Free Seduction and Betrayal by Elizabeth Hardwick

feel, even unwillingly, a sort of complicity, admiration. Hedda is cool — the older sense of the word. She is not, by the exercise of control, disguising turbulence and ambition, or even need. Her indifference is real. She is not in love. No one in the play has deeply stirred her feelings. The failure or inability to care for anyone is the first condition of her nature. It is not, however, a cause of action; it is merely a condition, the first circumstance of her character and her situation. It takes its place along with other details, many other details, such as being a liar. It is the basis of her style, the very stuff out of which the image she casts has been put together. It is intensely interesting.
    Many terms have been used to describe Hedda, among them “hyperesthesia” — a term suggesting some derangement of sensibility. And also a kind of anesthesia — frigidity. There is something too hopeful in the use of any sort of medical or physiological determination of Hedda’s character. It would seem to make us mourn that she had missed the felicities of “treatment” or simple sexual knowledge of the kind supposedly easy to come upon in our own day. We cannot know. We do know that she is a narcissist — a more ancient disposition, utterly tenacious and enduring. Yet the odd thing is that she is not particularly introverted or self-analytical. There is not much pleasure in her self-love. It is of an unproductive, even a useless, sort and so in the end she looks in the mirror endlessly and yet does not feel ardor for what she sees there. Again it is negative. She is merely more in love with herself than with anyone else, but not greatly in love.
    Egoism erases Hedda’s concern for others without giving her any transcendent joy in herself. She is wholly destructive, but not paranoid or schizophrenic. Indeed, she is something of a rationalist, a skeptic, and romantic posturings do not change her life. She doesn’t expect things to turn out well, has little faith in finding a savior. How different she is from her old school friend, Thea, who has suffered every wound from life and yet is full of belief, belief in art and thought, in love, in the possibility of reclaiming a dangerously unsteady soul like Lövborg. Hedda, on the other hand, would seem to have been born knowing that Lövborg would not stay sober forever and would somehow put terrible obstacles in the way of writing his book, even of living out his life.
    Another interesting thing about Hedda is that although “alienated” from purpose, she is mindful and perhaps even respectful of all those little conventions that decorate the surface and keep one safe. In the long run, again unlike the romantic Thea, Hedda knows that the conventions are simply too much trouble to break. And you would have to have a reason, a reason of passion, which she does not have.
    She speaks of her own boredom, but what does that mean? Boredom does not designate a positive condition; again it is negative, merely a lack of whatever would not be boring. And again it is striking that Hedda’s boredom does not improve her, does not make her long for something outside herself, something purer, deeper than the society of the scenery of “the west end of Christiania.”
    Hedda is not hysterical. It is natural that actresses would wish to find an objective expression for the mystery of Hedda’s nature. They cannot merely stand there , delivering her brilliant lines. They wonder what she is like alone, in private. And there it is usual to imagine her being more frank with herself than with others. Alone, face to face with whatever she is face to face with, she is likely to moan and wring her hands, to show her inner distress, her desperation. This is wrong for Hedda just as it is meaningless for Nora. The hysterical gestures so often seen in the acting out of Ibsen’s heroines are a way — secretive, on the sly, as it