The Unspoken Text: Hedda Gabler

The Unspoken Text in Hedda Gabler
EVERT SPRINCHORN
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Before the advent of realistic drama, a playwright found no difficulty in

having his characters express their inmost thoughts. Shakespeare could write
soliloquies for the introspective Hamlet, and Racine could let the spectators
in on Phedre's smouldering jealousy by letting her speak directly to them. But
the nineteenth-century dramatist who wanted to present a photographic sem-
blance of life on stage had to avoid the soliloquy and the aside. If the rules
of the fully developed realistic drama were faithfully adhered to, the specta-
tors had to be thought of as unseen guests, observing what happens on stage
but ignored by the people up there. Since the characters onstage could not
break through the fourth wall of the set, the viewer had to figure out what
was going on in their minds by watching them as they engaged in the ordi-
nary business of daily life, chatted with friends, poured tea, arranged flowers,
and passed the time of day.
One of Ibsen's more remarkable achievements was to find ways of reveal-
ing the unspoken thoughts of his characters without violating the conventions
of realistic theatre. Often there are overtones in his dialogue that hint at things
not actually said. Just as often the stage properties and the costumes silently
but eloquently comment on the spoken words and on the physical action. John
Northam and Else H0st pioneered in the study of these visual elements in
Ibsen's realistic plays, especially in Hedda Gabler, and others have followed
in their footsteps. I
But there is yet another method that Ibsen used to express what his charac-
ters cannot say directly if they are to behave like real people and what he as
author could not verbalize for the audience without breaking through the
fourth wall of the set and turning himself into a novelist. In Hedda Gabler,
and perhaps in other plays, Ibsen made the stage itself speak. He divided the
stage into distinct areas that have special significance, especially when they
are considered in relation to one another. A crude form of this technique was
Modem Drama , 36 (1993) 353

354 EVERT SPRINCHORN
employed in the medieval drama, in which heaven and hell were sometimes
set up at opposite ends of the playing area, and in the Elizabethan theatre,
where in Antony and Cleopatra, for example, profligate Egypt was opposed
to stolid and proper Rome by means of signs over the stage doors. This
method is almost uniquely theatrical. It does not work for novelists and lyric
poets and non-operatic composers, though painters have certainly made use
of it. Ibsen, who had once set his heart on being a painter, may have been the
first realistic dramatist to employ it rigorously throughout a whole play.
Although it could be used effectively in earlier times, a great drawback to
its use in the realistic theatre of the nineteenth century was that explanatory
signs could not be hung about the stage. Given the conventions of the peep-
hole stage, what could not be blatantly labelled had to accrue meaning grad-
ually through associations as the play progressed. The hidden drama had to
come to light slowly, as in real life.
Ibsen helps the spectator as much as he legitimately can by calling attention
in the first moments of the play to the significance of certain visual elements
on the stage. When Hedda first appears, she objects to the sunlight flooding
the room and asks that the curtain be drawn over the glass doors opening on
the verandah. Her husband's aunt had opened the doors wide to let in the air
and the sun. Hedda does not want nature to intrude that much into her life.
On the other hand, she does not want the doors closed. She only wants the
curtains drawn over the opening. Her husband, George Tesman, does her
bidding, saying, "There you are, Hedda. Now you've got both shade and
fresh air.,,2
A minute later she crosses the room to the side opposite to the glass doors
and stands at the tile stove. She makes this cross when Tesman asks her to
look at the old slippers that Aunt Juliane has brought him. Hedda is irritated.
" I'm really not interested," she says, coldly (XI:306).
Her husband follows her across the stage, insisting that she show some
interest for his sake; after ail, the slippers call up so many pleasant memories
for him. Hedda turns from him, moves to the table that occupies the centre
of the room, and from that point makes her devastating remark about Aunt
Juliane's new hat, spitefully and deliberately mistaking it for the maid's. " We
shall never manage with that new maid ... . Look, she's left her old hat lying
on that chair" (XI:306). This is her spontaneous retort to Tesman: the hat
against the slippers: tit for tat.
Observing this little scene, the audience can see battle lines being drawn
up in this quiet domestic setting: Hedda against the Tesman clan, those
boring, well-intentioned, ever-so-good denizens of the middle class, who, in
Ibsen' s words, "stand as a hostile and alien power opposed to [Hedda's]
fundamental nature" (xvlII:28o). Moreover, the stage has become a divided
room. At the left (from the audience's point of view, as are all the stage
directions in the play) the sun enters the room, while towards the right the
The Unspoken Text in Hedda Gabler 355
room is comparatively dark. Dominating that side of the room is a large

