Hedda's Quest for Beauty
 

In many ways, the character of Hedda seems ahead of her time: she finds the gendered expectations of the time stifling, she craves freedom and despises domesticity. In all these aspects, she anticipates and embodies the spirit the New Woman of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century (delve more into that here). But in many other ways, she also seems kind of old-fashioned in her quest for Beauty (with a capital B) and her almost naïvely idealist belief in the intrinsic value of beauty. She is something of a Romantic (with a capital R)! In a brilliant essay titled "Hedda’s Silences: Beauty and Despair in Hedda Gabler" the feminist literary critic Toril Moi makes precisely this point - to really understand Hedda, we must understand her desperate quest for Beauty.

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Here's an extended excerpt from the essay:

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The Postmodern Problem with Hedda

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In recent years, Hedda Gabler has been one of Ibsen’s most frequently produced plays. In the United States, some of the most noticed productions have had great stars in the part of Hedda: over the years, I have managed to catch Annette Bening in Los Angeles, Kate Burton in New York, and Cate Blanchett in Brooklyn. Although Cate Blanchett is an uncommonly thoughtful actress, the Australian production of Hedda Gabler in which she starred was a mess. Blanchett’s Hedda was too witty, too exasperated, too impatient, and far too keen to fling her body around on every available sofa or chair. There was a lot of plumping of cushions and fidgeting with furniture. The pace was frenetic, to the point that Hedda’s burning of Løvborg’s manuscript became just another hectic event. At the end of the play, Hedda killed herself in full view of the audience. Predictably, the audience was neither moved nor shocked. While less frantic, the productions with Bening and Burton turned Hedda into a cynical, world-weary deliverer of caustic one-liners, more likely to kill her husband than herself.

 

Missing in all these productions were the despair, the yearning for beauty, the depth of soul that give Ibsen’s Hedda her complexity and grandeur. I am inclined to see such high-profile productions of Hedda Gabler as symptoms of a postmodern anxiety about seriousness and deep feelings. Such productions respond to what the Norwegian writer Dag Solstad calls “the 19th century’s quite specific form of seriousness” by trying to repress it.Turning the play into fast and brilliant surface, such directors reveal their fear that Hedda Gabler is no longer relevant, that contemporary audiences simply won’t be able to relate to Hedda’s existential despair or her idealist yearning for beauty.

 

Such a postmodern emptying out of the play would have made no sense to the women who cried and moaned during the first matinée performances in London in the early 1890s.“Hedda is all of us,” one of them declared. Postmodern directors, however, do their utmost to block identification, usually because they take as gospel the highly questionable idea that someone who identifies with a character necessarily must take that character to be real and thus fail to realize that she is dealing with theatre […] But if we aren’t capable of seeing the world as Hedda sees it, if only for a moment, we won’t be able to acknowledge her plight of soul and body. If this– trying to see the world from the point of view of another– is identification, we need it to understand the play. Above all, we need it to understand why Hedda kills herself.

 

Beautiful Freedom: Hedda's Idealism

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To rise to the challenge of Ibsen’s play, directors (and critics too) must manage to make Hedda’s plight– and her talk of beauty– significant to contemporary audiences. A truly brilliant production of Hedda Gabler must make us realize that even if– or rather, particularly if– Hedda had become a general or a prime minister, she would still have felt unfree, isolated, incapable of love.

 

Hedda’s dreams can’t be satisfied by a career alone. Her yearning for beauty reveals that she is after greater things. She is, for example, revulsed to learn that Løvborg has not killed himself cleanly and beautifully. When she learns that he did not shoot himself in the head (as she herself will do), she assumes that he must have shot himself in the chest instead and exclaims, “I am saying that there is beauty in all this.” This line isolates Hedda, for neither her husband nor Thea Elvsted is capable of understanding whatshe means. While Tesman simply exclaims, “Beauty! What an idea!”; Thea Elvsted recriminates,“Oh, Hedda, how can you talk about beauty in such a thing?” When Hedda finally discovers that Løvborg died in a brawl that ended with a gunshot wound to his genitals, she is disgusted: “What is it, this– this curse– that everything I touch turns ridiculous and vile?” As I have argued elsewhere, Hedda’s horror of det lave [the low] (“vile,” in Fjelde’s translation) is a “horror of the ordinary and the everyday, which she here associates with farce (the ridiculous combined with the low). [In fact,] throughout the last two acts of the play, Hedda behaves like a producer and director desperately trying to stage a sublime idealist tragedy entitled‘Løvborg’s Death.” Nowhere in the play is the clash between Hedda’s dreams of sublime beauty and the ridiculous ugliness of reality more stark than here.

 

For Hedda, to yearn for beauty is to yearn for freedom. Her concept of beauty is at once existential and aesthetic, as it was for Schiller and the German Romantics. For them, as for Hedda, artistic beauty– in poetry, for example– was the incarnation of human freedom. Ibsen himself indicated as much when he noted that “In Hedda, there is a core of deep poetry. But her surroundings scare her. The very thought of becoming ridiculous” (my translation). If Hedda had lived in 1800, she might have been able to voice her yearnings without fear of ridicule. Her tragedy is that she is a radical idealist in 1890, at a time when her ideals have long since become obsolete.

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You can read the full essay here.

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