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L'Homme Fatal in Hedda Gabler MERVYN NICHOLSON An important convention of literature, and culture generally, is the figure of the Tricky Female, as it may be called: the attractive but deceptive woman who seduces males - often by looking vulnerable. And having gained power by her sexual beauty, she then kills or seriously damages the man, because she in some way feeds on males. In its most concentrated expressions, this figure is not human, properly speaking. In romance - in a form popularized by Mario Praz as the Jemme Jatale - she may actually kill, eat, entrap, or magically metamorphose her victim. In works of realism, she may use the male to get things she needs, hurting - sometimes killing - him in the process (one thinks of Laura in Strindberg's The Father for example). The Tricky Female is one of the most popular conventions in patriarchal culture: in the person of the disobedient Eve she symbolizes everything that can go wrong. Examples of the Tricky Female range from Delilah in the Bible and Circe in Homer to the greedy murderess of The Maltese Falcoll, whom Sam Spade (Bogart in the movie version) calls "angel" as he gleefully hands her over to the hangman; the movie Fatal Attraction is a textbook case. The Tricky Female seems to embody primal anxiety, a fear so paralyzing as scarcely to be contemplated by the male hierarchy.' Ibsen's Hedda Gabler presents a curious mutation of this very popular and influential convention. Hedda herself has, of course, many of the insignia of the Tricky Female, and, as often happens to such figures, she is also ruthlessly cornered and lamed - until she achieves her own triumph. A not insignificant portion of commentary on Ibsen's play has been devoted to observing the Tricky Female qualities that Hedda seems to illustrate ("she is a monster," says Arthur Ganz'). Hedda's ancestry in Norse myth has even been traced so as to demonstrate affinity with an unpleasant folkloric figure: "Hedda could be placed directly in the tradition of the demonic !tavJru who lures men to their doom" and even with the fairy temptress, the !tllidre, "who Modern Drama, 35 (1992) 365 MERVYN NICHOLSON is very beautiful, but possesses a repellent physical characteristic that renders her identifiable" - often a cow's tail (one can imagine what Hedda's reaction to the cow's tail would be!).' But while Hedda at times seems to play the Tricky Female - especially in her manipulation of the hapless Ejlert L¢vborg - the real use of this convention is quite different. The tricky one is not so much Hedda, but J¢rgen Tesman, the person Hedda above all despises - and underestimates. For Tesman acts as homme Jatal to snare and bring down the great general's daughter. This is a startling claim. After all, doesn't 'everybody agree Tesman is bumbling, immature, ineffectual, stupid, weak? But of course it is precisely a person who seems to be ineffectual, bumbling, and so on - and only such a person - who could cause the haughty Hedda to miss her step - and fall. She is fatally attracted to him not because of his appearance, but because of his apparent usefulness. There is thus a hidden contest between Hedda and the seemingly ineffectual Tesman: indeed it fOTITIS a powerful dramatic tension that builds palpably if subtextually throughout the play. Hedda has such a magnetic presence that she affects our perception of all the other characters. So strong is her magnetism that we tend to perceive them as she does, ignoring elements in their personality that make them more complex than they appear; because of her extraordinary power, the play is subtly projected from her point of view. Thus the way Hedda sees Tesman is essentially the way the audience see him - and the critics. In terms of the logic of action in Hedda Gabler, however, Tesman performs'a very different role from what his image would allow. Hedda views Tesman in tenns of someone she can use: she does not see him in terms of his own Personality, with its specific traits. In particular, he is constituted for her as a useful object: that is why she married him. Anything about...

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