stove, faced with dark tiles. Hedda launches her sally on the Tesmans from
that stove, moving from there to the table in the centre to point at the hat.
Each movement by itself seems insignificant, but, lingering in our minds,
these movements acquire meaning and become signs in a theatrical language
that is not difficu lt to read. Thea Elvsted is seated in the easy chair next to
the porcelain stove as she tells Hedda of her unhappy marriage and of her
leaving her husband. When Hedda expresses her surprise at this defiance of
social morality - "r don't see how you dared!" - Thea rises from the chair,
crosses the room, and sits in the sofa near the glass door. "I simply had to
do what I did," she says (XI:3 I 8).
These little episodes point to the tensions and conflicts that will dominate
the drama: the aristocratic Hedda against the middle-class Tesmans, and
social propriety against mitural instincts. When Judge Brack and Hedda have
their tete-ii-tete hinting at a mel/age a Irois, notoriously Norwegianized by
Ibsen as Irekant (triangle), they are seated on the sofa at the right, near the
stove. But in act 2 when Hedda reminisces with L~vborg, recalling their
titillating conversations in which the Bohemian, uninhibited L~vborg recount-
ed his sexual escapades, they are seated on the sofa at the left, near the
garden . Judge Brack, the embodiment of sexual and social hypocrisy, never
sits ·on the sofa at the left. Similarly, when Thea, that seemingly proper
woman who has flouted social convention by walking out on her husband,
says, " People can say what they want" (XI:319), she sits down on the sofa
at the left. In contrast, when Judge Brack utters his famous last line, "Such
things just aren't done!" (Xt:393), he is ensconced in the armchair near the
stove on the side of the stage that connotes propriety and the repression of
the instinctual life.
Going through the play scene by scene, one can find example after example
supporting this interpretation of the division of the stage left and right. How-
ever, Ibsen's characters do not confine themselves to horizontal movements
across the stage. They also move up and down it. In fact, the most obvious
aspect of the set is the division of the playing space into a downstage area,
the drawing room, and an upstage area, the inner room where Hedda will
shoot herself. This room is definitely Hedda' s domain. She claims it by hang-
ing the portrait of her father there and by having her piano moved into it.
This room is her refuge. When Tesman wanlS her to show her friendliness by
addressing his aunt with the familiar du, Hedda declines and goes towards the
inner room as if to escape from the insufferably sweet Tesmans.
Yet it is obvious that the playgoer cannot identify the inner room exclu-
sively with Hedda. Other people use it. In one of the central scenes in the
play Tesman and Brack sit there while Hedda and L~vborg are seated down-
stage, pretending to be looking at pictures in a photograph album while
actually reviving their old relationship as trusting comrades. In those days
EVERT SPRI NCHORN
when they were seei9g a lot of each other, Liilvborg whispered his secrets to
Hedda while General Gabler sat nearby, reading a newspaper. The tolerant
father sat near the window in the light, while the two young people sat on the
darker side of the room. Now, in the playas we see it, we are in another
house and the past is imposed on the present. General Gabler's portrait in the
inner room looks down on Hedda and L0vborg, while Judge Brack sits under
the portrait, keeping a jealous eye on them. The inference to be drawn from
this is that the inner room is not so much Hedda's refuge as it is a link to the
past3 Ibsen has divided upstage from downstage, inner room from living
room, to suggest that the past is ever present in the lives of these people. This
is a variation on a technique he had employed in earlier Tealistic plays. In
Ghosts he had bToughtthe past to beaT on the pTesent by having Oswald make
love to Regina, just as yeaTS befoTe Oswald's fatheT had made love to Re-
gina's mother. And in The Wild Duck he had made the loft at the TeaT of the
stage a Tepository of things from the pas t, imbuing it with an atmospheTe that
affects the li ving chaTacteTs.
Behind the inner room are more rooms , yet even back there, where the
bedrooms aTe located, a symbolic div ision exists between right and left.
Tesman enteTS from the right when he first appears on stage, and Hedda from
the left. Hedda's ancestors were Viking barbarians; George Tesman's were
tillers of the soil (their first names, Hedda, a fonn of Hedvig, meaning battIe,
and George, meaning husbandman, point to this difference in their lineages).
Even in representing the past, Ibsen remains consistent in having the left side
stand for the free and untamed human being, and the right stand for the
domesticated home dweller. Hedda wants to act like her barbarian ancestors
by exerting her power over others, while Tesman, living up to his name
(' 'Thesis-man' '), is writing his doctoral dissertation on the domestic industries
of Brabant.
If the rear area of the stage opens up a vista on the past, and if the main
part of the stage where most of the action takes place represents the present,
then the extension of the time line implies that the area faTthest downstage
might contain glimmerings of the futuTe. It is hardly a mailer of chance that
in act I Judge Brack and Tesman discuss the latter's hopes for the future
while they aTe seated at the oval table that is closest to the apron of the stage.
Again, in act 3, when Brack, with barely concealed relish, infonns Hedda that
Liilvborg is a ruined man who will be shunned by every decent person after
the bTawl in a madam's house, and insinuates that from now on he will take
Liilvborg's place in Hedda's life, he is seated at this same table at the longer
and dominant upstage side, while Hedda is at the left side of it.
The end of act 2 also connects the downstage table with future events. As
Liilvborg leaves for Brack's bachelor party, the maid enters wi th a lighted
lamp that she places on this table. Thea says uneasily, "Hedda, Hedda, how
is this all going to end? " (11:355). There is really no need to bring on the
lamp shortly before the curtain is to come down on the act except to empha-
size Thea's words - and to call our a((ention to the table.
The table is not empty. The flowers that Thea brought to the Tesman house
in the first act were moved from the piano (at the left, on the side of nature)
and placed on that table. More to the point, the manuscript of Ll'lv borg's
revolutionary work, the book about the future course of civilization, lies on
the table as Brack, Tesman, and its author discuss it (while the appurtenances
of Tesman and Brack - books, hat, and coat - are grouped together upstage
right). During a large part of the act, the manuscript and the flo wers are
displayed together on the table, a weighty image, considering that it was only
through Thea' s loving care that Ll'lvborg was able to write the book.
At the end of the act the stage grows dark as the sun sets. Ll'lvborg puts the
manuscript in his pocket as the maid brings in the lamp that casts its light on
the flowers. The connection between the flowers and the manuscript is now
severed, and the viewer is left to wonder what indeed will happen to Ll'lv-
borg's vision of the future.
Hedda herself is thinking about the immediate future. " At ten o'clock,
Ll'lvborg will be back," she says, "with vine leaves in his hair" (XI:355). The
phrase is disconcerting, and was greeted with derisive laughter when the play
was first produced in Munich and Copenhagen. 4 It comes without any pre-
paration; up to this point no one has mentioned vine leaves. Now we both
hear about Hedda' s vine leaves and see Thea's flowers . Then, at the very end
of the act, while Hedda repeats the phrase about vine leaves, she threatens to
bum Thea's hair. She virtually drags Thea into the inner room, behaving like
a ravaging Viking, while downstage the light falls on Thea's flowers. There
is flow and counterflow to the action. The lamp, brought in from the rear
room, comes in from out of the past, as it were, while Hedda hauls Thea back
into the past, treating her as she diu when they were schoolgirls and Hedda
used to bully and torment her by pulling her hair.
Naturally, most of what we see and hear concerns the present - that is, the
r890s - and takes place on the main part of the stage. Behind the middle-
class world of the late nineteenth century, spatially and chronologically, lies
the world of the barbarians, the Vikings, the precursors of the aristocratic
class that has been pretty much replaced by the bourgeoisie, leaving behind
only a few relics like Hedda. But this middle class, although it has superseded
the aristocracy, is divided against itself. Within it, there has sprung up a
group, the Bohemians, that spurns the values of the tradesmen and has formu -
lated its own code of ethics. These Bohemians see the upholders of middle-
class values as hypocrites. In Hedda's drawing room the Philistines and the
Bohemians collide. "I only wanted to show," said Ibsen, "what results from
the contact between two social classes that do not understand each other." 5
The Tesman family exemplifies the middle class at its best - gentle, con-
siderate of one another, and self-sacrificing - whereas Judge Brack is the
EVERT SPRINCHORN
exemplary Philistine, the bourgeoisie at its worst, pharisaical, self-serving, and

