Ibsen’s development as a playwright can only be understood in terms of the cultural battle for Norwegian independence. Up until 1814 Norway had been ruled by Denmark, and even then remained in a union with Sweden, subordinated to a foreign King and unable to deal with foreign affairs. Ibsen himself puts emphasis on the libertarian effect of revolution elsewhere in Europe: as he remarked in the Preface to a reprinting of Catiline in 1875, his first play was written in “exciting and stormy times. The February Revolution of 1848, the revolutions in Hungary and elsewhere, the Prussian-Danish war over Schleswig and Holstein – all this had a powerful and formative effect on my development.” But the struggle for a Norwegian culture was even more central. During the first half of the century Norwegian art and literature remained almost exclusively Danish, while (as in Ireland before the Irish Renaissance of the early twentieth century) the Norwegian language itself was largely restricted to the peasants.
It is only fairly recently that historians have analyzed the social and cultural aspect of national development, which forms the context for Ibsen’s writing. Significantly, the areas considered crucial by historians are also integral elements in Ibsen’s early plays: the recording of folklore and the historical glorification of the Vikings (which became the subject of several heroic tragedies), and the development of the Norwegian language (the first grammar being published when Ibsen was just 20 years old). From the first Ibsen was associated with cultural independence, being appointed as resident dramatist, then director at the first theatre to perform in Norwegian, the new Norske Theater in Bergen.
In choosing to write his poems and plays in Norwegian, Ibsen was making a political statement. At the same time, once he began writing naturalistic drama, he ensured that his plays were available for the world repertoire by having them immediately translated into German.
His early historical dramas may have had nationalistic themes, however his study of history (including Emperor and Galilean) also formed a basis for his naturalistic plays. As he commented just after completing A Doll’s House: “An extensive knowledge of history is indispensable to an author; without it he is not in a position to understand the conditions of his own age, or to judge men, their motives and actions, except in the most incomplete and superficial manner” (Letter to John Paulsen, 20 September 1879). His letters, and later public speeches, also show that as he turned to naturalistic work, with its inherent criticism of society, he was less concerned with nationalism than individual freedom. One of his comments on the proposed new Norwegian flag is typical:
It is said that Norway is an independent state, but I do not value much this liberty and independence so long as I know that the individuals are neither free nor independent. And they surely are not so with us. There do not exist in the whole country of Norway twenty-five free and independent personalities …
Let the union sign remain, but take the monkhood sign out of the minds; take out the sign of prejudice, narrow-mindedness, wrong-headed notions, dependence and the belief in groundless authority – so that individuals may come to sail under their own flag. The one they are sailing under now is neither pure, nor their own.
(Letter to Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, July 1879)
Indeed Ibsen’s dissatisfaction with Norwegian society had already led to self-imposed exile in 1864 (25 years before A Doll’s House).
The 1830s was a period in which a compromise was prepared. In three cultural fields important work was started which led to what has been labelled the “national breakthrough” in the 1840s. History became a science dedicated to the building up of an independent, national past. The first attempts at collecting folklore, folk-songs and folk-tales were made, and the possibility of creating a proper Norwegian language was discussed.
History became the handmaiden of nationalism. The historians Rudolf Keyser and Peter Andreas Munch established what was to be labelled by Danish colleagues “The Norwegian historical school”. Keyser (1803–1864) was the theorist. In 1828 he gave his first lectures at the University, and maintained that Norway was populated from the north – an old idea, as we remember – while most of the Swedes and the Danes were “Goths”, coming from the south and even being conquered by the northern race later on. He found his evidence in comparative linguistics. The quest for a separate “ethnic”, in Anthony Smith’s words, had started.
The instrumentality of the immigration theory in nation-building was clear. The Norwegians were seen as descendants of one race, with a common language, legal code and religion. From this “mother-race” the Norwegians had developed into a people with its own “national character” and “an undiluted Norwegian spirit (Volks-geist)”.
This theory, which by the way was contested also in Norway, was taken up by P. A. Munch, the greatest Norwegian historian of his time. It underpinned the Norwegian claim to be the true “owner” of the old Nordic language and culture, notably the sagas. The Norwegians fought hard for these and other historical treasures: “No right of property deserves more to be respected among nations than the right each has to its historical relics. To deprive a nation of these, is almost as unjust as to deprive it of part of its territory”. And this generation indeed made an almost superhuman effort to secure these treasures for the nation.
Also, other treasures had survived into the present. Folk-tales, songs and fairy-tales had long been the object of scientific interest in other countries, including Denmark and Sweden. The first collection of folk legends was not published in Norway until 1833. It was an edition more in the tradition of the 18th century, exposing superstition in a dry language so as to expel it. In the years to come other important works were published: folk-songs collected by Jørgen Moe, M. B. Landstad and their informant Olea Crøger, daughter of a priest in Telemark and a great collector, and folk-tales by the same Jørgen Moe and P. G. Asbjørnsen.
[…]
The third field for cultural nation-building was in language. Here too, lines of demarcation were drawn in the 1830s. Henrik Wergeland wanted to enrich his prose and poetry with everyday expressions and words taken from the spoken language, which in many ways differed from the printed language, which was pure Danish. He met with fierce opposition from P. A. Munch. To create a genuine Norwegian language, he maintained, one had to go to those dialects which were less changed in the course of time, and which could bridge the gap with the old Norse language. This historical, etymological approach came to influence development immensely. Very soon a young genius took up the task of creating a Norwegian language. Ivar Aasen, son of a peasant on the west coast, started to collect samples of dialects in the vernacular, and also to prepare a grammar to create a common language. His motives were both national and social. Language was “the most distinctive mark of a nation”, and Norway needed a language of its own. But the elements of such a language he found in his own social class, the rural population. He wanted to give it a language of its own. He was himself an autodidact, and declined to take his baccalaureate. In his personal conduct he underlined his peasant upbringing, never hanging his hat on the peg on the wall, but dropping it on the floor behind the door. His self-conceit was, however, mixed with true modesty, which perhaps explains why he gave up his own first plan to base a written Norwegian language on the existing dialects. He succumbed to the theories of P. A. Munch, who became his friend and mentor, and modelled his language after historical etymological principles, making it archaic and much less suited to the task he had set himself of creating a language that was easy to understand for the uneducated masses. Nevertheless, his Norwegian grammar, first published in 1848, as well as his dictionary of 1850 confirmed his theory that the vernacular was founded on the old Norse language, and was not, as hitherto believed, a distortion of Danish.
In the two decades from 1830 to 1850 the elements on which to build a Norwegian national identity had thus been established: a scientifically argued theory of a separate origin as a separate race, with its own territory and its own culture and institutions and “character”, a documentation of a rich cultural heritage of music and orally transmitted literature hidden among the rural population, and a theory of a Norwegian language which had survived also among this population, going back to the Middle Ages, that distant but glorious time in history before the union with Denmark.
All this gave occasion for pride, and in the year 1849 the national enthusiasm exploded, so to speak, in the capital. In a series of so-called “tableaux”, the daughters of Christiania acted as peasant girls against a background of curtains painted by Norwegian artists whom the revolutions of 1848 had forced back to Norway, while folk-music was played on the Hardanger fiddle and a choir of 100 men performed songs composed by musicians educated in Leipzig, but inspired by the “Norwegian tone” of the folk-songs.
These evening performances in 1849 were later on seen as the culmination of an epoch imprinted with national feeling.
It was a time in the latter part of the 1840s when we, who were then young, so to speak realized that we – in the concrete and not only in the abstract – had a country (Vaterland), when we discovered that our people possessed a beautiful, big, common treasure of history, tales, songs, music, language, poetry and art, which all at once made it a cultured people (Kulturvolk) with a distinctive national stamp.
This was the verdict of an acute observer, the art historian Lorentz Dietrichson.
[…]
The 1860s saw the rise of a new wave of nationalism.
It started with a crisis in the relationship with Sweden. Toward the end of the 1850s the government decided to do away with one of the marks of inferiority which had been much resented, the provision that the king could place a Swedish governor in Norway. Nobody had occupied this post since the 1830s, and the abolishment of the office was considered in Norway to be uncontroversial, an impression which had been confirmed by the king himself. But the Swedish government said no. This created an intense national animosity, and once more a series of questions concerning the nature of the union were raised. […]
This went together with other conflicts. Scandinavism was revitalized, but instead of uniting the elite, it divided it. In the wake of 1864, when Denmark was left to fight alone against Germany, some wanted to strengthen the bonds between Sweden and Norway, to protect the Scandinavian Peninsula. Others insisted on Denmark joining in. The split between “two-state Scandinavism” and “three-state Scandinavism” was seen as a conflict of nationalism. […]
On this political background a nationalist revival took place. It centred around the same old questions: history and language.
Even though many of the theories of the Norwegian historical school had been abandoned, the problem of how to interpret the past was still there. The idea that the union with Denmark represented a “false soldering” between two parts of a broken golden ring – the Norwegian history – once put forward by Henrik Wergeland, was challenged by younger historians. “Who are our true ancestors?” asked the historian Mikael Birkeland in a speech to the Student Association in Christiania in 1866. Could it be denied that the economic development had been favourable during the union with Denmark? Was it not true that commerce and the cities had played a great part in this economic growth? Had not Norway benefited from the contact with other nations? Were our forefathers during those 400 years of civilizing development not our true fathers?
But this interpretation was not echoed by the new, radical intellectuals who gathered around the young historian Ernst Sars. The more “materialist” interpretations of conservative historians met with an idealist history-writing, which was for the rest of the century – and far into the next – to dominate the understanding of the past, stressing the link with the glorious Middle Ages through the mediation of the rural, peasant population. The bureaucracy was seen as “aliens” and “colonists”. The task was to “demolish foreign elements and rebuild national unity.”
The radical writers and publicists who gathered around Sars, also took up the cause of a national language. It was a cultural movement at first. Language societies were formed, uniting radical urbans and rural intellectuals, and a publishing house was established. In the course of the century the question was politicized. A series of laws strengthened the position of the “landsmål”. In 1885 both languages became official.
*
Another crucial element in Ibsen’s plays, which only became central once he turned to naturalistic subjects, was the position of women. Writing to Camilla Collett, one of the earliest and most influential advocates of women’s rights through her novels The Sheriff’s Daughter (Amtmandens Dotre, 1855) and From the Camp of the Dumb (Fra de Stummes Lejr, 1877), Ibsen recorded his “warm, complete sympathy with you and your life-task” and made a clear connection between literature and political change:
The ideas and visions with which you have presented the world are not of the kind destined merely to lead a barren life in literature. Living reality will seize on them and build upon them. That this may happen soon, soon, I too wish with all my heart.
(Letter to Camilla Collett, August 1881)
As the first historical survey below indicates, the situation of women in Scandinavia had already become a subject of debate by 1854 (the date when Norwegian daughters were given equal inheritance rights to sons). The way ideals of femininity frustrated self-expression and isolated women from public life forms the context for Ibsen’s characters such as Hedda Gabler. Similarly, although male guardianship of unmarried women was abolished in Norway in 1863, and after 1866 women had the right to earn an independent living, the situation facing unmarried women was still bleak, giving added weight to both Mrs. Linde’s attitude and Nora’s decision in A Doll’s House. In addition Norwegian nationalism itself contained a symbolic representation of gender, which denied equality. For instance, at the 17 May celebration of statehood in 1827 the procession carried paintings of Nora – a female symbol of the Norwegian nation – while the national anthem composed by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson and first performed on 17 May 1864(Ja, vi elsker dette landet – “Yes, we love this country”) codified different roles for men and women. As a recent historical study argues,
The song reflected the roles assigned to each gender in the construction of the national home: the strong father protecting his house, actively supported by his wife … Women, however, were given another activity as well: “all that the fathers have fought for, the mothers have wept for.” Against this background, it seemed natural that men, as fathers and defenders of the nation, had the right to take part in political decisions. Men were obviously associated with the nation, whereas women had a more ambiguous role. As mothers they had their special function in the national home, but to take part in active combat did not comply with their femininity …
This was clearly expressed, for example, in the debate in the Storting in 1890 about the first constitutional proposal for female suffrage. One argument cited against female suffrage was “the word ‘public’ – for how fine and ironic language often is – there is nothing to prevent us from saying that all of us, we are public men, but we know of course that if we linked the word public with the name of a woman, it would be the utmost disgrace … the veil is a garment that belongs to the woman, but never to the man, and whoever tears a woman’s veil is guilty of a shameless deed” [Bishop J. C. Heuch]. The idea that women had no place in the public sphere could scarcely have been expressed more clearly.
(Ida Blom, “Nation – Class – Gender,” Scandinavian Journal of History, 1966)
The Norwegian Women’s Rights League was founded in 1884, just five years after the first performance of A Doll’s House, and from 1886 on published a biweekly woman’s suffrage magazine, Nylaende. When they invited Ibsen to address their Festival in 1898, it was in recognition of the role his drama had played in fostering public awareness of the position of women in Norwegian society (as well as generally in Europe). That Festival marked the campaign for the first constitutional proposal to give women the vote, which reached parliament in 1890. But it was typical that his speech rejected any specific gender bias – just as he earlier denied the relevance of national liberation.
The Scandinavian Countries 1720–1865: The Rise of the Middle Classes (vol. II), Kennikat Press, 1972
The exploitation of Danish and Swedish wives, daughters, and servants by the men aroused the wholesouled anger of Mary Godwin, and the submis-siveness of the women excited her contempt. But her description of the hardships of female servants was hardly as graphic as that of the Swedish economists Agardh and Ljungberg, written in 1854:
The servant woman’s duty is … to wait on every member of the household; to run every one’s errands, and the language of her contract stipulates that, “she shall do all that is to be done.” She must keep the rooms in order and tend the fires, carry wood up all the stairs, cook, bake, and brew; she must make, patch, and wash everyone’s dirty clothes, often standing knee-deep in cold water; she must scrub the floors on hands and knees. She is expected to brush the men’s clothing and clean their shoes. In the country districts she is sent out upon the fields in the heat, – and in several provinces only in her underwear – to work as strenuously as the men. Furthermore, she must make the beds for the master’s family, and even for the male servants, conduct the masters to their bedrooms and there apply all her strength … to drag off their boots. Finally it became the lot of woman in Sweden to serve as odalisks at every inn and restaurant in order to attract customers. In short, woman in the North is the household beast of burden and the slave of man. We are so used to it that it does not arouse our shame.
Women of the middle classes although spared from drudgery, were even more cut off from really functional activity. They were either more intimate servants or decorative hothouse plants. If their fathers and husbands were rich enough to keep them in indolence, they might be given excellent for-malistic educations, but they were separated from the world and from life by a Chinese wall of proprieties which usually served to frustrate any desires for active self expression. The wall was built of modesty, helplessness, delicacy, gratitude, and a chastity valued the more as it approached ignorance. The supreme virtue was obedience. As far as their means permitted, the men of the lower middle classes demanded of their women the same behavior. Never so much as then was home the woman’s place; never did poets so ecstatically eulogize the “beautiful, weaker sex.” […]
If the lot of the daughter and the wife was drab, that of the unmarried woman was incredibly dreary. She was not even ornamental. Where she could perform some useful work in the house of her relatives she was able to maintain her self-respect and was often welcome. Otherwise she must become a burden, or seek refuge in some sort of foundation, or take employment as a servant. For women of the middle classes it was an almost insuperable degradation to become a servant. Refuges after the pattern of the Catholic convents – in Denmark they even continued to be called convents – were maintained by endowments, but were generally open only to members of the nobility and the bourgeoisie. The unmarried women of the common people had to shift for themselves. Agardh and Ljungberg estimated that Sweden had 270,000 of them in 1854, of whom about one fourth had given birth to illegitimate children.
Very few of our readers have any conception of the extent of the misery and the consequent temptations, to which Swedish womanhood is at present exposed.
