzelepis and Athena Athanasiou, 79–92.
New York: State University of New York Press.
Templeton, Joan. 1989. “The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen.”
PMLA 104 (1): 28–40.
Templeton, Joan. 1997. Ibsen’s Women. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thresher, Tanya. 2008. “Vinløv I Håret: The Relationship between Women, Language,
and Power in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler.” Modern Drama 51 (1): 73–83.
Winter, Sarah. 1999. Freud and the Institution of Psychoanalytic Knowledge. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.

Lior Levy, Department of Philosophy, University of Haifa, 199 Aba Khoushy Ave, Mt.
Carmel, Haifa 3498838, Israel. E-mail: llevy1@univ.haifa.ac.il

[ 31 ]