pretentious. His very name was the slangy Swedish contemptuous term for a
Philistine (brackalZ). What made the Philistine so unpleasant was that he
harbored petit bourgeois values while entertaining aristocratic pretensions.
Georg Brandes in his lectures on Nietzsche in 1888 declared that the assault
on the culture-Philistine mentality was a phenomenon of the nineteenth
century. The culture-Philistines were, he said, responsible for the absence of

true culture and the simultaneous belief that they actually possess it.
The repartee between Judge Brack and Hedda Gabler is a fencing match
between one who is truly cultured and one who is not. Brack wants to acquire
status by possessing Hedda, while she can have a better time duelling with
Brack, with whom she has much in common, than prating with her husband.
What she has, Brack wants.
. What Hedda wants is quite another matter. Like Brack, she would like to
be a free spirit, rising above the conventions and prejudices of a society that
bores and frustrates her; but, also like Brack, she wants a secure position in
that society. The result is hypocrisy in Brack and fretfulness, restiveness,
malice, and resentment in Hedda. The child in her womb; now six months
after conception beginning to stir noticeably. only exacerbates her nervous-
ness. It will commit her to all that she despises, while Ljlvborg offers the
possibility of at least a momentary escape. She is a woman not only in con-
flict with the society in which she lives but also in conflict wi th herself. In
one of his working notes for the play, Ibsen wrote, "The play is about 'the
insuperable,' the aspiring to and striving for something that goes against
convention, against what is allowed into the conscious mind - Hedda's mind
included" (XI:500).
There are demons within Hedda that she cannot control, imps engendered
by the intermingling of the Viking spifit with middle-class propriety and
restraint. The aggressive barbarian will has been stifled and, finding no outlet
in a social environment that confines women to the home, has turned against
Hedda herself. Nietzsche in one of his proleptically Freudian remarks said that
"All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly tlll'lZ inward,,,6 and
Ibsen's drama affords a vivid demonstration of those words.
Why did Hedda, an intelligent, sophisticated, stylishly handsome woman
from a good family, one of the most admired women in town, accept in
marriage the hand of George Tesman, a man whom she cannot help but
ridicule in her chat with Judge Brack? She says it all happened because of an
impulse of the moment. Walking home from a party one evening, Hedda, who
was only trying to make conversation with Tesman, tongue-tied in the pres-
ence of this awesome woman, happened to remark as they passed a handsome
town house that she would like to live there. That "brought on the engage-
ment, and the marriage, and the honeymoon, and the whole lot" (11:336).
The cruel irony is that she did not even like the house.
We can guess why she yielded to the impulse, and the stage arrangement
provides a visual confirmation of our thoughts. The picture provides the
subtext for the scene. During their conversation, Hedda sits in the armchair
next to the tile stove, and Judge Brack stands behind the chair. The chair
stands for middle-class conventionality and comfort, and the stove is the home
of the imps and demons bred by thwarted instincts and desires. When Hedda
says that " these impulses come over me all of a sudden, and I just can't
resist them," she "throws herself dowll ill the easy chair by the stove"
(r 1:335). Though the stove suggests domesticity and protection against the
elements, the man-made fire in it can be as destructive as any natural force,
and more pernicious. Hedda 's desire to be assured of the comforts of life and
a good place in society led her to malTY Tesman. Now she is bored and look-
ing for some kind of excitement that will relieve the tensions within her. In
the next act the demons will break loose, and the fire will blaze in the stove.
Hedda grows increasingly destructive as the drama unfolds. In fact the plot
fonns a crescendo of malignity, and each one of her wicked acts makes use
of a different part of the stage. In act r she makes fun of Aunt Juliane 's
bonnet, moving from the stove to the table at stage centre to do so. In act 2
she induces LI/Svborg, the reformed alcoholic, to drink. This happens at the
sofa on the left, the garden side, which suggests that Hedda regards it as a
creative act: she hopes to transform LI/Svborg into Bacchus. In the third act
she bums his manuscript in the stove, killing the "child" of Thea and LI/S v-
borg. In the final act she kills herself - and the child within her - in the room
at the back of the stage.
The burning of the manuscript constitutes the climax of the drama, and in
order to leave no doubts in the viewer's mind about Hedda's reasons, Ibsen
for once resorts to the soliloquy , realistically motivated by the circumstances.
Since Hedda's mind is exposed here, the scene provides the perfect occasion
for a confirmation of the symbolic significance of the division of the stage
space. The fire in the stove dominates the scene visually, emphasizing the
right-hand side of the stage. The left side of the stage, however, is not dark.
Earlier, Hedda had gone to the glass door and opened the drapes, letting the
bright morning sun pour into the room. Her behaviour here contrasts with her
dislike of the sun in act I. Furthennore, the slove was not lit in the two
previous acts. Although it would seem more true to life to have a fire in the
afternoon of act 2 when guests were entertained, Ibsen has artfully saved the
lighting of the fue for the third act in order to call attention to it. He has also
arranged for the curtain covering the opening to the inner room to be drawn
shut. The viewer's eye, then, is caught by the shafts of sunlight to the left and
the reddish light from the stove on the right. Pictorially, the stage presents a
conflict between the sunlight and the firelight, between nature's light and
artificiallighl, between nature and civilization or, more specifically. bearing in
mind the time axis of the stage, society at the end of the nineteenth century.
EVERT SPRINCHORN
At the beginning of the act, theTe aTe only a few embeTs glowing in the
stove, and, in keeping with this, Hedda is asleep on the sofa at the left, the
side of the natuTal instincts. The fiTe will grow brighteT thToughout the act,
and Hedda will be feeding it with the manuscript at the end, burning the
"child" of curly-haiTed Thea. Taking the scene in through OUT eyes, Teading
the ideogTams of the stage, we see the natuTal emotions being TepTessed and
perverted, becoming destructive TatheT than creative. Hedda burns the manu-
script out of spite and jealousy. Resentful of Thea (Thea = DOTothea, "the
gift of the god"), and envying her abundant hair, heT life-giving spiTit, and
heT caring nature, Hedda would TatheT kill new life and close off the futuTe
than see heT Tival accomplish what she heTself could not. The image is that
of a pTegnant motheT throwing the new-born babe of another mother into the
fiTe. And in his inimitable fashion Ibsen combines the intellectual motive with
the emotional. Unlike Thea, Hedda undeTstands the significance of the manu-