[…]
In Norway, Camilla Collett’s book Amtmandens dötre (1855) marked the real beginning of the Norwegian feminist problem. Camilla Collett (1813– 1895), the gifted daughter of Nicolai Wergeland and sister of Henrik Wergeland, measured her girl’s wits with the best in Norway and held her own. No wonder she fretted under the conventional restraints. As early as 1833, she was clear in her own mind on the intellectual equality of woman with man, though neither her brother nor J. S. Welhaven, the man she loved, agreed. In her diary she recorded her sense of frustration.
My life passes uselessly and without importance, suffocated by the eternal question whether this is really the kind of existence to which I am destined. It awakens me suddenly at night, I arise with it in the morning, and when I put on my night-cap in the evening and contemplate what I have done the whole day since I took it off I am saddened and ask myself why I dress at all, why I do not always wear it, for that would be most appropriate to such a night-cap life:
The experiences of her youth were interwoven with happiness and grief. Though freedom marked her father’s liberal household, she could not escape the constraints of an illiberal society; she fell passionately in love with her brother’s bitter rival, Welhaven, and, already torn between conflicting loyalties, lost her lover in part, at least, because her open adoration offended his sense of feminine propriety. Later Camilla Collett married the understanding and honorable professor of jurisprudence, John Collett, whom she could respect but never fully love. Hence, when she wrote Amtmandens dötre, she drew from her own experience the devastating realism with which she indicted the tyranny of convention over Norwegian women. Love and marriage was woman’s career? Beautiful. But what woman was free to marry for love? In this and in her subsequent work the influence of George Sand is manifest. Though a bitter and disappointed woman, Camilla Collett made two important contributions to Norwegian culture: she inaugurated the woman’s movement, and she ranks as the first pioneer in literary realism. Amtmandens dötre was at first denounced as an ugly book, even by Bjørnson, both for “feminine immodesty” and for its realism. But three of Norway’s greatest literary artists have readily acknowledged their indebtedness to its authoress, namely Jonas Lie, Alexander Kielland, and Henrik Ibsen. In Ibsen’s mind it planted the seed of A Doll’s House.
Had it been left to the women to win their battles by their own pressure, nothing would have been won before 1865, for it is hardly possible to speak of a woman’s movement until the early 1870’s. But, as has been said, there were more fundamental forces at work which caused the men to begin reform before the women themselves became active. As early as 1825 the draft of the reformed Swedish legal code, due to the efforts of J. G. Richert, proposed to make women independent of guardianship at the age of twenty-five. Significandy, the two lower chambers supported it, but the nobility and the clergy successfully resisted adoption. As late as 1854, Swedish law classified unmarried women as minors along with children and the insane. Finally, in the session of 1856–58, the riksdag adopted the proposition, but only with reservations. Unmarried Danish women were made independent of guardians in 1857, Norwegian in 1863.
The adoption of equal rights in inheritance for women and men is, in each country, usually described as the true beginning of legal emancipation. It came first in Sweden (1845), then in Norway (1854), and finally also in Denmark (1857).
[…]
A famous proposal by the city physician of Copenhagen, Dr. Paul Scheel, in 1810, to combat prostitution by affording women opportunities to engage in trades and crafts was defeated by the gilds. After 1830, however, the problem became increasingly acute. On the one hand people realized that, “However much there may be conceded to the woman in thought, song, and speeches, she is denied practically everything as long as she is denied a personal life work.” On the other, here were many who felt instinctively that “… the young woman who wants to earn a living represents an active social danger. She forecasts the twilight of many ancient gods. Beyond her lies a day when even the services of the wife do not belong to the husband but to herself.” The pressure of surplus women and the triumphant course of the capitalistic motive of profit proved too strong to resist, however, especially when the growing complexity of life and increasing emigration created a demand for female labor. Hence it is not strange to find occupational freedom extended to unmarried women as part of the larger movement to establish occupational freedom. The Danish law of 1857, the Swedish of 1864, and the Norwegian ones of 1842 and 1866 established the right of the unmarried woman to earn her living in any craft or trade. But this concession only began the struggle for the economic equality of woman with man.
Translated by Evert Sprinchorn
I am not a member of the Women’s Rights League. Whatever I have written has been without any conscious thought of making propaganda. I have been more the poet and less the social philosopher than people generally seem inclined to believe. I thank you for the toast, but must disclaim the honor of having consciously worked for the women’s rights movement. I am not even quite clear as to just what this women’s rights movement really is. To me it has seemed a problem of mankind in general. And if you read my books carefully you will understand this. True enough, it is desirable to solve the woman problem, along with all the others; but that has not been the whole purpose. My task has been the description of humanity. To be sure, whenever such a description is felt to be reasonably true, the reader will read his own feelings and sentiments into the work of the poet. These are then attributed to the poet; but incorrectly so. Every reader remolds the work beautifully and neatly, each according to his own personality. Not only those who write but also those who read are poets. They are collaborators. They are often more poetical than the poet himself.
With these reservations, let me thank you for the toast you have given me. I do indeed recognize that women have an important task to perform in the particular directions this club is working along. I will express my thanks by proposing a toast to the League for Women’s Rights, wishing it progress and success.
The task always before my mind has been to advance our country and to give our people a higher standard. To achieve this, two factors are important. It is for the mothers, by strenuous and sustained labor, to awaken a conscious feeling of culture and discipline. This feeling must be awakened before it will be possible to lift the people to a higher plane. It is the women who shall solve the human problem. As mothers they shall solve it. And only in that capacity can they solve it. Here lies a great task for woman. My thanks! And success to the League for Women’s Rights!
Each of Ibsen’s mature plays marks a new development. As he wrote in a tribute to Leopold Sacher-Masoch, “in these times every piece of creative writing should attempt to move the frontier markers” (1882). However, he repeatedly refers to the conceptual unity of his naturalistic plays – as in “I dare not go further than Ghosts … But Ghosts had to be written. After Nora, Mrs. Alving had to come” (Letter to Sophie Adlersparre, 24 June 1882). For Ibsen there was also an essential continuity, in the most general thematic terms, between his earlier heroic drama and his naturalistic work. Looking back on his first play, Catiline (completed in 1849), he commented: “Much that my later work concerns itself with – the conflict between one’s aims and one’s abilities, between what man purposes and what is actually possible, constituting at once both the tragedy and comedy of mankind and of the individual – is already vaguely intimated in this work” (Preface to Cataline, 1 February 1875). He had also adopted the stylistic principles associated with Naturalism while still engaged with heroic historical drama. Ibsen’s statement in writing to his English translator, Edmund Gosse, in January 1874 is often cited as programmatic for naturalistic drama:
The play is, as you must have observed, conceived in the most realistic style; the illusion I wished to produce was that of reality. I wished to produce the impression on the reader that what he was reading was something that had really happened. If I had employed verse, I should have counteracted my own intention and prevented the accomplishment of the task I had set myself. The many ordinary, insignificant characters whom I have intentionally introduced into the play would have become indistinct and indistinguishable from one another, if I had allowed them all to speak in the same rhythmical measure. We are no longer living in the days of Shakespeare. Among sculptors there is already talk of painting statues in the natural colours … I have no desire to see the Venus of Milo painted, but I would rather see the head of a negro executed in black than in white marble. Speaking generally the style must conform to the degree of ideality which pervades the representation. My new drama is no tragedy in the ancient acceptation; what I desired to depict were human beings, and therefore I would not let them talk the ‘language of the Gods’.
The play referred to is in fact Emperor and Galilean, set in ancient Rome and dealing with highly philosophical and religious issues. However, the general principles outlined are those that Ibsen followed in his subsequent plays dealing with contemporary society: the stress on modernity, the individualization of even minor characters, and the use of everyday language. At the same time, it should be noted that he emphasizes both the illusory nature of the impression of reality, and a degree of symbolism – e.g. the relative abstraction of using “natural” material (uni-colored marble) rather than detailed mimesis (representational painting). Writing to the director of Ghosts a decade later the same principles are restated. Ibsen insists that the “realism and ruthless honesty” in the “spirit and tone of the play” be rendered in the production, while the Swedish translation should make the dialogue “seem perfectly natural, and the manner of expression must differ from character to character … The effect of the play depends a great deal on making the spectator feel as if he were actually sitting, listening, and looking at events happening in real life” (Letter to August Lindberg, 1883). Responding to the “terrible uproar in the Scandinavian press” (Letter to Ludwig Passarge, 1881) Ibsen stressed the objectivity inherent in naturalistic presentation in an open letter:
They [the critics] endeavour to make me responsible for the opinions expressed by some of the characters in the play. And yet there is not in the whole book a single opinion that can be laid to account of the author … The method in itself, the technique which determined the form of the work, entirely precluded the author’s appearing in the speeches. My intention was to produce the impression in the mind of the reader that he was experiencing something real. Now nothing would more effectively prevent such an impression than the insertion of the author’s private opinions in the dialogue …
And they say that the book preaches nihilism. It does not. It preaches nothing at all. It merely points out that there is a ferment of nihilism under the surface, at home as elsewhere.
(Morgenbladet, 14 January 1882)
However, this claim to objectivity was recognized as a “cowardly” evasion by Strindberg (in a letter to Edvard Brandes, 18 January 1882) and by Brandes. Like any other dramatist, a naturalistic playwright’s opinions determine choice of subject and dramatic focus, and are expressed through structure and use of symbols.
As his letters show, Ibsen exercised control over the casting of his plays in Scandinavia (and to a lesser extent in Germany). He also advised directors on characterization and the way characters should be played, the setting and particularly the lighting, even the blocking of key scenes. So for The Wild Duck in 1884, he instructs Lindberg:
I have supposed Hjalmar will be played by Reimers. This part must definitely not be rendered with any touch of parody nor with the faintest suggestion that the actor is aware that there is anything funny about his remarks … His sentimentality is genuine, his melancholy charming in its way – not a bit of affectation …
The lighting too, has its significance; it differs from act to act and is calculated to correspond to the basic mood that characterizes each of the five acts … [in A Doll’s House too Ibsen’s lighting was keyed to the emotional tone of the action, with a gradual transition from brightness to deep darkness.] When Hedvig has shot herself, she should be placed on the couch in such a way that her feet are downstage, so that her right hand holding the pistol can hang down.
Similarly, for Ghosts in 1886 he describes the interior of a Norwegian country house to Duke Georg of Meiningen:
The living rooms of the oldest family house of this type are sometimes covered with coloured, dark wallpaper. Below the paper the walls are lined with simple wainscotting … The stoves are big and massive, generally of cast iron. The furniture is kept to the style of the First Empire; however, the colours are consistently darker.
And he also gives explicit instructions to individual actors, as for Sofie Reimers in the 1887 production of Rosmersholm:
… carefully observe what the other persons say about Rebecca. In earlier times our actors often committed the great mistake of studying their parts in isolation and without paying sufficient attention to the character’s position in and connection with the work as a whole …
No declamation! No theatrical emphases! No pomposity at all! Give each mood credible, true to life expression. Do not ever think of this or that actress you may have seen.
Such comments display both the degree to which Ibsen’s practical experience as a theatre-director informs the writing of his plays, and the way he intended his naturalistic principles to be carried through in the staging.
But his references to Ghosts as a “book” and to “readers” of the play are a recognition that the major influence of his work came through publication, rather than stage performance. His first naturalistic play, The Pillars of Society, was published in Norway a month before its first production, and had already sold 6,000 copies, with a second printing of 4,000 copies being required within two months. In the English-speaking countries the effect was even more marked. The first play by Ibsen to reach the London stage was The Pillars of Society, given a single matinee in 1880. By 1892 five other plays had been staged in England; Ghosts and Rosmersholm (two performances each), The Lady from the Sea (three performances), Hedda Gabler (ten matinees), plus A Doll’s House (one week, but extended to 24 performances, in 1889) – though A Doll’s House had also been presented in two short-lived adaptations, Breaking a Butterfly (1884) and Nora (1885). Up to 1893 fewer than 10,000 people in England can have seen staged performances of any play by Ibsen. By contrast, as William Archer pointed out,
The Pillars of Society, Ghosts and An Enemy of the People were published in a shilling volume [in 1879] … up to the end of 1892 Mr. Walter Scott had sold 14,367 copies. In 1890 and 1891 the same publisher issued an authorized uniform edition of Ibsen’s prose dramas in five volumes, at three, and sixpence each. Of these volumes up to the end of 1892, 16,834 copies had been sold. Thus, Mr. Walter Scott alone has issued (in round numbers) thirty-one thousand volumes … and each volume contains three plays. Thus we find that one publisher alone has placed in circulation ninety-three thousand plays by Ibsen. Other publishers have issued single-volume editions of A Doll’s House, Ghosts, Rosmersholm, The Lady from the Sea, Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder. … Thus, I think, we are well within the mark in estimating that one hundred thousand prose dramas by Ibsen have been bought by the English-speaking public in the course of the past four years. Is there a parallel in the history of publishing for such a result in the case of translated plays? Putting Shakespeare in Germany out of the question (and he has been selling, not for four years, but for a century), I doubt whether any translated dramas have ever sold in such quantities.
(“The Mausoleum of Ibsen,” Fortnightly Review, 1 July 1893)
The official view of Ibsen in England was still the one expressed by E.F.S. Piggott, the Examiner of Stage Plays, in 1892:
I have studied Ibsen’s plays pretty carefully, and all the characters seem to me to be morally deranged. All the heroines are dissatisfied spinsters who look on marriage as a monopoly, or dissatisfied married women in a chronic state of rebellion … as for the men, they are all rascals or imbeciles.
(Testimony to the 1892 Select Committee on Censorship)
However, given such figures – and following Janet Achurch’s success in the extended run of A Doll’s House – it is perhaps not surprising that in 1893 there were successful productions of The Master Builder, Beerbohm Tree’s An Enemy of the People, and an Ibsen “season” at the Opera Comique. From that point on, Ibsen’s naturalistic plays became a standard feature of the English-speaking repertoire, as they had a decade earlier in Germany.
As William Archer remarked, Ibsen’s notes for A Doll’s House “throw invaluable light upon the genesis of his ideas … Of A Doll’s House we possess a first brief memorandum, a fairly detailed scenario, a complete draft in quite actable form, and a few detached fragments of dialogue” (Introduction, From Ibsen’s Workshop, 1912). In particular the notes reveal the feminist critique of patriarchal society at the core of the play, and Ibsen’s concept of the action as a tragedy for all the characters, and the ending as a “catastrophe” – not, even for Nora, a liberation.
The Works of Henrik Ibsen, New York, 1912
Translated by A.G. Chater
There are two kinds of spiritual law, two kinds of conscience, one in man and another, altogether different, in woman. They do not understand each other; but in practical life the woman is judged by man’s law, as though she were not a woman but a man.
The wife in the play ends by having no idea of what is right or wrong; natural feeling on the one hand and belief in authority on the other have altogether bewildered her.
A woman cannot be herself in the society of the present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and with a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view.
She has committed forgery, and she is proud of it; for she did it out of love for her husband, to save his life. But this husband with his commonplace principles of honor is on the side of the law and looks at the question from the masculine point of view.
Spiritual conflicts. Oppressed and bewildered by the belief in authority, she loses faith in her moral right and ability to bring up her children. Bitterness. A mother in modern society, like certain insects who go away and die when she has done her duty in the propagation of the race. Love of life, of home, of husband and children and family. Now and then a womanly shaking off of her thoughts. Sudden return of anxiety and terror. She must bear it all alone. The catastrophe approaches, inexorably, inevitably. Despair, conflict, and destruction.
(Krogstad has acted dishonorably and thereby become well-to-do; now his prosperity does not help him, he cannot recover his honor.)
Scenario: first act
A room comfortably, but not showily, furnished. A door to the right in the back leads to the hall; another door to the left in the back leads to the room or office of the master of the house, which can be seen when the door is opened. A fire in the stove. Winter day.
