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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 huge, 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, shades into the disreputable night world
of Miss Diana. Diana and her ladies rule the disreputable, 'offstage'
night world of sexual orgy; whereas Hedda rules this scene's '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, along with Diana, in court. Hedda, with her military
discipline and restraint is the Apollonian counterpart of the wildly
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 open up our own 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 also 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 by archetypal forces and
powers, the reproachful and half-forgotten ghosts that have shaped our
modern identities.
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