script; hence the destructive act is raised in our minds above the merely
psychological. "Her act," as a perceptive French critic wrote, "is not one of
simple female vengeance; it is an act of vandalism, a crime against humanity.
In committing it, Hedda becomes something otheT than a mentally distuTbed
person [une simple detraquee]. She assumes in our eyes a superhuman stature;
heT role takes on a metaphysical aspect. Hedda is the genius of evil fighting
against progress. "7
Seen in the perspective of histoTY, the Viking despoileT has degeneTated
into the VictoTian spoiler. Just how true this is may be seen by comparing the
early Ibsen play The Vikings at Helgeland (Htermamdene pd Helgeland, 1858)
with Hedda Gabler (1890)8 In the fonner, the heroine HjiSrdis (who is equiv-
alent to BrUnnhilde in WagneT's Ring of the Nibelung) pTefeTs to slay heTself
and heT lover ratheT than live on in a Christian world in which the Viking
qualities of pTide and self-assertion would be regarded as mOTal defects.
"The white god heads north," she laments. "I do not wish to meet him.
The old gods are no 10ngeT strong. They sleep. They aTe but shadows, half-
alive. With them shall we fight! Out of this life, Sigurd! I will set you on the
throne of heaven, and I shall sit at your side" (4:94).
She kills SiguTd with an arrow from her bow, only to learn that Sigurd had
become a convert to Christianity and that consequently they will not meet in
the afterlife. Hedda's destruction of L0vborg contains a much greater iTony,
fOT Hedda at that moment is no Hj0Tdis. She burns the manuscript in resent-
ment against the good ChTistian Thea, whereas Hj0Tdis acts out of TegTet,
maintaining heT nobility of chaTacter. But, like heT Viking forbear, Hedda
must face death alone, knowing that Thea and L0vborg will exist togetheT in
the futuTe through the salvaging and Teconstruction of the manuscript.
When Hedda bums the manuscript, exulting in this surrogate infanticide,
she is at heT worst. The admiTable Viking attributes, the willingness to face
a challenge unflinchingly and the ability to bear defeat without rancour, have
deserted her. The stage picture tells as much. The rear room, the area repre-
senting her ancestral past, is closed off throughout the whole act so that we
may see her as trapped in a middle-class Victorian parlour and motivated
largely by middle-class standards of respectability, seeking an outlet for her
energies not through brave deeds but through a cowardly, selfish, dog-in-the-
manger act.
In the last part of the play, Ibsen attempts to redeem his heroine. Visually,
the opening of the fourth act serves as a sharp contrast to the ending of the
third. There the inner room was concealed; the sunlight entered from the left;
the fire burned in the stove at the right. As tile curtain rises on the fourth act,
the drawing room is in darkness, and the inner room is lit by a lamp hanging
over the table. The arrangement of light and dark is the reverse of what it
was. The implication is that Hedda's Viking spirit is asserting itself. Having
carried on like a hysterical. neurotic woman in the previous act, she will now
perfonn with the pride and self-esteem of the barbarian and the hauteur of the
aristocrat. Matthew Arnold's designation of the aristocratic class as barbarians
applies here: "The Barbarians, to whom we all owe so much, and who
reinvigorated and renewed our worn-out Europe .... The Barbarians brought
with them that staunch individualism ... and that passion for doing as one
likes, for the assertion of personal liberty.'"
In the last act, Hedda the barbarian asserts her personal freedom in the
most extreme manner. When Judge Brack, the consummate Philistine, insinu-
ates that he, knowing who owns the pistol that killed L0vborg, will blackmail
Hedda, she realizes that she must either be forever sullied by public scandal
or embraced by the unctuous Brack as his mistress. Either way, she loses her
independence and purity. She takes the only way out - for a barbarian. She
retreats into the inner room, goes back to her ancestral origins. sits at the
piano, the family heirloom, and under the eyes of her father, whose portrait
hangs in that room, blows her brains out with her father 's pistol. Like Hjl2lr-
dis, she vehemently rejects a world that does not measure up to her standards,
preferring to join the shades of her ancestors.
The painter's eye and the psychologist's insight are at work in the scene
in which Brack exerts his power over Hedda. Talking of Hedda' s fear of
scandal, Brack leans on the back of the armchair at the right, while Hedda,
sitting on the ottoman belonging to the chair, is conspicuously at his feet. But
she is near the stove in which the demons dwell. When Brack bends over her
and whispers his threats, she says, "I'd rather die" (XI:390). The fact that the
fire is out implies that she is no longer in the grip of her emotions, no longer
d<i/raquee. She is thinking clearly. Here the stage picture speaks more elo-
quently than the words because the properties - the chair, the stool, and the
stove - have gradually been accumulating symbolic weight during the first
three acts.
There are, however, other symbols in the play that weave through the
EVERT SPRlNCHORN
dialogue to create patterns of meaning. The most obvious of these, the one
that stridently calls attention to itself, is the image of L~vborg as a Bacchic
or Dionysian figure. Hedda visualizes him returning from Brack's bachelor
party with vine leaves in his hair. ' 0 When that vision is shattered, she imag-
ines him dying "in beauty," that is, by shooting himself in the temple.
Although men in those days did sometimes go to parties at which they wore
wreaths of vine leaves on their heads, Hedda certainly does not have in mind
one of those staid affairs, such as the Christmas banquet of the Scandinavian
Society in Rome, with women weari ng wreaths of roses accompanying the
men." She is conjuring up an image of Dionysus as Nietzsche pictured him. In
The Twilight of the Gods (Gotzen-Diimmerung), which appeared in print only
a year before Hedda Gabler, the German philosopher described his Goethean
superman as a "highly cultured human being who keeping himself in check and
having reverence for himself, dares to allow himself the whole compass and
wealth of natural being - a man to whom nothing is forbidden, except weakness .
... He no longer denies . ... Such faith is the highest of all possible faiths; I have
baptized it with the name Dionysus" (chapter 9, section 49)."
Nietzsche had emerged as the most talked-about thinker in Scandinavia
after Georg Brandes gave a series of public lectures on him in 1888, thus
introducing the philosopher to an international audience. The lectures sparked
a controversy between Brandes and the Danish philosopher Harald Hwffding,
who assailed < 4 aristocratic radicalism," Brandes's term for Nietzsche's elit-
ism, as immoral. H~ffding was the comfortably placed academic, a professor
of philosophy at the University of Copenhagen; Brandes the unregenerate
defier of s~ia l convention and notorious defender of sexual licence, who
some years before had been denied a professorship at the same university.
The quarrel between these two is reflected in the competition between Tes-
man and L~vborg.'3 The latter's work on the history of social and cultural