She enters from the back, humming gaily; she is in outdoor dress and carries several parcels, has been shopping. As she opens the door, a porter is seen in the hall, carrying a Christmas tree. She: Put it down there for the present. (Taking out her purse) How much? Porter. Fifty öre. She: Here is a crown. No, keep the change. The porter thanks her and goes. She continues humming and smiling contentedly as she opens several of the parcels she has brought. Calls off to find out if he is home. Yes! At first, conversation through the closed door; then he opens it and goes on talking to her while continuing to work most of the time, standing at his desk. There is a ring at the hall door; he does not want to be disturbed; shuts himself in. The maid opens the door to her mistress’s friend, just arrived in town. Happy surprise. Mutual explanation of the state of affairs. He has received the post of manager in the new joint-stock bank and is to begin at New Year’s; all financial worries are at an end. The friend has come to town to look for some small employment in an office or whatever may present itself. Mrs. Stenborg encourges her, is certain that all will turn out well. The maid opens the front door to the debt collector. Mrs. Stenborg terrified; they exchange a few words; he is shown into the office. Mrs. Stenborg and her friend; the circumstances of the collector are touched upon. Stenborg enters in his overcoat; has sent the collector out the other way. Conversation about the friend’s affairs; hesitation on his part. He and the friend go out; his wife follows them into the hall; the Nurse enters with the children. Mother and children play. The collector enters. Mrs. Stenborg sends the children out to the left. Big scene between her and him. He goes. Stenborg enters; has met him on the stairs; displeased; wants to know what he came back for? Her support? No intrigues. His wife cautiously tries to pump him. Strict legal answers. Exit to his room. She: (repeating her words when the collector went out) But that’s impossible. Why, I did it from love!
Second act
The last day of the year. Midday. Nora and the old Nurse. Nora, driven by anxiety, is putting on her things to go out. Anxious random questions of one kind and another intimate that thoughts of death are in her mind. Tries to banish these thoughts, to make light of it, hopes that something or other may intervene. But what? The Nurse goes off to the left. Stenborg enters from his room. Short dialogue between him and Nora. The Nurse re-enters; looks for Nora; the youngest child is crying. Annoyance and questioning on Stenborg’s part; exit the Nurse; Stenborg is going in to the children. Doctor enters. Scene between him and Stenborg. Nora soon re-enters; she has turned back; anxiety has driven her home again. Scene between her, the Doctor, and Stenborg. Stenborg goes into his room. Scene between Nora and the Doctor. The Doctor goes out. Nora alone. Mrs. Linde enters. Scene between her and Nora. Lawyer Krogstad enters. Short scene between him, Mrs. Linde, and Nora. Mrs. Linde in to the children. Scene between Krogstad and Nora. She entreats and implores him for the sake of her little children; in vain. Krogstad goes out. The letter is seen to fall from outside into the letter box. Mrs. Linde re-enters after a short pause. Scene between her and Nora. Half confession. Mrs. Linde goes out. Nora alone. Stenborg enters. Scene between him and Nora. He wants to empty the letter box. Entreaties, jests, half-playful persuasion. He promises to let business wait till after New Year’s Day; but at 12 o’clock midnight … ! Exit. Nora alone. Nora: (looking at the clock) It is five o’clock. Five; seven hours till midnight. Twenty-four hours till the next midnight. Twenty-four and seven – thirty-one. Thirty-one hours to live.
Third act
A muffled sound of dance music is heard from the floor above. A lighted lamp on the table. Mrs. Linde sits in an armchair and absendy turns the pages of a book, tries to read, but seems unable to fix her attention; once or twice she looks at her watch. Nora comes down from the party; so disturbed she was compelled to leave; surprise at finding Mrs. Linde, who pretends that she wanted to see Nora in her costume. Helmer, displeased at her going away, comes to fetch her back. The Doctor also enters, to say good-by. Meanwhile Mrs. Linde has gone into the side room on the right. Scene between the Doctor, Helmer, and Nora. He is going to bed, he says, never to get up again; they are not to come and see him; there is ugliness about a deathbed. He goes out. Helmer goes upstairs again with Nora, after the latter has exchanged a few words of farewell with Mrs. Linde. Mrs. Linde alone. Then Krogstad. Scene and explanation between them. Both go out. Nora and the children. Then she alone. Then Helmer. He takes the letters out of the letter box. Short scene; good night; he goes into his room. Nora in despair prepares for the final step, is already at the door when Helmer enters with the open letter in his hand. Big scene. A ring. Letter to Nora from Krogstad. Final scene. Divorce. Nora leaves the house.
As this scenario indicates, although the names of some characters are different, the action of the play has been worked out in detail from its first conception. Apart from the broadening of focus – in the scenario everything is presented from Nora’s viewpoint – the most significant change in the final text is the introduction of the tarantella. Off-stage in the scenario, the dance may have been brought in to capitalize on the abilities of Betty Hennings, the first actress to play the role (at the Copenhagen Royal Theatre, 1879) who had been a ballerina.
All Ibsen’s naturalistic plays aroused protests, but A Doll’s House was met with more vehement denunciation than any other, with the possible exception of Ghosts – and one recurring criticism was that “Nora has only shown herself as a little Nordic ‘Frou-Frou’ and as such she cannot be transformed in a flash to a Soren Kierkegaard in skirts” (Dagens Nyheder, 22 December 1879). The notes make clear that Nora is confused by conflicting value systems; and as Archer was the first to point out, commenting on Eleonora Duse’s performance:
If she were really and essentially the empty-headed doll we hear so much about, the whole point of the play would be gone; so that there is not the least reason why we should demand from the actress a waxen, flaxen prettiness, on which experience has left no traces. The critics, in fact, sublimely unconscious of the way in which they thereby drive home the poet’s irony, fall into the very same misunderstanding of Nora’s character which makes Helmer a bye-word for masculine stupidity, and are no less flabbergasted than he when the doll puts off her masquerade dress and turns out to be a woman after all. And if Nora is not really childish, still less is she “neurotic”.
(Theatrical World, 1893)
| December 1879, Doll’s House, is published by Gyldendal, Copenhagen | ||
| December 1879 | Royal Theatre | Nora: Betty Hennings |
| Copenhagen | ||
| January 1880 | Christiana Theatre | Nora: Johanne Juell |
| Stockholm | ||
| March 1880 | Residenztheater | Nora: Marie Ramlo |
| Munich | ||
| 1882 Warsaw | Imperial Theatre | Nora: Modjeska [Helene Modrzejewska] |
| June 1889 London | Novelty Theatre (later the Kingsway) | Nora: Janet Achurch |
| Director: Charles Charrington | ||
| February 1891 | Teatro di Filodrammatici | Nora: Eleonora Duse |
| Milan | ||
| April 1892 | Avenue Theatre | Nora: Janet Achurch |
| London | ||
| March 1893 | Royalty Theatre | Nora: Janet Achurch |
| London | ||
| October 1894 | Deutsches Theater | Nora: Agnes Sorma |
| Berlin | Director: Otto Brahm | |
| May 1897 | Globe Theatre | Nora: Janet Achurch |
| London | ||
| May 1905 | New Lyceum Theatre | Nora: Ethel Barrymore |
| New York | ||
| December 1906 | Komissarzhevskaya Theatre | Nora: Vera |
| St. Petersburg | Director: Vsevolod Meyerhold | Komissarzhevskaya |
| November 1917 | Kammerspiele | Nora: Irene Triesch |
| Berlin | Director: Max Reinhardt | |
| April 1918 | Plymouth Theatre | Nora: Alla Nazimova |
| New York | ||
| June 1918 | Workers’ Club | |
| Petrograd | Director: Vsevolod | |
| Meyerhold | ||
| February 1933 | Companie Pitoëf | Nora: Mme. Pitoëf |
| Paris | ||
| December 1937 | Morosco Theatre | Nora: Ruth Gordon |
| New York | Director and Producer: Jed Harris |
Apart from the initial performances in Scandinavia between 1879 and 1880, for the first decade, audiences saw adaptations of A Doll’s House with a very different ending from the one Ibsen had written. This was initially due to Ibsen himself. Commenting later on the public reaction to Ghosts, he acknowledged “A writer dare not alienate himself so far from people that there is no longer any understanding between them and him” (Letter to Sophie Adlersparre, 1882). So when the Berlin actress Hedwig Niemann-Raabe, who was to play Nora in the first German production, declared she could never leave her children – and would be unable to play such an unnatural act convincingly – Ibsen revised the ending specifically for her.
At the same time in an open letter Ibsen protested against the change. Despite the growing acceptance of his work, he was forced to continue defending the integrity of the original ending by theatre managers who wished to stage the play in a form more acceptable to their audiences. His correspondence indicates the extent to which bourgeois society felt threatened by A Doll’s House, even over a decade after it first appeared.
Ibsen’s revised ending – with its sentimental appeal, restoration of the sexual status quo, and evasion of the moral issues raised in the preceding discussion – was preferred by such leading dramaturges as Heinrich Laube in Vienna and Maurice in Hamburg. It became the standard ending for European productions between 1880 and 1882, and formed the basis for further adaptations – as in Helene Modjeska’s Thora, first performed in St. Petersburg in 1881 then toured across America in 1883 – though even critics who objected to the original ending found the revision inconsistent:
A brilliant audience crowded Macaulay’s Theater last evening, the occasion being the first presentation in America of ‘Thora’, a Norwegian drama by Henrik Ibsen …
The drama opens promisingly … The third and last act, however, does not fulfill the promise of the first and second. It begins dramatically, but ends turgidly … finally through the medium of the children and some indefinite talk about ‘religion’ there is a reunion, a rushing together and a falling curtain on a happy family tableau. The principal inconsistency of the play is at this point. A woman cherishing as high an ideal of her husband as Thora did, and finding him as unworthy of it as Helmer was, cannot mount him again on his pinnacle through any such superficial means as here employed. In the original drama, Thora carries out the logic of the situation by leaving her husband. Probably after all the most consistent ending would be her death.
(Louisville Courier-Journal, 8 December 1883)
The most notorious of these adaptations was the English version of A Doll’s House, performed by Beerbohm-Tree in 1884 under the tide of Breaking a Butterfly. Although greeted with mixed reviews, the critical consensus was that this play – and, since it was taken to correspond to Ibsen’s text which was not yet available in translation, the original too – was unimportant and trifling. However, those English critics familiar with Ibsen’s text condemned the adaptation as a travesty. Arguing that “Ibsen’s drama is, in short, a plea for woman’s rights – not for her right to vote and prescribe medicine, but for her right to exist as a responsible member of society” William Archer pointed out that the adaptation had cut Nora’s children, removing the source of her anguish. In addition, a comic sister for Nora’s husband is substituted for the sombre figure of the dying Doctor; and Mrs. Linde, the woman who plays on the blackmailer’s better nature and persuades him to send back the forged document, is replaced by a book-keeper who steals the “fatal paper”. As one critic (Edward Aveling) pointed out, “the authors of this conventional little play have succeeded in the Herculean labour of making Ibsen appear common-place” and the type of alterations “are a sad reminder of the condition of our bourgeois morality generally” in reducing social analysis to standard melodrama:
… the whole moral of the Norwegian play is lost in the English version by Helmer taking upon himself the crime supposed to have been committed … It is however in the ending that the dramatists have most deeply sinned. Whatever may be thought of Ibsen’s ending, it is not conventional … the ending is as unhappy as it is truthful, and British audiences require the last words of a play to part of a chorus of general congratulations.
(Today, 1884)
Translated by Richard Badger
| NORA. | That our life together would be a real marriage. Goodbye. (She is about to go.) |
| HELMER. | (Takes her by the arm) Go, if you must, but see your children for the last time. |
| NORA. | Let me go. I don’t want to see them. I cannot. |
| HELMER. | (Draws her towards the door at the left) You must see them. (Opens the door and says softly:) Do you see – there they sleep carefree and quiedy. Tomorrow when they awaken and call for their mother, they will have none … |
| NORA. | (Trembling) No mother … |
| HELMER. | As you have had none. |
| NORA. | No mother! (An internal struggle. She lets her bag fall and says) Oh, I am sinning against myself, but I cannot leave them. (She sinks down at the door.) |
| HELMER. | (Happy, says softly) Nora! |
(The curtain falls)
MUNICH, 17th February 1880.
To the EDITOR
SIR, – In No. 1360 of your esteemed paper I have read a letter from Flensburg, in which it is stated that A Doll’s House (in German Nora) has been acted there, and that the conclusion of the play has been changed – the alteration having been made, it is asserted, by my orders. This last statement is untrue. Immediately after the publication of Nora, I received from my translator, Mr. Wilhelm Lange, of Berlin, who is also my business manager as far as the North German theatres are concerned, the information that he had reason to fear that an “adaptation” of the play, giving it a different ending, was about to be published and that this would probably be chosen in preference to the original by several of the North German theatres.
In order to prevent such a possibility, I sent to him, for use in case of absolute necessity, a draft of an altered last scene, according to which Nora does not leave the house, but is forcibly led by Helmer to the door of the children’s bedroom; a short dialogue takes place, Nora sinks down at the door, and the curtain falls.
This change I myself, in the letter to my translator, stigmatise as “barbaric violence” done to the play. Those who make use of the altered scene do so entirely against my wish. But I trust that it will not be used at very many German theatres.
As long as no literary convention exists between Germany and the Scandinavian countries, we Scandinavian authors enjoy no protection from the law here, just as the German authors enjoy none with us. Our dramatic works are, therefore, in Germany exposed to acts of violence at the hands of translators, theatrical directors, stage-managers, and actors at the smaller theatres. When my works are threatened, I prefer, taught by experience, to commit the act of violence myself, instead of leaving them to be treated and “adapted” by less careful and less skilful hands. – Yours respectfully,
HENRIK IBSEN.
Translated by Mary Morrison
MUNICH, 23rd January 1891.
DEAR COUNT PROZOR, – Mr. Luigi Capuana has, I regret to see, given you a great deal of trouble by his proposal to alter the last scene of A Doll’s House for performance in the Italian theatres.
I do not for a moment doubt that the alteration you suggest would be distinctly preferable to that which Mr. Capuana proposes. But the fact is that I cannot possibly directly authorise any change whatever in the ending of the drama. I may almost say that it was for the sake of the last scene that the whole play was written.
And, besides, I believe that Mr. Capuana is mistaken in fearing that the Italian public would not be able to understand or approve of my work if it were put on the stage in its original form. The experiment ought, at any rate, to be tried. If it turns out a failure, then let Mr. Capuana, on his own responsibility, employ your adaptation of the closing scene; for I cannot formally authorise, or approve of, such a proceeding.
I wrote to Mr. Capuana yesterday, briefly expressing my views on the subject; and I hope that he will disregard his misgivings until he has proved by experience that they are well founded.1
At the time when A Doll’s House was quite new, I was obliged to give my consent to an alteration of the last scene for Frau Hedwig Niemann-Raabe, who was to play the part of Nora in Berlin. At that time I had no choice. I was entirely unprotected by copyright law in Germany, and could, consequently, prevent nothing. Besides, the play in its original, uncorrupted form, was accessible to the German public in a German edition which was already printed and published. With its altered ending it had only a short run. In its unchanged form it is still being played.
The enclosed letter from Mr. Antoine I have answered, thanking him for his intention to produce The Wild Duck, and urging him to make use of your translation. Of course I cannot tell what he will decide. But as the Théâtre Libre is really of the nature of a private society, it is probably not possible to procure a legal injunction. There are, besides, reasons which would render the taking of such a step inadvisable, even if possible. However, I leave the decision of this question entirely to you, assured that you will act in the best way possible.
