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Hedda
Gabler
 Hedda
Gabler is haunted by other texts. Its almost claustrophobically
confined scene re-enacts the pagan-Christian collision of Emperor
and Galilean, and figures and themes from that panoramic, historical
drama invade the Tesman household, transposed to the modern world of
alienation. The 'Christian' world of Tesman, the aunts and Thea Elvsted
shades into the ambiguous Judge Brack, one of Ibsen's many 'satanic'
figures. ('It is a treat to see you by daylight" Hedda greets him
in Act One). On the 'pagan' side, Hedda, her military father and Eilert
Løvborg, shade into the disreputable world of Miss Diana. Diana
and her ladies rule the disreputable, 'offstage' night world of sexual
orgy, whereas Hedda rules the 'day world' of social propriety.
Løvborg accuses Diana of the crime 'killing the child' committed
by Hedda. He is shot in Diana's apartment with Hedda's pistol, and Judge
Brack threatens Hedda with the possibility of her appearing in court
alongside Diana. Hedda, with her military discipline and restraint is
the Apollonian counterpart to the Dionysian Løvborg whom she
envisages with "vine leaves in his hair".
Such design throughout the play (and the Cycle
as a whole) does not detract from its human urgency and appeal: but
we get only a fraction of Ibsen's plays if we read them as photographic
realism instead of as imaginative poems of universal dimensions. Instead
of seeing him small scale we need to liberate our faculties of perception
to fathom his full intention. The action of Hedda Gabler is a
great reckoning in a little room; Ibsen's realist scene is occult, haunted
ground, providing a more adequate space than strict realism for Ibsen's
poetic imagination; and a more adequate portrait of our human identity.
"Art." wrote Ibsen's son, Sigurd, "gives liberty of action
to forces and possibilities to which life does not grant the chance
of coming into their rights." The characters on Ibsen's stage are
animated, not at all solemnly, by archetypal forces and powers, the
reproachful and half-forgotten ghosts that have shaped our modern identities.
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