forces and what they portend sounds very much like Nietzsche's Beyond
Good and Evil, which has the subtitle "Prelude to a Philosophy of the Fu-
ture." Lwvborg's manuscript is in two parts, the first on cultural forces in the
past, the second on the future course of civilization. 14
With Nietzsche's name on the lips of every literate person, contemporary
critics immediately saw Hedda as a kind of superwoman, a higher being who
places herself above society's moral standards, a woman liberated from
conventional attitudes towards motherhood and family life. Not long after
Ibsen's play was published, E.F. Lachman wrote:
Hedda Gabler corresponds to Nietzsche's man of the future. She be longs to the
supermen. a com ing higher stage in evoluti on. She has emerged a little too early.
however, and goes down to defeat in that ·petty and confining modem society that has
no pJace for these higher existences .... Her death is, take note, a "death in beauty;"
in actuality, a death without solace and without· hope, a complete annihilation.'s
For Lachman, Hedda is a destructive and cruel human being and her
creator the incarnation of a maleficent force.
Nietzsche himself understood the double nature of his higher form of
humanity. In a passage that reads like a commentary on Hedda Gabler, he
said:
Superior spirits run no small danger of learning, one day or another, to look out for
the terribl~ joy which is to be found in destruction .. . in the event of creative activity
being absolutely denied them .... For such spirits, there then remains no other alterna-
tive; they may feel themselves constrained to destroy. gradually, insidiously, and with
diabolical delight, just what they have loved most.16
Like one of these superior spirits, Hedda brings to ruin the one person she
admires when he fails to live up to her ideal. When she challenges Liilvborg
to drink in act 2, she wants him to conform to her image of the strong man
to whom nothing is forbidden, the superman who is able to retain control of
himself while experiencing all that nature offers. She sends him off to Judge
Brack's bacchanal for the same reason, convinced that he will return as
master of himself, in her words, "a free man for the rest of his life. " Seeing
herself as a kind of goddess, above and apart from other mortals, she is the
uncompromising aesthete, and when her lost comrade falls short of her image
of him as Nietzsche's Dionys us, she asks him to regain some of his lost glory
by making his suicide a beautiful gesture, an aesthetic feat beyoAd the com-
prehension of shallow souls - "Une balle dans la tempe, voWI ce qu'il y a
de mieux, Ie vrai chic!" as a French critic put it. 17 Like Nietzsche, she
believes that only as a work of art and not as a moral product can the world
be justified, and only as transmuted into music and not as reduced to reality
can the world be redeemed.
At the beginning of the last act, she is waiting for the news that Liilvborg
has died "in beauty."'· Understandably tense, Hedda paces the darkened
room; then moves up into the inner room, which is lit; strikes a few chords
on her piano; and comes back into the living room. She crosses to the glass
door and looks out into the garden, which lies in darkness. Although she has
received word that Tesman's Aunt Rina has died, her mind is occupied by
other mallers: Liilvborg's suicide and her pregnancy. She must reconcile
herself to a life with the most un-Dionysian of men. Yet her mood is not one
of complete fru stration. True, she will give birth to a child she does not want,
but she is also about to enjoy the thrill of exerting her power over someone
else's destiny. The child should have been Liilvborg's. Now she must be
content with Liilvborg's poetic death - an aesthetic and sublime deed that she
can savour again and again in the tiresome days and years that lie ahead.
To Judge Brack she expresses the sense of release and freedom she feels,
believing that Liilvborg died following her wishes. "I feel liberated, set free,
EVERT SPRlNCHORN
knowing that a bold, gratuitous act is still possible in this world. An instinc-
tive act, shimmering with pure beauty" (XI:387). She utters these Dionysian
thoughts while seated in the easy chair near the stove.
Now it would seem that the more appropriate place for these thoughts
would be on the garden side of the stage. Why does Ibsen have Hedda cross
the stage and sit down at the stove when her mind is preoccupied by a bold,
defiant, unconventional deed, completely in contrast to what the right-hand
side has come to represent? If she is imagining her Dionysian L¢vborg dying
in beauty, why does she take her place with the Pharisees who do not appre-
ciate true beauty and have no conception of the higher man?
Here the stage picture speaks more profoundly than the words. Hedda's
physical movement exposes the substratum of her emotional life and betrays
what has stirred her more deeply than Dionysian beauty. She returns to the
place where she burned L¢vborg's manuscript, and she burned the manuscript
out of jealousy of Thea. Although she speaks to her confidant of a beautiful,
audacious, convention-defying death. her inner being wants L~vborg dead
because she cannot have him, because he belongs to someone else. She acts
out of resentment, the must un-Nietzschean and un-Dionysian of sentiments.
It was the one response to an unpleasant and demeaning world absolutely
denied the superman. Carelessly destructive he might be, but never resentful.
By putting Hedda in the armchair, Ibsen is pronouncing a Nietzschean judg-
ment on her.
At that moment she is as mean in spirit as she was at the end of act 3
when she bade goodbye to L¢vborg. " I want you to take something to re-
member me by," she had said, moving upstage (Xl:387). It is a wonderfully
revealing moment, its impact often lost in perfonnance because it happens so
quickly. Both the manuscript and the pistols are in the desk upstage, and
when Hedda takes the one and not the other, Lhe attentive viewer will under-
stand exactly what it is that motivates Hedda and what underlies the talk
about dying beautifully.
Equally revealing is her stage cross in the last act when she realizes she is
in Brack's power. She rises from the easy chair and crosses to the writing
desk, moving into the light, towards the garden of nature, and preparing
through her suicide to rejoin the nobler races, who, as Nietzsche described
them,
savor a freedom from all social constraints, they compensate themselves in the wilder-
ness for the tension engendered by protracted confinement and enclosure with in the
peace of soc iety, they go back to the innocent conscience of the beast of prey, as
triumphant monsters who perhaps emerge from a di sgust ing procession of murder,
arson, rape, and torture, exhilarated and undisturbed of sou l, ... convinced they have
provided the poets with a lot more material for song and praise. One cannot fai l to see
at the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast
prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory; this hidden core needs to erupt
from time to time, the animal has to get out again and go back to the wilderness. 19
Hedda takes the other of the two duelling pistols lbat belonged to her father
and retreats into the inner room (off left) where she shoots herself after
playing on the piano.