*
In a sense even such extreme adaptations as Breaking a Butterfly were simply an attempt to make sense of an action – not only Nora’s exit from her marriage, but abandoning her children – which denied accepted attitudes and expectations of the time to such an extent that Nora’s motivation appeared incomprehensible. Even in Germany, the country most open to Ibsen’s naturalistic drama, critical response was initially unfavorable. For instance, the reviewers of Die Gegenwart (18, 1880) and Deutsche Rundschau (26, 1881) saw the play as clearly didactic, dealing with a serious subject, but were confused about the actual message, and attacked the character development of Nora, finding the woman of the final act incompatible with the child-mother of the opening. However, attitudes changed in Germany after the publication of a monograph on Ibsen – by L, Passarge in 1883, the very first to appear, predating Shaw’s study by almost a decade. Indeed it was only when more extensive analyses of Ibsen’s work were published that the integrity of the original ending was recognized, and then became the standard staging.
In England William Archer’s production of A Doll’s House in his own translation preceded Shaw’s lectures on The Quintessence of Ibsenism. It was a popular success, and although the play itself was heavily attacked by all the critics, even unsympathetic reviews praised the performance:
The interest was so intense last night that a pin might have been heard to drop. Miss Janet Achurch received the enthusiastic congratulations she so well deserved, and when the curtain fell there was such cheering that Mr. Charrington promised to telegraph the happy result to Henrik Ibsen. We cannot doubt that all who desire to become better acquainted with the author’s new-fangled theories, and to see them put into practice in the most satisfactory manner, will crowd the Novelty Theatre for the next few evenings. If they cannot agree with the author, they will, at any rate, see some admirable acting.
(Sunday Times, 7 June 1889)
The play had already become a “vehicle” for star actresses, such as Helena Modjeska – as reviews of her 1883 performance indicate:
The production last evening was a novelty, curiosity to see Modjeska in a new role, as well as admiration for the great actress arousing more than ordinary interest in the performance … Her portrayal of the innocent, gay, true-hearted Thora is full of beauty and varying charm, reaching in the second act a nervous intensity and strength and yet maintaining a rare delicacy and grace which seem in the power of none so well as this actress … The character, indeed, is a beautiful one, and in that pure womanliness, that exquisite art necessary for its interpretation, where is the actress so gifted as Modjeska? Modjeska, in truth, was the performance.
(Louisville Courier-Journal, 8 December 1883)
Indeed it was A Doll’s House that made Janet Achurch a star, attracting the attention of Bernard Shaw, who wrote Candida (his “counterblast” to Ibsen, showing that in the typical doll’s house “it is the man who is the doll”) for her.
Among others who saw Janet Achurch’s performance in 1889 was the actress/producer Elizabeth Robins, who was inspired by this to become the leading interpreter of Ibsen in America; and Achurch’s rendering of Nora remained the standard against which English critics measured other actresses who took up the role – notably Eleonora Duse. But if A Doll’s House became a star vehicle, it was because, like Ibsen’s other naturalistic plays, this was one of the few challenging leading roles for women in contemporary drama.
Ibsen was not only an advocate of woman’s rights (despite his own disclaimers). His plays also reversed gender stereotypes by making the actress the central figure in performance; and, as Archer argued, A Doll’s House was the play that had the most impact of all Ibsen’s work, especially in spreading the new drama to England and North America.
13 June, ’89
We have fought a good fight for the Old Min [pet name for Ibsen], and have won a really glorious victory. It would take me a day’s hard writing to give you full details, but I shall send along with this a budget of press notices. Of course most of them are silliness itself; but still the play has been the great event of the week-almost of the season. It has been more talked about and written about than even The Profligate. It holds the B.P. like a vice – and what’s more, they pay to see it. The receipts are not large – between £35 and £45 a performance – but that, for an out-of-the-way house, is by no means bad, especially as it is scarcely advertised at all. Of course Miss Achurch has the lioness’s share in the success. She is really a delightful Nora – not ideal; her voice and tricks of utterance forbid that – but she feels the part right through, and is often very fine and even noble. In short she is a Nora and a very beautiful one, though not quite the Nora. It is by far the biggest thing she has ever done; compliments and offers of engagements have poured in upon her; no actress for years has made such a success. She varies rather from night to night. I always go to see the last scene, which is to me the great thing of the piece and one of the Old Min’s biggest achievements; and once or twice I have seen her play it perfectly. At other times she goes in for motiveless fortes and pianos which mar the smoothness of it. On the first night Waring (Helmer) got a little wrong in his lines and didn’t say the speech: “I would work for you, etc.; but no man sacrifices his honour even for one he loves” – so that of course she couldn’t get in her Millions of women have done that. I was mad at that, for she speaks it beautifully – it was almost the one misfortune of a glorious evening. Since then we have of course got the passage put right, and the B.P. now rises to the occasion unfailingly …. But what a scene that is! Every speech in it rings like a clarion. They may call it pure logic if they like, but it is logic saturated with emotion. I cry over it every night. It’s very curious, the first time I saw Miss A. rehearse it she was deadly – querulous, whimpering, wretched. I arranged to meet her half an hour before the next rehearsal and go through the scene with her; but that day she was ill and didn’t come to rehearsal at all; so I told Charrington what I thought was wrong, and he said he would go through it with her. The next rehearsal I sat in the stalls and listened to it – the thing was totally different. It gripped me line by line and simply thrilled me with intellectual pleasure and intense emotion. At the end she came to the footlights and said: “How was that?” I said: “If that scene moves the audience half as much as it has moved me to-day, the play’s all right” – and it was! There was another rather amusing thing about that scene. X. Y, the acting manager, a Philistine of the Philistines, happened to see it one day at rehearsal. At the end he said: “You’ll excuse me, Miss Achurch, it’s no business of mine, but I can’t help saying that that scene’s splendid – most interesting – certain to go.” She rushed across the stage and almost embraced him, and we were all delighted to have conquered the doughty Y. But next day he came to me and said: “It was rather good, my going into raptures over that scene. I had no idea it was the last act. I thought it was the first act, and it was all going to be cleared up … .”
Fru Gundersen of the Xiania Theatre, who is over here just now, told me Miss A. was the best Nora she had ever seen, and she had no reason to put it as strongly as that if she didn’t think so. In short we have had a splendid week, and whatever else comes of it, Ibsen has triumphed.
In dealing with Ibsen’s significance to the acting profession, I naturally think of one actress in particular whose view would have been immensely interesting. I mean, of course, the woman to whom belongs the lasting honour of being the first person to play a great Ibsen part in England – Janet Achurch. As she is not here, I was going to say – but in a sense she is here, vivid in the consciousness of all who ever saw her act. As she cannot, however, speak to you, I think the makeshift-best I can do in this direction is to tell you about my own recollection of the first production of A Doll’s House, for that occasion, in addition to so much else, stood for Ibsen and at least three actresses: Janet Achurch, Marion Lea, and myself, plus I don’t know how many more, who were to be affected by that day’s happening. I do not know whether I had ever heard Ibsen’s name till the afternoon when I went with my friend Marion Lea to see her friend act A Doll’s House.
I cannot think such an experience was ever ushered in with so little warning. There was not a hint in the pokey, dingy theatre, in the sparse, rather dingy audience, that we were on the threshold of an event that was to change lives and literatures. The Nora of that day must have been one of the earliest exceptions – she was the first I ever saw – to the rule that an actress invariably comes on in new clothes, unless she is playing a beggar. This Nora, with her home-made fur cap on her fair hair, wore the clothes of Ibsen’s Nora, almost shabby, with a touch of prettiness.
I never knew before or since anybody strike so surely the note of gaiety and homeliness as Janet Achurch did in that first scene. You saw her biting into one of the forbidden macaroons, white teeth flashing, blue eyes full of roguery, her entire Wesen inviting you to share that confidence in life that was so near shipwreck. The unstagey effect of the whole play (and that must have owed much to Charles Charrington) made it, to eyes that first saw it in ‘89, less like a play than like a personal meeting – with people and issues that seized us and held us, and wouldn’t let us go.
I remember Marion Lea wanted desperately to play Nora – in the provinces, in America, anywhere. Strangely, it didn’t take me like that. Janet Achurch’s acting had carried me clean out of myself. I didn’t even feel on that first occasion, as I did later, that the Tarantella dance was, from the point of view of the theatre, somehow a mistake. But the famous lines: “Millions of women have done so” and “ … it burst upon me that I had been living here these eight years with a strange man, and had borne him three children” – for all time they should be said just as they were first said, and by just that person.
If we may measure fame by mileage of newspaper comment, Henrik Ibsen has for the past month been the most famous man in the English literary world. Since Robert Elsmere left the Church, no event in ‘coëval fictive art’ (to quote a modern stylist) has exercised men’s, and women’s, minds so much as Nora Helmer’s departure from her Doll’s House. Indeed the latter exit may be said to have awakened even more vibrant echoes than the former; for, while Robert made as littie noise as possible Nora slammed the door behind her. Nothing could be more trenchant than her action, unless it be her speech. Whatever its merits or defects, A Doll’s House has certainly the property of stimulating discussion. We are at present bandying the very arguments which hurded around it in Scandinavia and in Germany nine years ago. When the play was first produced in Copenhagen, some one wrote a charming little satire upon it in the shape of a debate as to its tendency between a party of little girls around a nursery tea-table. It ended in the hostess, aged ten, gravely declaring that had the case been hers, she would have done exactly as Nora did. I do not know whether the fame of A Doll’s House has reached the British nursery, but I have certainly read some comments on it which might very well have emanated from that abode of innocence.
Puerilities and irrelevances apart, the adult and intelligent criticism of Ibsen as represented in A Doll’s House, seems to run on three main lines. It is said, in the first place, that he is not an artist but a preacher; secondly, that his doctrine is neither new nor true; thirdly, that in order to enforce it, he oversteps the limits of artistic propriety.
[…]
For my part, looking at his dramatic production all round, and excepting only the two great dramas in verse, Brand and Peer Gynt, I am willing to admit that his teaching does now and then, in perfectly trifling details, affect his art for the worse. Not his direct teaching – that, as it seems to me, he always inspires with the breath of life – but his proclivity to what I may perhaps call symbolic side-issues. In the aforesaid dramas in verse this symbolism is eminently in place; not so, it seems to me, in the realistic plays. I once asked him how he justified this tendency in his art; he replied that life is one tissue of symbols. ‘Certainly,’ I might have answered; ‘but when we have its symbolic side too persistently obtruded upon us, we lose the sense of reality, which, according to your own theory, the modern dramatist should above all things aim at.’ There may be some excellent answer to this criticism; I give it for what it is worth. Apart from these symbolic details, it seems to me that Ibsen is singularly successful in vitalising his work; in reproducing the forms, the phenomena of life, as well as its deeper meanings. Let us take the example nearest at hand – A Doll’s House. I venture to say – for this is a matter of fact rather than of opinion – that in the minds of thousands in Scandinavia and Germany, Nora Helmer lives with an intense and palpitating life such as belongs to few fictitious characters. Habitually and instinctively men pay Ibsen the compliment (so often paid to Shakespeare) of discussing her as though she were a real woman, living a life of her own, quite apart from the poet’s creative intelligence. The very critics who begin by railing at her as a puppet end by denouncing her as a woman. She irritates, troubles, fascinates them as no puppet ever could. Moreover, the triumph of the actress is the dramatist’s best defence. Miss Achurch might have the genius of Rachel and Desclée in one, yet she could not transmute into flesh and blood the doctrinary doll, stuffed with sawdust and sophistry, whom some people declare Nora to be. Men do not shudder at the agony or weep over the woes of an intellectual abstraction. As for Helmer, I am not aware that any one has accused him of unreality. He is too real for most people – is commonplace, unpleasant, objectionable. The truth is, he touches us too nearly; he is the typical husband of what may be called chattel matrimony. If there are few Doll’s-Houses in England, it is certainly for lack of Noras, not for lack of Helmers. I admit that in my opinion Ibsen has treated Helmer somewhat unfairly. He has not exactly disguised, but has omitted to emphasize, the fact that if Helmer helped to make Nora a doll, Nora helped to make Helmer a prig. By giving Nora all the logic in the last scene (and she is not a scrupulous dialectician) he has left the casual observer to conclude that he lays the whole responsibility on Helmer. This conclusion is not just, but it is specious; and so far, and so far only, I grant that the play has somewhat the air of a piece of special pleading. I shall presendy discuss the last scene in greater detail; but even admitting for the moment that the polemist here gets the better of the poet, can we call the poet, who has moved freely through two acts and two-thirds, nothing but a doctrinary polemist?
[…]
The second line of criticism is that which attacks the substance of Ibsen’s so-called doctrines, on the ground that they are neither new nor true. To the former objection one is inclined to answer curtly but pertinendy, ‘Who said they were?’ It is not the business of the creative artist to make the great generalisations which mark the stages of intellectual and social progress. Certainly Ibsen did not discover the theory of evolution or the doctrine of heredity, any more than he discovered gravitation. He was not the first to denounce the subjection of women; he was not the first to sneer at the ‘compact liberal majority’ of our pseudo-democracies. His function is to seize and throw into relief certain aspects of modern life. He shows us society as Kean was said to read Shakespeare – by flashes of lightning – luridly, but with intense vividness. He selects subjects which seem to him to illustrate such and such political, ethical, or sociological ideas; but he does not profess to have invented the ideas. They are common property; they are in the air. A grave injustice has been done him of late by those of his English admirers who have set him up as a social prophet, and have sometimes omitted to mention that he is a bit of a poet as well. It is so much easier to import an idea than the flesh and blood, the imagination, the passion, the style in which it is clothed. People have heard so much of the ‘gospel according to Ibsen’ that they have come to think of him as a mere hot-gospeller, the Boanerges of some strange social propaganda. As a matter of fact Ibsen has no gospel whatever, in the sense of a systematic body of doctrine. He is not a Schopenhauer, and still less a Comte. There never was a less systematic thinker. Truth is not, in his eyes, one and indivisible; it is many-sided, many-visaged, almost Protean. It belongs to the irony of fate that the least dogmatic of thinkers – the man who has said of himself, ‘I only ask: my call is not to answer’ – should figure in the imagination of so many English critics as a dour dogmatist, a vendor of social nostrums in pilule form. He is far more of a paradoxist than a dogmatist. A thinker he is most certainly, but not an inventor of brand new notions such as no one has ever before conceived. His originality lies in giving intense dramatic life to modern ideas, and often stamping them afresh, as regards mere verbal form, in the mint of his imaginative wit.
