Hedda Gabler: The Past Recaptured

Hedda Gabler: The Past Recaptured SANDRA E. SAARI • MOST SCHOLARLY CRITICISM of Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler inevitably focuses on an analysis of Hedda's character and motives. But a dramatic consideration prior to the why of character and motive is: what is Hedda doing? Plot, the most important element of tragedy according to Aristotle, is an imitation of an action. Yet the character of Hedda is so compelling that the action of Hedda Gabler has been denied even by Henry James: "his drama is essentially that supposedly undramatic thing, the picture not of an action but of a condition"1; and has been severely de-emphasized by a critic of such stature as M. C. Bradbrook: "As, however, the centre of the play is not a problem but a personality there is less emphasis on the story-on the links of cause and effect."2 Obviously it is not readily apparent what Hedda is doing. However, an analysis of the structure of the play, and in particular the structure of the four dominant image patterns, reveals the nature of Hedda's actions and that, together with an analysis of the secondary characters' actions, establishes the unity of the play's action. In broadest terms, the structure of Hedda Gabler is identical to that of all Ibsen's mature plays-the movement from delusion or illusion, with respect to the past, to recognition. Specifically this structure in Hedda Gabler consists in a series of attempts by Hedda to reinstate the past in her present life, a series that culminates in her suicide, her final recognition of the delusory nature of that project. Using retrospective exposition, Ibsen counterpoints each revelation of an incident from Hedda's past life with a re-enactment of that incident in the play's forward action. For example, the retrospective exposition 299 300 SANDRA E. SAARI in Act II reveals that Hedda and Lovborg used to sit together on a sofa in her father's house, ostensibly looking at a book but actually engaged in clandestine conversation; the forward action in Act II has Lovborg and Hedda in an identical posture using the same pretext for a similar purpose. Ibsen has counterpointed that past incident by having Hedda, fully aware of its past import, re-create it in the present. During this conversation, Hedda is able to treat Tesman as no more of a threat than her father had been on similar occasions. Furthermore, until reminded by Tesman, Hedda completely forgets about the imminent arrival of her present rival, Thea, so successfully has she disengaged herself from the present and immersed herself in re-creating the past. This pattern, as will be shown below, is the dominant pattern of Hedda's actions.3 Thus the major action of the play-the action the plot imitates; that which, as Francis Fergusson states, "is to be used to indicate the direction which an analysis of a play should take"4-is to re-create the past in a perfected form. I Since unity of action demands that all characters be engaged in that action, a preliminary step in this analysis is to demonstrate that the secondary characters participate in the action of re-creating the past in a perfected form. Two of the three major secondary characters are historians-by their stipulated vocation they are re-creators of the past -and the third is an historian's amanuensis. Jorgen Tesman spent his six-month honeymoon rummaging through European archives to gather notes on medieval domestic industries. Ibsen's conception of this pursuit is indicated by an early note for the play: "And then Tesman isn't really a scholar, but a specialist. The Middle Ages are dead."5 Tesman's lifework is to recreate the dead past; for him the present is empty of significance until it has been completed, until it has become the past. Ibsen reinforces this characterization of Tesman repeatedly. To Aunt JulIe's covert inquiries about Hedda's pregnancy, Tesman responds with total lack of comprehension; his focus on the history of mankind has rendered unrecognizable the shape of the present and the prospects for the future.6 Lovborg's manuscript about the future...