The final stage picture sums up the play. The characters onstage are clad
in black in mourning for Tesman's aunt. The downstage table, pointing to the
future, stands empty. The advance of culture envisioned by Li1!vborg and
understood intuitively by Hedda seems doomed. The manuscript that would
have adumbrated the future course of civilization has been destroyed by an
undisciplined Li1!vborg and a spiteful Hedda. Judge Brack is in the armchair
at the right, exclaiming, "Such things just aren't done!" (XI:393). That side
of the stage was made relati vely dark when Tesman moved the lamp from the
table above the easy chair to Hedda's desk on the other side of the room. The
light is on the left where Thea and Tesman sit, piecing together Li1!vborg's
manuscript, which is entirely beyond their comprehension. Yet they are on the
side of life. They belong among those who affirm human existence, regardless
of its quality, often by sacrificing themselves for the sake of others. And
ultimately, even for Ibsen, life itself is more decisive for the progress of
humanity than are ideas about life.
For Ibsen, but not for Hedda. When she takes her own life, she escapes
from the slave morality of those who surround her and becomes the magnifi-
cent barbarian. She takes time to play the Dionysian music for her own death,
and she dies beneath her father's portrait. She asserts her Viking heritage
while at the same time fulfilling her dream of an exalted life. When she
shoots herself, she acts destructively and wantonly but without meanness or
rancour. By her own standards and Nietzsche'S, she dies in beauty.
NOTES
1 John Northam, Ibsen's Dramatic Method (London, 1953); Else H~st. Hedda
Gable,.: Ell mOllografi (Oslo, 1958), Among further contributions to the subject
are Sigmund Skard, "Else H!ZIsts doktordisputas am Hedda Gabler," Edda
(1960),24; Erik 0sterud, "Lenestolsymbolet i ' Hedda Gabler,' " Ibsentlrbok
( 196o-{i2), 82-92; Northam, " Hedda Gabler," Ibsemirbok ( 1968-{i9), 60-81;
and James H. Clancy, " Hedda Gabler: Poetry in Action and in Object," in
Studies ill Theatre alld Drama: Essays in HOllOI' of Hubert C. Heffner, ed.
Oscar G. Brockett (The Hague, 1972),64-72.
2 Ibsen, Samlede Verker, ed. Francis Bull, Halvdan Koht, and Didrik Arup Seip,
22 vols. (Oslo, 1928-57), 11 :305. All translations from this edition are my
own; volume and page numbers will be cited in the text.
3 In a stimulating discussion of Ibsen's use of the scenic space, Freddie Rokem
EVERT SPRINCHORN
(Theatrical Space inlbsell, Chekhov and Stril1dberg: Public Forms of Privacy