The second allegation, that his doctrines are not true, is half answered when we have insisted that they are not put forward (at any rate by Ibsen himself) as a body of inspired dogmas. No man rejects more consistently than he the idea of finality. He does not pretend to have said the last word on any subject. ‘You needn’t believe me unless you like,’ says Dr. Stockmann in An Enemy of the People, ‘but truths are not the tough old Methuselahs people take them to be. A normally constituted truth lives, let us say, some seventeen or eighteen years; at most twenty.’ The telling of absolute truths, to put it in another way, is scarcely Ibsen’s aim. He is more concerned with destroying conventional lies, and exorcising the ‘ghosts’ of dead truths; and most of all concerned to make people think and see for themselves. Here again we recognise the essential injustice of regarding a dramatic poet as a sort of prophet-professor, who means all his characters say and makes them say all he means. I have been asked, for example, whether Ibsen intends us to understand by the last scene of A Doll’s House that awakened wives ought to leave their husbands and children in order to cultivate their souls in solitude. Ibsen intends nothing of the sort. He draws a picture of a typical household; he creates a man and woman with certain characteristics; he places them in a series of situations which at once develop their characters and suggest large questions of conduct; and he makes the woman, in the end, adopt a course of action which he (rightly or wrongly) believes to be consistent with her individual nature and circumstances. It is true that this course of action is so devised as to throw the principles at stake into the strongest relief; but the object of that is to make people thoroughly realise the problem, not to force upon them the particular solution arrived at in this particular case. No two life-problems were ever precisely alike, and in stating and solving one, Ibsen does not pretend to supply a ready-made solution for all the rest. He illustrates, or, rather, illumines, a general principle by a conceivable case; that is all. To treat Nora’s arguments in the last scene of A Doll’s House as though they were the ordered propositions of an essay by John Stuart Mill is to give a striking example of the strange literalness of the English mind, its inability to distinguish between drama and dogma. To me that last scene is the most moving in the play, precisely because I hold it the most dramatic. It has been called a piece of pure logic – is it not rather logic conditioned by character and saturated with emotion? Some years ago I saw Et Dukkehjem acted in Christiania. It was an off season; only the second-rate members of the company were engaged; and throughout two acts and a half I sat vainly striving to recapture the emotions I had so often felt in reading the play. But the moment Nora and Helmer were seated face to face, at the words, ‘No, that is just it; you do not understand me; and I have never understood you – till to-night’ – at that moment, much to my own surprise, the thing suddenly gripped my heart-strings; to use an expressive Americanism, I ‘sat up;’ and every phrase of Nora’s threnody over her dead dreams, her lost illusions, thrilled me to the very marrow. Night after night I went to see that scene; night after night I have watched it in the English version; it has never lost its power over me. And why? Not because Nora’s sayings are particularly wise or particularly true, but because, in her own words, they are so true for her, because she feels them so deeply and utters them so exquisitely. Certainly she is unfair, certainly she is one-sided, certainly she is illogical; if she were not, Ibsen would be the pamphleteer he is supposed to be, not the poet he is. ‘I have never been happy here – only merry …. You have never loved me – you have only found it amusing to be in love with me.’ Have we not in these speeches the very mingling of truth and falsehood, of justice and injustice, necessary to humanise the character and the situation? After Nora has declared her intention of leaving her home, Helmer remarks, ‘Then there is only one explanation possible – You no longer love me.’ ‘No,’ she replies, ‘that is just it.’ ‘Nora! can you say so?’ cries Helmer, looking into her eyes. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, Torvald,’ she answers, ‘for you’ve always been so kind to me.’Is this pamphleteering? To me it seems like the subdest human pathos. Again, when she says ‘At that moment it became clear to me that I had been living here for eight years, with a strange man and had borne him three children – Oh, I can’t bear to think of it! I could tear myself to pieces’ – who can possibly take this for anything but a purely dramatic utterance? It is true and touching in Nora’s mouth, but it is obviously founded on a vague sentiment, that may or may not bear analysis. Nora postulates a certain transcendental community of spirit as the foundation and justification of marriage. The idea is very womanly and may also be very practical; but Ibsen would probably be the first to admit that before it can claim the validity of a social principle we must ascertain whether it be possible for any two human beings to be other than what Nora would call strangers. This further analysis the hearer must carry out for him, or her, self. The poet has stimulated thought; he has not tried to lay down a hard-and-fast rule of conduct. Again, when Helmer says, ‘No man sacrifices his honour even for one he loves,’ and Nora retorts, ‘Millions of women have done that!’ we applaud the consummate claptrap, not on account of its abstract justice, but rather of its characteristic injustice. Logically, it is naught; dramatically, one feels it to be a masterstroke. Here, it is the right speech in the right place; in a sociological monograph it would be absurd. My position, in short, is that in Ibsen’s plays, as in those of any other dramatist who keeps within the bounds of his form, we must look, not for the axioms and demonstrations of a scientific system, but simply for ‘broken lights’ of truth, refracted through character and circumstance.1 The playwright who sends on a Chorus or a lecturer, unconnected with the dramatic action, to moralise the spectacle and put all the dots on all the i’s, may fairly be taken to task for the substance of his ‘doctrines.’ But that playwright is Dumas, not Ibsen.
Lastly, we come to the assertion that Ibsen is a ‘coarse’ writer, with a morbid love for using the theatre as a physiological lecture-room. Here again I can only cry out upon the chance which has led to so grotesque a misconception. He has written some twenty plays, of which all except two might be read aloud, with only the most trivial omissions, in any young ladies’ boarding-school from Tobolsk to Tangiers. The two exceptions are A Doll’s House and Ghosts – the very plays which happen to have come (more or less) within the ken of English critics. In A Doll’s House he touches upon, in Ghosts he frankly faces, the problem of hereditary disease, which interests him, not in itself, but simply as the physical type and symbol of so many social and ethical phenomena. Ghosts I have not space to consider. If art is for ever debarred from entering upon certain domains of human experience, then Ghosts is an inartistic work. I can only say, after having read it, seen it on the stage, and translated it, that no other modern play seems to me to fulfil so entirely the Aristotelian ideal of purging the soul by means of terror and pity. In A Doll’s House, again, there are two passages, one in the second and one in the third act, which Mr. Podsnap could not conveniently explain to the young lady in the dress-circle. Whether the young lady in the dress-circle would be any the worse for having them explained to her is a question I shall not discuss. As a matter of fact, far from being coarsely treated, they are so delicately touched that the young person suspects nothing and is in no way incommoded. It is Mr. Podsnap himself that cries out – the virtuous Podsnap who, at the French theatre, writhes in his stall with laughter at speeches and situations à faire rougir des singes. I have more than once been reproached, by people who had seen A Doll’s House at the Novelty, with having cut the speeches which the first-night critics pronounced objectionable. It has cost me some trouble to persuade them that not a word had been cut, and that the text they found so innocent contained every one of the enormities denounced by the critics. Mr. Podsnap, I may add, has in this case shown his usual alacrity in putting the worst possible interpretation upon things. Dr. Rank’s declaration to Nora that Helmer is not the only man who would willingly lay down his life for her, has been represented as a hideous attempt on the part of a dying debauchee to seduce his friend’s wife. Nothing is further from the mind of poor Rank, who, by the way, is not a debauchee at all. He knows himself to be at death’s door; Nora, in her Doll’s House, has given light and warmth to his lonely, lingering existence; he has silently adored her while standing with her, as with her husband, on terms of frank comradeship; is he to leave her for ever without saying, as he puts it, ‘Thanks for the light’? Surely this is a piece either of inhuman austerity or of prurient prudery; surely Mrs. Podsnap herself could not feel a suspicion of insult in such a declaration. True, it comes inaptiy at that particular moment, rendering it impossible for Nora to make the request she contemplates. But essentially, and even from the most conventional point of view, I fail to see anything inadmissible in Rank’s conduct to Nora. Nora’s conduct to Rank, in the stocking scene, is another question; but that is merely a side-light on the relation between Nora and Helmer, preparatory, in a sense, to the scene before Rank’s entrance in the last act.
In conclusion, what are the chances that Ibsen’s modern plays will ever take a permanent place on the English stage? They are not great, it seems to me. […] On the other hand I have not the remotest doubt that Ibsen will bulk more and more largely as years go on in the consciousness of all students of literature in general, as opposed to the stage in particular. The creator of Brand and Peer Gynt is one of the great poets of the world.
Ibsen’s preliminary notes for Hedda Gabler are more detailed than for any of his other plays, and allow analysis of his working methods. They show the development from an initial concept (probably late summer 1889), to a complete oudine (spring 1890), along with many scattered jottings, and a detailed scenario for Acts I and II which was probably written after the first draft of Act I. This full-length draft – published in vol. XII of The Works of Henrik Ibsen (edited by William Archer, New York 1912) – was begun in mid-July, thoroughly revised in October and published on December 4, 1890. There are real-life analogues to the main characters. Løvborg was based on Julius Hoffory, a Norwegian professor who went insane in 1890; and Ibsen’s earliest notes revolve around Camilla Collett, the Norwegian novelist and woman’s rights advocate, who had complained that Ibsen used her as a model for the central figure in The Lady from the Sea:
A married woman more and more imagines that she is an important personality, and as a consequence feels compelled to create for herself a sensational past–
If an interesting female character appears in a new story or in a play, she believes it is she who is being portrayed.
The masculine environment helps to confirm her in this belief.
The two lady friends agree to die together. One of them carries out her end of the bargain, but the other one who realizes what lies in store for her loses her courage. This is the reversal.
‘He has such a disgusting way of walking when one sees him from behind.’
She hates him because he has a goal, a mission in life. The lady friend has one too, but does not dare to devote herself to it. Her personal life treated in fictional form.
In the second act the manuscript that is left behind –
The ‘lost soul’ apologizes for the man of culture. The wild horse and the race horse … Revolution against the laws of nature – but nothing stupid, not until the position is secure.
The issue of a woman’s lack of real outlets for personal fulfillment in a male dominated society was carried over into subsequent versions, together with the female protagonist’s jealousy of a man with a mission in life, and contrasting male figures. In addition certain of the plot details from these first jottings survive into the final play – such as a misplaced manuscript, and a double suicide, botched by one of the participants. However, the protagonist was to change completely; and a slightly later note encapsulates the central elements of the character who emerges as Hedda:
Translated by Evert Sprinchorn;pages 98–100 translated by A.G. Chater
¶ The pale, apparently cold beauty. Expects great things of life and the joy of life.
The man who has now finally won her, plain and simple in appearance, but an honest and talented, broad-minded scholar.
[…]
¶ The manuscript that H. L. leaves behind contends that man’s mission is: Upward, toward the bearer of light. Life on the present foundations of society is not worth living. Therefore he escapes from it through his imagination. By drinking, etc. – Tesman stands for correct behavior. Hedda for blasé over sophistication. Mrs. R. is the nervous-hysterical modern individual. Brack represents the personal bourgeois point of view.
¶ Then H. departs this world. And the two of them are left sitting there with the manuscript they cannot interpret. And the aunt is with them. What an ironic comment on humanity’s striving for progress and development.
¶ But Holger’s double nature intervenes. Only by realizing the basely bourgeois can he win a hearing for his great central idea.
¶ Mrs. Rising is afraid that H., although “a model of propriety,” is not normal. She can only guess at his way of thinking but cannot understand it. Quotes some of his remarks –
¶ One talks about building railways and highways for the cause of progress. But no, no, that is not what is needed. Space must be cleared so that the spirit of man can make its great turnabout. For it has gone astray. The spirit of man has gone astray.
¶ Holger: I have been out. I have behaved obscenely. That doesn’t matter. But the police know about it. That’s what counts.
¶ H. L.’s despair lies in that he wants to master the world but cannot master himself.
¶ Tesman believes that it is he who has in a way seduced H. L. into indulging in excesses again. But that is not so. It is as Hedda has said: that it was he she dreamed of when she talked about “the famous man.” But she does not dare tell Tesman this.
¶ To aid in understanding his own character, L. has made notes in “the manuscript.” These are the notes the two of them should interpret, want to interpret, but cannot possibly.
¶ Brack is inclined to live as a bachelor, and then gain admittance to a good home, become a friend of the family, indispensable –
¶ They say it is a law of nature. Very well then, raise an opposition to it. Demand its repeal. Why give way. Why surrender unconditionally –
¶ In conversations between T. and L. the latter says that he lives for his studies. The former replies that in that case he can compete with him. – (T. lives on his studies) that’s the point.
¶ L. (Tesman) says: I couldn’t step on a worm! “But now I can tell you that I too am seeking the professorship. We are rivals.”
——
¶ NB! Brack had always thought that Hedda’s short engagement to Tesman would come to nothing.
Hedda speaks of how she felt herself set aside, step by step, when her father was no longer in favor, when he retired and died without leaving anything. Then she realized, bitterly, that it was for his sake she had been made much of. And then she was already between twenty-five and twenty-six. In danger of becoming an old maid.
She thinks that in reality Tesman only feels a vain pride in having won her. His solicitude for her is the same as is shown for a thoroughbred horse or a valuable sporting dog. This, however, does not offend her. She merely regards it as a fact.
Hedda says to Brack that she does not think Tesman can be called ridiculous. But in reality she finds him so. Later on she finds him pitiable as well.
Tesman: Could you not call me by my Christian name?
Hedda: No, indeed I couldn’t – unless they have given you some other name than the one you have.
Tesman puts Løvborg’s manuscript in his pocket so that it may not be lost. Afterward it is Hedda who, by a casual remark, with tentative intention, gives him the idea of keeping it.
Then he reads it. A new line of thought is revealed to him. But the strain of the situation increases. Hedda awakens his jealousy.
¶ In the third act one thing after another comes to light about Løvborg’s adventures in the course of the night. At last he comes himself, in quiet despair. “Where is the manuscript?” “Did I not leave it behind me here?” He does not know that he has done so. But after all, of what use is the manuscript to him now! He is writing of the “moral doctrine of the future”! When he has just been released by the police!
¶ Hedda’s despair is that there are doubtless so many chances of happiness in the world, but that she cannot discover them. It is the want of an object in life that torments her.
When Hedda beguiles T. into leading E. L. into ruin, it is done to test T.’s character.
¶ It is in Hedda’s presence that the irresistible craving for excess always comes over E. L.
Tesman cannot understand that E. L. could wish to base his future on injury to another.
¶ Hedda: Do I hate T.? No, not at all. I only find him boring.
¶ Brack: But nobody else thinks so.
Hedda: Neither is there any one but myself who is married to him.
Brack: … not at all boring.
Hedda: Heavens, you always want me to express myself so correctly. Very well then, T. is not boring, but I am bored by living with him.
Hedda: … had no prospects. Well, perhaps you would have liked to see me in a convent (home for unmarried ladies).
Hedda: … then isn’t it an honorable thing to profit by one’s person? Don’t actresses and others turn their advantages into profit. I had no other capital. Marriage – I thought it was like buying an annuity.
Hedda: Remember that I am the child of an old man – and a worn-out man too – or past his prime at any rate – perhaps that has left its mark.
Brack: Upon my word, I believe you have begun to brood over problems.
Hedda: Well, what cannot one take to doing when one has gone and got married.
¶ NOTES: One evening as Hedda and Tesman, together with some others, were on their way home from a party, Hedda remarked as they walked by a charming house that was where she would like to live. She meant it, but she said it only to keep the conversation with Tesman going. “He simply cannot carry on a conversation.”
The house was actually for rent or sale. Tesman had been pointed out as the coming young man. And later when he proposed, and let slip that he too had dreamed of living there, she accepted.
He too had liked the house very much.
They get married. And they rent the house.1
But when Hedda returns as a young wife, with a vague sense of responsibility, the whole thing seems distasteful to her. She conceives a kind of hatred for the house just because it has become her home. She confides this to Brack. She evades the question with Tesman.
¶ The play shall deal with “the impossible,” that is, to aspire to and strive for something which is against all the conventions, against that which is acceptable to conscious minds – Hedda’s included.
[…]
¶ Very few true parents are to be found in the world. Most people grow up under the influence of aunts or uncles – either neglected and misunderstood or else spoiled.
¶ Hedda rejects him because he does not dare expose himself to temptation. He replies that the same is true of her. The wager! … He loses … ! Mrs. Elvsted is present. Hedda says: No danger – He loses.
¶ Hedda feels herself demoniacally attracted by the tendencies of the times. But she lacks courage. Her thoughts remain theories, ineffective dreams.2
¶ The feminine imagination is not active and independen TLY creative like the masculine. It needs a bit of reality as a help.
¶ Løvborg has had inclinations toward “the bohemian life.” Hedda is attracted in the same direction, but she does not dare to take the leap.
¶ Buried deep within Hedda there is a level of poetry. But the environment frightens her. Suppose she were to make herself ridiculous!
¶ Hedda realizes that she, much more than Thea, has abandoned her husband.
¶ The newly wedded couple return home in September – as the summer is dying. In the second act they sit in the garden – but with their coats on.
¶ Being frightened by one’s own voice. Something strange, foreign.
¶ NEWEST PLAN: The festivities in Tesman’s garden – and Løvborg’s defeat – already prepared for in the 1st act. Second act: the party –
¶ Hedda energetically refuses to serve as hostess. She will not celebrate their marriage because (in her opinion, it isn’t a marriage)
¶ Holger: Don’t you see? I am the cause of your marriage –
¶ Hedda is the type of woman in her position and with her character. She marries Tesman but she devotes her imagination to Eilert Løvborg. She leans back in her chair, closes her eyes, and dreams of his adventures …. This is the enormous difference: Mrs. Elvsted “works for his moral improvement.” But for Hedda he is the object of cowardly, tempting daydreams. In reality she does not have the courage to be a part of anything like that. Then she realizes her condition. Caught! Can’t comprehend it. Ridiculous! Ridiculous!