[Ann Arbor, 1986]) sees the inner room as Hedda's own place and as the focal
point of the play, a "metaphor for an inner self she is unwilling to share with
anyone" (23), The application of this metaphor leads one to expect that the
intimate dialogue between Hedda and L~vborg would take place in the inner
room and not downstage. Rokem argues that Ibsen could not place them where
logic requires them to be because they would he overheard by Tesman and
Thea, and so Ibsen had to give them some privacy by hiding them behind a
photograph album. But surely Ibsen could have found a way around this techni-
cal difficulty if he had wanted to put Hedda and Lf)vborg in the inner room. It
is more likely that Ibsen desired to make use of the time axis of the stage as he
imagined it. When Hedda and L¢vborg talk about their comradeship, they be-
long in spirit to the present and the future and are trying to break with the past.
4 Wolfgang Brachvogel, "'Hedda Gabler' in Munchen," Freie Biihne fiir mod-
ernes Leben, 2 (r891), 117- 18; Elisabeth Davidsen, Henrik Ibsen og Del
kongelige Teater (Copenhagen, 1980), 177.
5 Ibsen, Hedda Gabler, French trans. M. Prozor (Paris, 1892),5.
6 On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. 1. Hollingdale
(New York, 1969),84 (essay 2, section 16).
7 Auguste Ehrhard, Henrik Ibsen et Ie theatre contemporaill (paris, 1892), 458.
Ibsen praised this study of his works: "M. Ehrhard a fait tout un livre, qui ne
sera pas, certes, de sitot depasse" (Maurice Bigeon. "Profits scandinaves: Hen-
rik Ibsen," Le Figaro, 4 January 1893, 3).
8 The similarities between the two plays were immediately apparent to knowl-
edgeable critics; for example, Henrik Jreger, "Hedda Gablers forhold til tid-
Iigere skuespil af Henrik Ibsen," Folkebladet (Christiania, 1891), #2; Jreger,
Henrik Ibsen og hailS vrerker (Christiania and Copenhagen, 1892), 190; and
Emil Reich, "Ibsen und das Recht der Frau," lahresbericht des Vereins fiir
erweitert Frauenbildung (Vienna, 1891).
9 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. 1. Dover Wilson (Cambridge, 1960), 102.
IO On the significance of the vine leaves, see Josef Faalund, Hellrik Ibsen og
alltikken (Oslo, 1943), 74; Sigmund Skard and Paulus Svendsen, • 'Else H!I)sts
doklordisputas am Hedda Gabler," Edda, 1960, pp. 25-28, 49-50; Lis Jacob-
sen, "En trilogi: Studie over tre Ibsen'ske trylleord," Edda (1960), 53- 70; John
Northam, "Hedda Gabler"; Eugene Webb, "The Radical Irony of Hedda Gab-
ler," Model'll Language Quarterly, 31 (I970), 53-63.
I J Ibsen's friend Ludvig Dietrichsen describes the Christmas banquet in Rome and
attributes the source of the phrase "vine leaves in his hair" to Ibsen's recollec-
tion of the occasion (Dietrichsen. Svundne Tider, vol. 1: Bergen og Christiania
i 40-og 50-Am'ene, 2nd ed. [Christiania, 1913], 366).
12 Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in drei Banden, ed. Karl Schlechta, 2nd ed. (Mu-
nich, 19(0),2:1025.
13 For a discussion of the H!I)ffding-Brandes controversy and its impact on Ibsen,
see Evert Sprinchom, "Ibsen and the Immoralists... . Comparative literature"