¶ The traditional delusion that one man and one woman are made for each other. Hedda has her roots in the conventional. She marries Tesman but she dreams of Eilert Løvborg …. She is disgusted by the latter’s flight from life. He believes that this has raised him in her estimation …. Thea Elvsted is the conventional, sentimental, hysterical Philistine.
¶ Those Philistines, Mrs. E. and Tesman, explain my behavior by saying first I drink myself drunk and that the rest is done in insanity. It’s a flight from reality which is an absolute necessity to me.
¶ E. L.: Give me something – a flower – at our parting. Hedda hands him the revolver.
¶ Then Tesman arrives: Has he gone? “Yes.” Do you think he will still compete against me? No, I don’t think so. You can set your mind at rest.
¶ Tesman relates that when they were in Gratz she did not want to visit her relatives –
¶ He misunderstands her real motives.
¶ In the last act as Tesman, Mrs. Elvsted, and Miss Rysing are consulting, Hedda plays in the small room at the back. She stops. The conversation continues. She appears in the doorway – Good night – I’m going now. Do you need me for anything? Tesman: No, nothing at all. Good night, my dear! … The shot is fired –
¶ CONCLUSION: All rush into the back room. Brack sinks as if paralyzed into a chair near the stove: But God have mercy – people don’t do such things!
¶ When Hedda hints at her ideas to Brack, he says: Yes, yes, that’s extraordinarily amusing – Ha ha ha! He does not understand that she is quite serious.
¶ Hedda is right in this: there is no love on Tesman’s part. Nor on the aunt’s part. However full of love she may be.
Eilert Løvborg has a double nature. It is a fiction that one loves only one person. He loves two – or many – alternately (to put it frivolously). But how can he explain his position? Mrs. Elvsted, who forces him to behave correctly, runs away from her husband. Hedda, who drives him beyond all limits, draws back at the thought of a scandal.
¶ Neither he nor Mrs. Elvsted understands the point. Tesman reads in the manuscript that was left behind about “the two ideals.” Mrs. Elvsted can’t explain to him what E. L. meant. Then comes the burlesque note: both T. and Mrs. E. are going to devote their future lives to interpreting the mystery.
¶ Tesman thinks that Hedda hates E. L.
Mrs. Elvsted thinks so too.
Hedda sees their delusion but dares not disabuse them of it. There is something beautiful about having an aim in life. Even if it is a delusion –
She cannot do it. Take part in someone else’s.
That is when she shoots herself.
The destroyed manuscript is entitled “The Ethics of Future Society.”
¶ Tesman is on the verge of losing his head. All this work meaningless. New thoughts! New visions! A whole new world! Then the two of them sit there, trying to find the meaning in it. Can’t make any sense of it ….
¶ The greatest misery in this world is that so many have nothing to do but pursue happiness without being able to find it.
¶ “From Jochum Tesman there developed a Jørgen Tesman – but it will be a long, long time before this Jørgen gives rise to a George.”
¶ The simile: The journey of life = the journey on a train.
H.: One doesn’t usually jump out of the compartment.
No, not when the train is moving.
Nor stand still when it is stationary. There’s always someone on the platform, staring in.
[…]
¶ NB: The mutual hatred of women. Women have no influence on external matters of government. Therefore they want to have an influence on souls. And then so many of them have no aim in life (the lack thereof is inherited) –
¶ Løvborg and Hedda bent over the photographs at the table.
He: How is it possible? She: Why not? L.: Tesman! You couldn’t find words enough to make fun of him …. Then comes the story about the general’s “disgrace,” dismissal, etc. The worst thing for a lady at a ball is not to be admired for her own sake … L. : And Tesman? He took you for the sake of your person. That’s just as unbearable to think about.
¶ Just by marrying Tesman it seems to me I have gotten so unspeakably far away from him.
¶ He: Look at her. Just look at her! … Hedda: (stroking her hair) Yes, isn’t she beautiful!
¶ Men and women don’t belong to the same century… . What a great prejudice that one should love only one!
[…]
¶ The demoniacal element in Hedda is this: She wants to exert her influence on someone – But once she has done so, she despises him …. The manuscript?
¶ In the third act Hedda questions Mrs. Elvsted. But if he’s like that, why is he worth holding on to …. Yes, yes, I know –
¶ Hedda’s discovery that her relations with the maid cannot possibly be proper.
¶ In his conversation with Hedda, Løvborg says: Miss H – Miss – You know, I don’t believe that you are married.
¶ Hedda: And now I sit here and talk with these Philistines – And the way we once could talk to each other – No, I won’t say any more … Talk? How do you mean? Obscenely? Ish. Let us say indecently.
¶ NB!! The reversal in the play occurs during the big scene between Hedda and E. L. He: What a wretched business it is to conform to the existing morals. It would be ideal if a man of the present could live the life of the future. What a miserable business it is to fight over a professorship!
Hedda – that lovely girl! H.: No! E. L.: Yes, I’m going to say it. That lovely, cold girl – cold as marble.
I’m not dissipated fundamentally. But the life of reality isn’t livable –
¶ In the fifth act: Hedda: How hugely comic it is that those two harmless people, Tesman and Mrs. E., should try to put the pieces together for a monument to E. L. The man who so deeply despised the whole business –
¶ Life becomes for Hedda a ridiculous affair that isn’t “worth seeing through to the end.”
¶ The happiest mission in life is to place the people of today in the conditions of the future.
L.: Never put a child in this world, H.!
¶ When Brack speaks of a “triangular affair,” Hedda thinks about what is going to happen and refers ambiguously to it. Brack doesn’t understand.
¶ Brack cannot bear to be in a house where there are small children. “Children shouldn’t be allowed to exist until they are fourteen or fifteen. That is, girls. What about boys? Shouldn’t be allowed to exist at all – or else they should be raised outside the house.”
¶ H. admits that children have always been a horror to her too.
¶ Hedda is strongly but imprecisely opposed to the idea that one should love “the family.” The aunts mean nothing to her.
¶ It liberated Hedda’s spirit to serve as a confessor to E. L. Her sympathy has secretly been on his side – But it became ugly when the public found out everything then he backed out.
¶ MAIN POINTS:
1. They are not all made to be mothers.
2. They are passionate but they are afraid of scandal.
3. They perceive that the times are full of missions worth devoting one’s life to, but they cannot discover them.
¶ And besides Tesman is not exactly a professional, but he is a specialist. The Middle Ages are dead –
¶ T: Now there you see also the great advantages to my studies. I can lose manuscripts and rewrite them – no inspiration needed –
¶ Hedda is completely taken up by the child that is to come, but when it is born she dreads what is to follow –
¶ Hedda must say somewhere in the play that she did not like to get out of her compartment while on the trip. Why not? I don’t like to show my legs …. Ah, Mrs. H., but they do indeed show themselves. Nevertheless, I don’t.
¶ Shot herself! Shot herself!
Brack (collapsing in the easy chair): But great God – people don’t do such things!
¶ NB!! Eilert Løvborg believes that a comradeship must be formed between man and woman out of which the truly spiritual human being can arise. Whatever else the two of them do is of no concern. This is what the people around him do not understand. To them he is dissolute. Inwardly he is not.
¶ If a man can have several male friends, why can’t he have several lady friends?
¶ It is precisely the sensual feelings that are aroused while in the company of his female “friends” or “comrades” that seek release in his excesses.
¶ Now I’m going. Don’t you have some little remembrance to give me –? You have flowers – and so many other things – (the story of the pistol from before) – But you won’t use it anyhow –
¶ In the fourth act when Hedda finds out that he has shot himself, she is jubilant …. He had courage.
¶ Here is the rest of the manuscript.
¶ CONCLUSION: Life isn’t tragic …. Life is ridiculous …. And that’s what I can’t bear.
¶ Do you know what happens in novels? All those who kill themselves – through the head – not in the stomach …. How ridiculous – how baroque –
¶ In her conversation with Thea in the first act, Hedda remarks that she cannot understand how one can fall in love with an unmarried man – or an unengaged man – or an unloved man – on the other hand –3
¶ Brack understands well enough that it is Hedda’s repression, her hysteria that motivates everything she does.
¶ On her part, Hedda suspects that Brack sees through her without believing that she understands.
¶ H.: It must be wonderful to take something from someone.
¶ When H. talks to B. in the fifth act about those two sitting there trying to piece together the manuscript without the spirit being present, she breaks out in laughter then she plays the piano – then – d –
¶ Men – in the most indescribable situations how ridiculous they are.
¶ NB! She really wants to live a man’s life wholly. But then she has misgivings. Her inheritance, what is implanted in her.
¶ Loving and being loved by aunts … Most people who are born of old maids, male and female.
¶ This deals with the “underground forces and powers.” Woman as a minor. Nihilism. Father and mother belonging to different eras. The female underground revolution in thought. The slave’s fear of the outside world.
¶ NB!! Why should I conform to social morals that I know won’t last more than half a generation. When I run wild, as they call it, it’s my escape from the present. Not that I find any joy in my excesses. I’m up to my neck in the established order ….
¶ Hedda: Slender figure of average height. Nobly shaped, aristocratic face with fine, wax-colored skin. The eyes have a veiled expression. Hair medium brown. Not especially abundant hair. Dressed in a loose-fitting dressing gown, white with blue trimmings. Composed and relaxed in her manners. The eyes steel-gray, almost lusterless.
¶ Mrs. Elvsted: weak build. The eyes round, rather prominent, almost as blue as water. Weak face with soft features. Nervous gestures, frightened expression –
¶ See above. E. L.’s idea of comradeship between man and woman… . The idea is a life-saver!
¶ If society won’t let us live morally with them (women), then we’ll have to live with them immorally –
¶ Tesman: the new idea in E. L.’s book is that of progress resulting from the comradeship between man and woman.
¶ Hedda’s basic demand is: I want to know everything, but keep myself clean.
¶ I want to know everything – everything – everything –
H.: – –
H. If only I could have lived like him!
¶ Is there something about Brabant? B.: What on earth is that? …
¶ The wager about the use of both pistols.
¶ Miss T: Yes, this is the house of life and health. Now I shall go home to a house of sickness and death. God bless both of you. From now on I’ll come out here every day to ask Bertha how things are –
¶ In the third act H. tells E. L. that she is not interested in the great questions – nor the great ideas – but in the great freedom of man …. But she hasn’t the courage.
¶ The two ideals! Tesman: What in the name of God does he mean by that? What? What do we have to do with ideals?
¶ The new book treats of “the two ideals.” Thea can give no information.
A complete version of the notes, including detail on their original format, can be found in The Oxford Ibsen, vol. VII, ed. James McFarlane (1966).
*
Among “the tendencies of the times” to which Hedda is “demoniacally attracted”, is the whole fin-de-siècle atmosphere, which forms an oblique background to the play (as it does for Strindberg’s Miss Julie, written in 1888). The central icon of Decadent art was Salome, and as a summary of the fin-de-siècle movement points out:
In literature it led to the characterization of women as passive creatures of emotion and instinct or as dangerously attractive but ruthless dolls, the grown-up children of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, whose instinct is to drag men down to their own biological level. When this predatoriness is consciously aggressive, the ‘femme fatale’ results, the kind of role so enjoyed by Sarah Bernhardt, which, in turn, is easily associated with the ‘gynander’ – the unnatural woman who behaves like a man, that for Strindberg was exemplified by the ‘bluestocking’ heroines of Ibsen.
The attempt of such women to control or usurp male creativity was emblematized by the Decadents in vampires, sphinxes, maenads, willis, and destructive watersprites, but a particularly apt image was discovered in the symbolic castration afforded by decapitation, or decollation. This became one of the most frequent Decadent topoi, exemplified not only in the central story of Salome – who is very often conflated with her mother, Herodias – but also by the myths of Judith, Taïs, Delilah, Turandot, Rusalka, and the decapitated Orpheus …
The characteristic Decadent stance towards women, then, was the simultaneous urge to self-abasement and to savage domination that is technically known as ‘sado-masochism’. This definition was introduced … by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in his Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), and was taken from the name of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch who in 1870 had published a celebrated novel about bondage, Venus in Furs, in which sex is not seen as a pleasure but as a demonic source of pain …
(Brian Parker, in Modern Drama, 32 [1989])
The image of Hedda given by the notes corresponds closely with such an archetype: “the pale, apparently cold beauty”, over-sophisticated and “demonic”, masculinarized by the association with her father’s pistols, who leads a man to ruin through inspiring an “irresistible craving for excess”. Other elements in the play are the “vine leaves” Hedda envisions in Løvborg’s hair, as well as his slightly displaced castration – shooting himself in the “stomach” through the agency of her pistol. It is also significant that Sacher-Masoch had been a friend of Ibsen’s in Rome.
However, as with the “MAIN POINTS” listed in the notes, which clearly outline a central concern with the position of women, the fin-de-swcle Salome theme is present only in the subtext. Although in his correspondence Ibsen insisted on a particular actress – Constance Bruun – for the title figure because of her capacity “to express the demonical basis of the character” (letter to Hans Schroder, director of the Christiana Theater, 27 December 1890), his commentary on the play stressed that it had no explicit message. For instance, a letter to Moritz Prozor, his German translator, focussed on the psychological basis of the play and its unity as a whole:
The title of the play is Hedda Gabler. My intention in giving it this name was to indicate that Hedda as a personality is to be regarded rather as her father’s daughter than as her husband’s wife.
It has not been my desire to deal in this play with so-called human problems. What I principally wanted to do was to depict human beings, human emotions, and human desires, upon a groundwork of certain of the social conditions and moral principles of the present day. When you have read the whole, my fundamental idea will be clearer to you than I can make it by entering into further explanations …
(4 December 1890)
Other letters, written while the play was in rehearsal at the Christiana Theater, emphasize the dynamics of the action – in particular the monolithic unity of the society that faces Hedda. Writing to Kristina Steen, an actress in the production, Ibsen commented:
Jørgen Tesman, his old aunts, and the faithful servant Berthe together form a picture of complete unity. They think alike, they share the same memories and have the same outlook on life. To Hedda they appear like a strange and hostile power, aimed at her very being. In a performance of the play the harmony that exists between them must be conveyed.
(14 January 1891)
The same letter stresses that all characters, even an apparently minor figure like the “good-natured, simple, oldish” maid, are equally important and have to be fully realized by the actors to create this unified impression.
Not surprisingly, Ibsen’s supporters were quick to see the connection between the Hedda and Nora, and to point to the social criticism embodied in the title figure. One of the best commentaries on Hedda Gabler, which analyzes its technique and structure, gives a contemporary reading of Hedda’s character as a “fin de siècle woman“ and identifies its place in the naturalistic movement, is by Edmund Gosse, the English translator of the play
The Fortnightly, January-June, 1891
The new drama is the longest which Ibsen has published, with the exception of The Wild Duck. In comparison with the seven social plays which have preceded it, its analogies are rather with A Doll’s House than with the rest. It attempts no general satire of manners, as do The Pillars of Society and An Enemy of the People. It propounds no such terrible questions in ethics as Ghosts; it is almost as perplexing, but not nearly so obscure, as The Wild Duck. In style it is a return to Ibsen’s old realistic manner, without a trace of the romanticism which cropped up so strangely in The Lady from the Sea, and even in Rosmersholm; while the dialogue is more rapid and fluent, and less interrupted by long speeches than it has ever been before. In the whole of the new play there is not one speech which would require thirty seconds for its enunciation. I will dare to say that I think in this instance Ibsen has gone perilously far in his desire for rapid and concise expression. The stichomythia of the Greek and French tragedians was lengthy in comparison with this unceasing display of hissing conversational fireworks, fragments of sentences without verbs, clauses that come to nothing, adverbial exclamations and cryptic interrogatories. It would add, I cannot but think, to the lucidity of the play if some one character were permitted occasionally to express himself at moderate length, as Nora does in A Doll’s House, and as Mrs. Alving in Ghosts. None the less is the feat of combining a story with a play, and conducting both in meteoric bursts of extremely colloquial chat, one which Ibsen deserves the highest praise for having performed. And, on the stage, no doubt, this rapid broken utterance will give an extraordinary sense of reality.
As is known, Ibsen, like Euripides, does not present his characters to the public until their fortunes are determined. The heightened action of a third act in a “well-made” play is no luxury which he offers himself. But the Norwegian tragic poet cannot present a herald to his audience, or send Hermes down to tell the story in heroic verse. He has to explain the situation out of the mouths of his characters, and this he has an unrivalled adroitness in doing. We are never conscious of being informed, but, as we read on, the situation gradually and inevitably becomes patent to us. In the present case the state of affairs is as follows: A promising young man of letters, George Tesman, has gained a stipend, a sort of travelling scholarship, with the vague understanding that when he returns he will be appointed to the vacant Chair of the History of Civilisation, presumably at the University of Christiania. He is now looked upon as the principal rising authority in that science, a friend or rival of his, of far more original genius, one Ejlert Løvborg, having sunken into obscurity through drink and ill-living. Tesman, a sanguine, shallow youth, proposes to marry the beauty of the circle, Hedda Gabler, the orphan daughter of a late General Gabler. Tesman is himself an orphan, having been brought up by two maiden aunts, one of them a confirmed invalid. Hedda Gabler is understood to express a great desire to live in a certain villa. They marry, and they depart for six months on the Continent. A judge (assessor), Mr. Brack, who has been an intimate friend of both of them, contrives to secure and to furnish this villa for them during their absence. It seems a little rash that, having no income, they should launch into these expenditures, but it is excused on the score of Tesman’s practical certainty of being made a university professor. And their affection is supposed to be, and on Tesman’s side is, of so tender and idyllic a character that it is really cruel to disturb them about money. The reader takes it for granted that they are going to be disappointed of the Chair, and accordingly ruined, but that does not happen. Ibsen does not play these obvious old games of comedy.
It must now be explained that during the honeymoon of the Tesmans an event has occurred in the literary world. Ejlert Løvborg, who was supposed to have become submerged for good and all, and who was hidden in a mountain parish, has suddenly published a volume on the progress of civilisation which surpasses all his previous writings, and which creates a wide sensation. It is whispered that a lady up there in the mountains, Mrs. Elvsted, the wife of a sheriff of that name, has undertaken his social restoration. Løvborg is once more a dangerous rival to Tesman, who, however, with generous enthusiasm, hastens to pay his tribute of praise to the new publication. The play opens on the morning after the arrival of the Tesmans at their villa, and the action occupies forty-eight hours, the scene never changing from the suite of apartments on the ground floor. It may be conceived from these brief preliminaries that action, in the ordinary sense, is not the strong point of the drama, the interest of which, indeed, is strictly psychological. It consists, mainly, of the revelation of the complex and morbid character of Hedda Gabler, attended by the satellites of Mrs. Elvsted, Brack, and Løvborg, the husband, Tesman, being in reality a semi-comic character, not much more subtle than Helmer in A Doll’s House, but no whit the less closely studied.
Hedda is one of the most singular beings whom Ibsen has created. She has a certain superficial likeness to Nora, of whom she is, indeed, a kind of moral parody or perverted imitation. Hedda Gabler is a spoilt child, whose indulgent father has allowed her to grow up without training of any kind. Superficially gracious and pleasing, with a very pretty face and tempting manners, she is in reality wholly devoid of moral sense. She reveals herself, as the play proceeds, as without respect for age or grief, without natural instincts, without interest in life, untruthful, treacherous, implacable in revenge. She is a very ill-conditional little social panther or ocelot, totally without conscience of ill or preference for good, a product of the latest combination of pessimism, indifferentism and morbid selfishness, all claws and thirst for blood under the delicate velvet of her beauty.
[…]
Hedda Gabler is a more pronounced type of the fin de siècle woman than Ibsen has hitherto created. She is not thwarted by instinctive agencies beyond her authority, like Ellida Wangel; nor drawn aside by overmastering passion, like Rebekka West; personal refinement distinguishes her from Gina Ekdal, and deprives her of an excuse; she is infinitely divided from the maternal devotion of Helene Alving. As I have hinted before, the only figure in Ibsen’s rich gallery of full-length portraits which has even a superficial likeness to her is Nora Helmer. But Nora is intended; or else the play is a mere mystification, to be a sympathetic individual. Whatever view we may take of her famous resolve and her sudden action upon it, we have to understand that ignorance of life and a narrow estimate of duty have been the worst of her defects. In her child-like or doll-like sacrifice of principle for her husband she has acted with a native generosity which it would be monstrous to expect husbands, at any rate, wholly to disapprove of. But Hedda Gabler has no such infantile unselfishness; no such sacrifice of self even upon a squalid altar. Curiously enough, when confronted with the terrible act, the destruction of Løvborg’s manuscript, which she has committed purely to revenge herself on that personage, she deftly adopts Nora’s excuse for the forgery – she has done it for her husband’s sake. Here, and not for the first time, Ibsen seems to be laughing, if not at himself, at those fanatic disciples who take his experiments in pathology for lectures on hygiene.
[…]
In depicting Hedda Gabler, Ibsen seems to have expended his skill on the portrait of a typical member ofthat growing class of which M. Jules Simon spoke so eloquently the other day in his eulogy on Caro. To people of this temperament – and it is one which, always existing, is peculiarly frequent nowadays – the simple and masculine doctrines of obedience to duty, of perseverance, of love to mankind, are in danger of being replaced by “a complicated and sophisticated code which has the effect of making some of us mere cowards in the face of difficulty and sacrifice, and of disgusting all of us with the battle of life.” In Hedda Gabler we see the religious idea violently suppressed under the pretext of a longing for liberty. She will not be a slave, yet is prepared for freedom by no education in self-command. Instead of religion, morality, and philosophy her head is feverishly stuffed with an amalgam of Buddhism and Schopenhauer. Even the beautiful conventions of manners are broken down, and the suppression of all rules of conduct seems the sole road to happiness. In her breast, with its sickly indifferentism, love awakens no sympathy, age no respect, suffering no pity, and patience in adversity no admiration.
[…]
In Hedda Gabler, I believe it will be admitted that Ibsen has gone further than ever before in his disdain for the recognised principles of scenic art. In this connection, it is amusing to note that the situation on which his new play is based has a very curious resemblance to that of M. Henri Becque’s much-discussed comedy of La Parisienne. As in that play, so in Hedda Gabler, the three central figures are a wife of seductive manners and acute perceptions, devoid of all moral sense; a husband, who is a man of letters in search of a place; and a lover, who is the sympathetic friend of the husband, and even his defender against the caprices of the wife. The difference between French and Scandinavian convention is shown, indeed, in the fact that while Clotilde is pre-eminently unfaithful, Hedda has no virtue left but this, the typical one. Through the tempest which has raged in her moral garden, elle a sauvé sa rose. But in each play the tame lover, Lafont or Brack, eadeavours to restrain the tendresse of the wife, Clotilde or Hedda, for an unseen or suspected second lover, Sampson or Løvborg, and to prevent a scandal in the interest of the husband. I do not push the parallel further than this, nor would I affront convinced Ibsenites by comparing so serious a work as Hedda Gabler with La Parisienne, which is doubdess a trifle, though a very brilliant trifle. But this accidental resemblance to the work of Henri Becque turns up again in the last act of Hedda Gabler, where all the personages appear in deep mourning, and irresistibly remind “the inner eye ” of the lugubrious mise-en-scène of Les Corbeaux. Probably the reason why the name of Becque occurs to us once and again as we turn the pages of Ibsen’s last drama is, not so much these superficial resemblances of situation as the essential identity of the theatrical ideal in these two dramatists. Each is fighting, in defiance of the Clement Scotts and the Francisque Sarceys, against the tradition of the “well-made” play; each is trying to transfer to the boards a real presentment of life, or of a fraction of life. It is therefore curious, to say the least, to find them hitting upon forms of expression so similar. Unless my memory fails me, a piece of Becque’s was acted at the Théâtre Libre in Paris on the same night, or nights, on which Ghosts was performed there. It must have been very interesting to compare work so like and yet so essentially dissimilar. […]
What the moral of Hedda Gabler is, what “gospel” it preaches, and what light it holds out to poor souls tossing in our sea of “hysterical mock-disease,” I will not pretend to conjecture. Doubtless there will be scarcely less discussion over the ethics of Hedda’s final resolve than there was over those of Nora, when she slammed the front-door so vigorously eleven years ago. These are matters which, I conceive, interest the great magian at Munich less than they do his disciples. He takes a knotty situation, he conducts it to its extreme logical conclusion, he invites the world to fight over it, and then he retires for another two years of solitary meditation.
| January 1891 | Residenztheater | Hedda: Clara Heese |
| Munich | ||
| February 1891 | Lessing Theatre | Hedda: Anna Haverland |
| Berlin | ||
| February 1891 | Royal Theatre | Hedda: Betty Hennings |
| Copenhagen | ||
| April 1891 | Vaudeville Theatre | Hedda: Elizabeth Robins |
| London | ||
| December 1891 | Théâtre du Vaudeville | Hedda: Mme. Brandes |
| Paris | ||
| May 1893 | Opera Comique | Hedda: Janet Achurch |
| London | ||
| March 1898 | 5th Avenue Theatre | Hedda: Elizabeth Robins |
| New York | ||
| February 1899 | Moscow Art Theatre | Hedda: Maria F. Andreeva |
| Moscow | ||
| October 1903 | Adelphi Theatre | Hedda: Eleonora Duse |
| London | ||
| October 1903 | Manhattan Theatre | Hedda: Minnie Maddern |
| New York | Fiske | |
| November 1906 | Komissarzhevshaya | Hedda: Vera |
| St. Petersburg | Theatre | Komissarzhevskaya |
| November 1906 | Princess Theatre | Hedda: Alla Nazimova |
| New York | ||
| March 1907 | Court Theatre | Hedda: Mrs Patrick Campbell |
| London |
Given the subtext of Hedda Gabler outlined in Ibsen’s notes – that “the play shall deal with cthe impossible’” and with “ ‘underground forces and powers’”, plus the association of women with “Nihilism” – it is hardly surprising to find both actors and audiences uncomprehending. Both the world premiere in Germany at the Residenztheater (13 January 1891) and the first Paris performance (17 December 1891) at the Théâtre du Vaudeville were judged disastrous. The popular Munich actress Marie Conrad-Ramlo played Hedda in a conventionally histrionic and declamatory style, while the French comedienne Marthe Brandès presenting her as a stereotypical seductress was forced to close the production after a single matinee performance. Even the Norwegian public was confused, despite Ibsen’s involvement in the Christiana production.
When the play was presented in England by Elizabeth Robins (Vaudeville Theatre, 20 April 1891), the response was moral outrage, as William Archer’s summary of the reviews shows. The tone of these criticisms echoed the reactions to earlier productions of A Doll’s House, and particularly Ghosts, indicating the way that any play by Ibsen became a batdeground between conservative and reformist forces in the period. Indeed, this selection of criticism by Archer also documents the campaign for Ibsen, and is highly selective in omitting the praise of Robins’ performance by even the most antagonistic reviewers – such as Clement Scott, who acknowledged a “morbid attraction” in Robins’ “sublime study of deceit and heartlessness … What changes of expression! What watchfulness! … She has fascinated us with the savage” (Illustrated London News, 25 April 1891).
Figure 4.2 Studio portrait of Elizabeth Robins as Hedda Gabler, London, 1891
The production was received without enthusiasm by the public and by the critics who, for the most part, found the play confusing. The main criticism of Miss Bruun’s Hedda was that she was too cold. The critic for Aftenposten wrote that she has created an individual out of “the problematic female character” and that she brought out the “aristocratic, blasé, boredom with life and the cold passion” but did not bring out the other aspects. The Dagbladet critic wrote that Hedda should be like “champagne on ice” and that Miss Bruun served the ice but forgot the champagne. He also commented on the confusion in the audience and one member asking, “Don’t these people ever eat breakfast?”
The Dagbladet critic continues that Miss Bruun lacked “the finer shadings” which a few more rehearsals would have achieved. Given the still relatively short rehearsal period, there is probably some truth in this observation. In addition, he felt Miss Bruun’s Hedda had already decided to kill herself by the first act and “she is too blasé and too finished with life from the first to the last.” He thought that unhappy love was Hedda’s tragedy and her failure to win back Eilert should have been played as the cause of her suicide. Furthermore, he was confused by the relationship between Hedda and Brack. She played the earlier scene about the train both “secretive and promising” which made it confusing at the ending when she was so opposed to being in his power.
Although the Dagbladet reviewer found the overall performance lacking fullness and intensity, he noted the difficulty of the role, and suggested Miss Bruun’s admirable performance would improve. Several months later when Ibsen attended, this same reviewer wrote that now “there is an intensity and clear development … a fully formed figure.”
The critic for Morgenbladet wrote that Miss Bruun had understood the role’s various sides, and the reviewer for Shillings Magazin mentions her intellectual grasp of the role. However the latter was critical of the actress’ spontaneity – “letting the demonic out everywhere, lightly and playfully” and “supplementing his [Ibsen’s] strict style with the kind of spontaneity not really appropriate. …” He also mentions the ensemble acting, especially noting the scenes between Hedda and Brack and “how far our stage has reached in the last few years in the direction of natural speech.” Olaf Hansson, who played Brack, was known for his naturalistic line delivery and movement. One historian even asserts that Hansson was the first Norwegian actor who seriously turned his back to the public.
Because Bjørn Bjørnson directed this production and because he was such an exacting director, his comments on Hedda may indicate how he instructed Miss Bruun to play the role. He wrote that Hedda was “too weak to let herself go until she threw herself into death – the single, heedless, integrated courageous thing in her whole messed up life.” He also wrote that Miss Bruun’s tendency was toward coolness but that in the scene in front of the fire she was “hysterically wild.” By Bjørnson’s account, Ibsen later told him, “That is how pregnant women can become.” Also, the words about “dying in beauty with vine-leaves in the hair – are from the same workshop.” As in an earlier reference, Ibsen attributed much of Hedda’s behavior to her pregnancy.
“The Mausoleum of Ibsen”, Fortnightly Review, 1 July 1893
Ghosts was produced at the first performance of the Independent Theatre. The frenzy of execration with which it was greeted must be within the memory of all my readers. […]
Nothing daunted by the tempest, Miss Elizabeth Robins and Miss Marion Lea produced Hedda Gabler only five weeks later (April 20th, 1891). This time the “suburban Ibsen,” the “egotist and bungler,” was found by the Daily Telegraph to have produced a “ghasdy picture beautifully painted.” “It was like a visit to the Morgue …. There they all lay on their copper couches, fronting us, and waiting to be owned …. There they all were, false men, wicked women, deceitful friends, sensualists, egotists, piled up in a heap behind the screen of glass, which we were thankful for …. There were the dead bodies, and no one could resist looking at them. Art was used for the most baleful purpose. It is true that the very spectacle of moral corruption was positively fascinating …. Would indeed that, after this Morgue inspection, after this ghasdy spectacle of dead bodies and suicides, after this revolting picture of human frailty and depravity, there could be a break in the cloud …. But alas! there is no gleam to be seen in the dark raincloud of Ibsenite pessimism! … What a horrible story! What a hideous play!” Most of my readers are probably aware that there is only one dead body in Hedda Gabler, seen for something like a quarter of a minute just as the curtain falls. But what must the readers of the Daily Telegraph have gathered from the outburst I have just quoted? “I should like so much to see the piece you’re in,” a lady said to Mr. Scott Buist, the excellent Tesman of the cast, “but I don’t think I could stand anything so horrible.” “Horrible! How do you mean?” he inquired. “Why, you have the Morgue on the stage, haven’t you?” was the reply. And I have no doubt many thousands of people were under the same impression, on that 21st (not 1st) of April. The other critics, if less imaginative, were no less denunciatory.