Studies, 9 ( 1972), 58- 79.
14 See Harald Beyer, Nietzsche 08 Nordell, 2 vals. (Bergen, 1957-59),2:36.
15 E. F. Lochman, Popultere opsatser (Christiania, l89I ). 214. Among others who
remarked on the Nietzschean aspects of Hedda Gabler were Jules Lemaitre,
J
Impressions de theatre, 6th series (Paris, 1898),49--62 (a review that' appeared
originall y in December 189 1); I.A. Eklund, " Om ' Hedda Gabler' och 'esteti·
cism,' .. Svensk Tidskr;ft, 2 ( 1892), 606-16; and James Huneker, !'conoclas,s: A
Book of Dramatists (New York, 1905), 101. Else H\i1st in her monograph· on tile·
play viewed Hedda as the representative of a higher type of humanity;"S. Skard~
rebutted her argument (" H!iJsts doktordisputas," 30-33).
16 Quoted in F.A. Lea, The Tragic Philosopher: A Study of Friedrich Nietzsche-
(London, 1957), 3 19.
17 Ehrhard, Henrik IbseIl, 456.
18 " Die in beauty," unlike "vine leaves in his hair, " wou ld probably not: have
caused any laughter or snickering in the theatre. The phrase would' have. been,
fam iliar, resou nding with echoes of recent sensational events. Only th e ~ year
before, in 1889. the circus performer Elvira Madigan and her married lover,
Count Six ten Sparre of Sweden, had kill ed themselves in an idyllic selling in
Denmark. preferring to die in beauty rather than to live a life that could· never
be free of scandal. Their tragic fate was the subject of newspaper stories and a
popular ball ad: Their decision to put their love above and beyond me reach of
social conventi on was inspired by the MayerIing tragedy. Only six' months
earli er, Archduke Rupert, the crown prince of Austria, had killed the woman he
loved, Marie Vetsera. and then shot himself, when the emperor had ordered him.
to end his liaison with her. An early commentator remarked that the audience
upon hearing " die in beauty" would recall all the " theatrical death arrang e~
ments" of recent years (Eklund, 6 13). On the other hand, Max Harden, who
read the playas undiluted satire, said that laughter was the only proper re-
sponse to Hedda's asking Uvborg to die "in beauty." Harden also found
humour in I.41vborg's accidental death in "ein lusriges Haus" (M[axlH[arden1,_
"Hedda Gabler und ihre Kritiker," Die Gegenwar(, 39:8 (21 Feb. 181)1);.
12 5- 26.)
19 0" the Genealogy of Morals, 40-4 1 (essay I , section II ).

The Unspoken Text: Hedda Gabler

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The Unspoken Text in Hedda Gabler

Before the advent of realistic drama, a playwright found no difficulty in

Modem Drama , 36 (1993) 353

room is comparatively dark. Dominating that side of the room is a large

exemplary Philistine, the bourgeoisie at its worst, pharisaical, self-serving, and

century. The culture-Philistines were, he said, responsible for the absence of

playing on the piano.

(Theatrical Space inlbsell, Chekhov and Stril1dberg: Public Forms of Privacy

see Evert Sprinchom, "Ibsen and the Immoralists... . Comparative literature"

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