“Ibsen’s plays regarded as masterpieces of genius by a small but noisy set of people, but … the tastes of English playgoers are sound and healthy, and the hollowness and shams of the Ibsen cult need only be known to be rejected.” –Standard.
“Dr. Ibsen’s social dramas have yet to prove their power to interest cultivated audiences; for the limited number of worshippers who proclaim these productions as masterpieces of art and stagecraft … cannot be accepted as a fair sample even of the educated public.” – Daily News.
“Robust common-sense of ordinary English audiences will confirm the adverse judgment pronounced upon the morbid Norwegian dramatist by all save a clique of faddists anxious to advertise themselves by the aid of any eccentricity that comes first to hand… . Already, we fancy, the craze has had its day.” – Sporting and Dramatic News.
“One left the theatre filled with depression at the sorry spectacle that had been set before them (sic).” – Reynolds’ Newspaper.
“A few steps out of the hospital-ward and we arrive at the dissecting-room. Down a little lower and we come to the deadhouse. There, for the present, Ibsen has left us …. Miss Elizabeth Robins has done what no doubt she fully intended to do (!). She has made vice attractive by her art. She has almost ennobled crime. She has glorified an unwomanly woman,” &c., &c. Mr. C. Scott in the Illustrated London News.
“Hideous nightmare of pessimism … The play is simply a bad escape of moral sewage-gas …. Hedda’s soul is a-crawl with the foulest passions of humanity.” – Pictorial World.
“The piece is stuff and nonsense; poor stuff and ‘pernicious nonsense.’ It is as if the author had studied the weakest of the Robertsonian comedies, and had thought he could do something like it in a tragic vein.” –Punch.
“It is not, possibly, so utterly repulsive as others that have been seen, but, nevertheless, it is offensive.” – Lloyd’s News.
“The more I see of Ibsen, the more disgusted I am with his alleged dramas.” London.
“Utterly pessimistic in its tedious turmoil of knaves and fools… . Other plays from the same tainted source.” – The People.
“Full of loathsomeness.” – The Table.
“Things rank and gross in nature alone have place in the mean and sordid philosophy of Ibsen …. Can any human being feel happier or better from a contemplation of the two harlots at heart who do duty in Hedda Gabler? … Insidious nastiness of photographic studies of vice and morbidity. … It is free from the mess and nastiness of Ghosts, the crack-brained maunderings of Rosmersholm, the fantastic, shortsighted folly of A Doll’s House … The blusterous little band of Ibsen idolaters …. ” – Saturday Review.
“Strange provincial prigs and suburban chameleons …. The funereal clown who is amusing us … is given to jokes in very questionable taste. We are reminded again and again of Goethe’s famous stage direction, ‘Mephistopheles macht eine unaständige Geberde,’ and it is a coarseness of this sort which, I fear, constitutes Ibsen’s charm for some of his disciples …. For sheer unadulterated stupidity, for inherent meanness and vulgarity, for pretentious triviality … no Bostonian novel or London penny novelette has surpassed Hedda Gabler;”
Mr. ROBERT BUCHANAN in the Illustrated London News.
*
The reception of Hedda Gabler in England, which was widely recognized as a vindication of Ibsen’s theatre despite the attacks on what was seen as the immorality and pessimism of the play’s vision, was largely due to the psychological character study on which Robins based her performance. This was oudined in her commentary forty years later in Ibsen and the Actress. The feminist implications of her interpretation were indeed overlooked (as she indicates); even Lady Bell, whom she mentions as one of her strongest women supporters, focuses solely on the “corrosiveness” and “tragic” nature of the characterization:
Who that saw it will ever forget what Elizabeth Robins did with the second act? The crouching figure by the fire, Løvborg’s book in her terrible maleficent grasp, the firelight flickering on the sinister triumph of hatred in her eyes, as handful by handful she cast the manuscript into the flames, the intensity of her sibilant whisper shuddering through the air – ‘Your child, Thea! Your child and Eilert Lovborg’s … now I am burning the child!’
(Landmarks, 1929)
Significantly this highpoint in the performance departed from Ibsen’s text – as Archer notes Robins also did at other key moments. In her marked acting script for the production Robins crossed out Ibsen’s detailed and specific stage directions, substituting her own actions and lines to intensify the pathological destructiveness and emotion:
Hedda holds out her hands, wavering a little as he [Løvborg] goes out. She utters a broken cry, grasps curtains, looks back at desk where manuscript is and whispers hoarsely, ‘Thea! Thea!’ – again and again as she crosses the room, takes out ms with eager hands, catches sight of stove, glides to it and drops before it opening door and muttering, ‘Who? child, the child’ – crushes some leaves and burns them during ‘How I love burning your child’.
Henry James was first exposed to Ibsen by seeing Elizabeth Robins in Hedda Gabler. His description of the production used her rendering of the role as a basis to interpret Ibsen’s work, pointing out:
It is the portrait of a nature, the story of what Paul Bourget would call an état à âme, and of a state of nerves as well as soul, a state of temper, of disappointment, of desperation. Hedda Gabler is in short the study of an exasperated woman … We receive Hedda ripe for her catastrophe, and if we ask for antecedents and explanations we must simply find them in her character. Her motives are simply her passions.
(The New Review, June 1891)
James defined Ibsen’s “great quality” as “dealing essentially with the individual caught in the fact” – and the wide influence of his essay effectively imposed this performance as the standard view of Hedda’s character.
Whatever its subsequent critical importance, however, at the time the effect of this production was perhaps more limited than Robins’ supporters – who included Shaw as well as Archer and James – claimed. As one reviewer noted on revisiting Hedda Gabler towards the end of its run, the English audience for Ibsen was limited to an educated and politically radical elite:
Remarkable, indeed, has been the fate of Hedda Gabler at the Vaudeville. Only last week this pretty theatre was unto the worshippers at the shrine of Ibsen as a sort of temple, and the denizens of the stalls and dress circle were even more interesting than the odd drama itself. Their enthusiasm for their idol used to inspire his interpreters; and certainly the matinee performances of Hedda Gabler were vastly superior to those which take place now nightly at Mr. Thome’s theatre, although the cast remains unaltered. Before the lie [common public], which pays its shillings and its pence to enjoy an amusing or be thrilled by an exciting play, the aspect of things changed as if by magic. The pit and the gallery watched in blank amazement the vagaries of the lunatic Hedda, and listened to the crudely coarse dialogue with stupefaction. But little applause followed the fall of the curtain, and Miss Elizabeth Robins and Miss Marion Lea [Thea] both felt the chilly influence, and their old magic spell seemed broken.
(Saturday Review, 16 May 1891)
Ibsen and the Actress, Hogarth Press, 1928
I have somewhere several sets of page proofs of Hedda Gabler as they left the hands of the translators; one set scored over in Marion Lea’s handwriting, one with mine, and our final agreed recommendations. These Mr Archer fully criticised, sometimes denounced and utterly declined; but the final result was, I think, a very speakable, very playable version, no less faithful – I have always held more faithful – to Ibsen […]
The press notices were a palpitating excitement, especially those we jeered at – with anxiety in our hearts. But we put on a bold front. Mr Clement Scott understand Hedda? – any man except that wizard Ibsen really understand her? Of course not. That was the tremendous part of it. How should men understand Hedda on the stage when they didn’t understand her in the persons of their wives, their daughters, their women friends? One lady of our acquaintance, married and not noticeably unhappy, said laughing, “Hedda is all of us.”
Hedda was not all of us, but she was a good many of us – so Mr Grant Allen told the public. Anyway, she was a bundle of the unused possibilities, educated to fear life; too much opportunity to develop her weakness; no opportunity at all to use her best powers […]
Hedda is first represented to us as an enviable person. We hear of what General Gabler’s daughter had “been accustomed to”; how fond she was of dancing, and shooting at a mark and riding with her handsome father – she “in her long black habit and with feathers in her hat.” “So beset with admirers,” Aunt Julia says – who would have dreamt she would marry a mere professor? Well, she wasn’t on the scene sixty seconds before it was clear she knew there was joy in life that she hadn’t been able to grasp, and that marriage only emphasised what she was missing.
It was never any wish of mine to whitewash General Gabler’s somewhat lurid daughter. Even in the heat and glamour of that first personal contact with a great Ibsen part, I was under no temptation to try to make her what is conventionally known as “sympathetic.” One surviving recollection bears witness to that. Among those who never much cared about Ibsen, but always came to see him acted, was Lady Bell. At the first performance of Hedda she was thought by her companion to be in danger of lending herself too much to the glamour of the play; so this friend of Lady Bell’s youth warned her: “It’s all very exciting, but I wouldn’t trust her round the corner – that woman playing Hedda.”
I had the best of reasons for not trying to mitigate Hedda’s corrosive qualities. It was precisely the corrosive action of those qualities on a woman in Hedda’s circumstances that made her the great acting opportunity she was – in her revolt against those commonplace surroundings that the bookworm she had married thought so “elegant”; her unashamed selfishness; her scorn of so-called womanly qualities; above all, her strong need to put some meaning into her life, even at the cost of borrowing it, or stealing the meaning out of someone else’s.
Hedda’s first and dearest dream had been to find contacts with life through the attractive young man of letters, Eilert Løvborg. That hope ended in driving him from her at the point of a pistol – not, as one eminent critic has said, “in the ostentation of outraged purity which is the instinctive defence of women to whom chastity is not natural.” Hedda drove Løvborg from her in disgust; disgust at the new aspects of vulgar sensuality which her curiosity about life had led him to reveal. She never denied it was her doing that he revealed these things; it was not her doing that he had them to reveal. They made her gorge rise. The man who had wallowed in that filth must not touch Hedda Gabler – certainly not fresh from the latest orgy. The effect ofthat experience, plus the conditions of her own life and upbringing, was to throw her into marriage with the least ineligible man she can find who is decent, and no one can deny that poor Tesman was entirely decent.
The result was not peculiar to Ibsen characters. In one form or another, as we all know, it is a commonplace in the history of people whose nervous system generates more force than the engine of their opportunity can use up. Hedda speculates, like many another woman, on the opportunity politics would give to her husband, and, through him, give to her; but she is too intelligent to have much hope of Tesman in that direction. She is no sooner home from her boring honeymoon than she finds that a girl she had looked down on and terrorised at school – shrinking, gende Mrs Elvsted – has reclaimed the dissipated Løvborg. More than that, largely by her faith in him, she has helped him to write what they are calling a work of genius. The timid Thea Elvsted has actually left her husband and her home to watch over Løvborg, so that he may not fall into evil courses again. How on earth had it all come about? Hedda, by turns, worms and coerces the facts out of Thea; “He gave up his old habits not because I asked him to, for I never dared do that; but he saw how repulsive they were to me – so he dropped them.”
As simple as that! None of those shady stories told to Thea – but the pretty little fool has his dreams in her keeping; she has helped to turn them into reality. And Hedda has lost him. For Hedda there would be “others.” The insinuating Judge Brack, with his aristocratic profile and his eyeglass, is already at the door – but never the man whose faith in his own genius, faith in life, had given Hedda the one respite she had known from mean standards, mean fears.
Those had been times for Løvborg, too, of respite from his meaner self. Hedda’s passion for external material beauty was not the only kind of beauty that swayed her. Løvborg in his moods of poetic exaltation had given her, too, a glorious sense of freedom, of daring. She had her phrase for those high moods of his. It was the phrase that, with a truly Ibsenite irony, became famous in England in a totally different sense. When Hedda asks eagerly, “Did he have vine leaves in his hair?” she was not inquiring whether Løvborg was drunk with the fiery Scandinavian punch, but whether he had been tasting a diviner draught. She was using her symbol for his hour of inspired vision, which had had for her, too, its intoxication. Now she has lost all that – unless – unless she can break the hold of this irritating little goose. Thea had said she’d been so frightened of Hedda at school. Well, she should be frightened again!
It is a commentary on actress psychology that though in those days I accepted, and even myself used, the description of Hedda as a “bloodless egoist,” I was under no temptation to play her like that. Here I was in debt to Ibsen’s supreme faculty for giving his actors the clue – the master-key – if they are not too lofty or too helplessly sophisticated to take it. Ibsen’s unwritten clue brought me close enough to the “cold-blooded egoist” to feel her warm to my touch; to see Hedda Gabler as pitiable in her hungry loneliness – to see her as tragic. Insolent and evil she was, but some great celebrators of Ibsen have thought more meanly of Hedda than the text warrants […]
It is perhaps curious Ibsen should have known that a good many women have found it possible to get through life by help of the knowledge that they have power to end it rather than accept certain slaveries. Naturally enough, no critic, so far as I know, has ever noticed this governing factor in Hedda’s oudook, her consciousness of one sort of power, anyway – the power of escape. The reason men have not noticed the bearing this had on Hedda’s character and fate seems plain enough. Certainly the particular humiliations and enslavements that threaten women do not threaten men. Such enslavements may seem so unreal to decent men as to appear as melodrama.
Ibsen not only knew better; he saw further than the special instance. He saw what we at the time did not; I mean the general bearing of Hedda’s story.
I have just been correcting the proofs of the last act of Hedda … The last act of Hedda quite thrilled me as it acted itself before me in the proofs. Miss Robins was really fine in it – she had moments of inspiration. I must tell you what poor old Joe Knight said to me one day. We were talking about Barrie’s Ibsens’s Ghost, which was produced on the afternoon before the last performance of Hedda. I said it was rather funny. He said: “Well, yes – but I assure you, Archer, at the point where Miss Vanbrugh changed from Thea into Hedda, and I saw the black figure and the long white arms glimmering through the darkness of the stage, the feeling of the real thing gripped me and thrilled me, and I could hardly resist going back that night and seeing it once more.” Certainly it was a big thing, that last act, and how it held even the densest of audiences! They always used to hiss Hedda at the lines “I did it for your sake, George”, and “I couldn’t bear that anyone should throw you in the shade” – and certainly Miss Robins was diabolically feline in those lines. What always fetched me most in her performance was a point in which she departed from Ibsen’s strict intention. It is where Hedda is sitting by the stove, absorbed in the contemplation of Løvborg’s having “had the will and the courage to turn away from the banquet of life – so early.” Instead of starting, where Brack says he must dispel her pleasant illusion, Miss R. used to speak three speeches: “Illusion?” “What do you mean?” and “Not voluntarily!” – quite absently, looking straight in front of her, and evidently not taking in what Brack was saying. She used to draw deep breaths of relief (“befrielse”), quite intent on her vision of Eilert lying “I skonhed” [beautifully], and only woken up at her fourth speech: “Have you concealed something?” Now the old min [Archer’s pet name for Ibsen] evidently didn’t intend this but it is one of those things I’m sure he would be grateful for, it was so beautiful.
1 Luigi Capuana (born 1839), an Italian novelist and dramatic critic, translated A Doll’s House into Italian. It was the famous actress, Eleonora Duse, who wished him to alter the last scene of the play; but she finally accepted and acted it in the original form.
It so happens that two or three formal generalisations of Ibsen’s have recently been going the round of the press; but they are all taken from letters or speeches, not from his plays.
Both of them, each in his and her own way, have seen in their common love for this house a sign of their mutual understanding. As if they sought and were drawn to a common home.
Then he rents the house. They get married and go abroad. He orders the house bought and his aunt furnishes it at his expense. Now it is their home. It is theirs and yet it is not, because it is not paid for. Everything depends on his getting the professorship. (Ibsen’s note)
This note is omitted in the Centennial Edition. It is translated from Else Høst, Hedda Gabler: En monografi (Oslo: 1958), p. 82.
But, my heavens, Tesm. was unmarried. H.: Yes, he was. Th.: But you married him. H.: Yes, I did. Th.: Then how can you say that … Well now –