Free Seduction and Betrayal by Elizabeth Hardwick Page A

were — of trying for a clear and neat motivation the author does not wish to provide. Hysterical feeling and silent desperation create a sympathy, a surrounding of attractive feminine weaknesses, pitiable, searing, but not very serious. It would seem to be the only motivation we can imagine embodying. Alone, what would Hedda do? Nothing, perhaps. She is immensely idle and the idle do not wring their hands.
    The play opens on a room in dark colors. Ibsen has specified that and it may represent something or merely be the fashion of the time in which he wrote. The drawing room is “spacious, handsome, and tastefully furnished” in dark colors. It leads to a garden with “autumn foliage.” Hedda is not domestic. In Christiania, in the life of the Norwegian house, the family, this itself would perhaps be a striking circumstance. In this particular instance she is well contrasted to Nora, with her love of things, of dresses, ribbons, Christmas trees, special gifts for the children. They are both extravagant, but in a quite different way. Hedda’s extravagance has no connection with herself. She does not know the bills, as Nora does, and so lets others borrow for her. She is, actually, the object of extravagance. Unknowable, mysterious, unrooted as she is, it is natural that simple, earnest people like her husband and his aunt would imagine that she could be identified, warmed, humanized by a proper setting. She has expressed a tepid desire to be, in the lack of any other occupation, a town hostess. But it is clear that Hedda could not accomplish this with her own social energy. It would require money and Tesman, her husband, does not have it, although he shows his suppressed knowledge of the foolishness and coldness of their marriage by stretching his finances to his own vague and humiliating idea of what would make Hedda love him. Things will not make Hedda love him, and in any case those Tesman can buy are never enough. The sacrifices made for her are painful in their inadequacy and in the awful cost to those who sacrifice. The dramatic point of the apartment so pitifully created for Hedda is the portrait of her father, General Gabler. He looks on from the adjoining room, more important than any other piece of furniture or expenditure could possibly be.
    Hedda is returning from a wedding trip of nearly six months with her husband. Tesman is an unworldly man, very much the absent-minded professor. He is not a dark, voluminous Casaubon, as in Middlemarch , but a nice, middling Ph.D., rather dilatory about finishing his dissertation. Tesman is slightly ridiculous, and spectacularly without sex appeal. His is one of those disconcerting natures compounded of the blind innocence that protects him from knowing what he does not wish to know; if he is good it is not actively so, but is instead an expression of a soft and fuzzy self-protectiveness.
    The man Hedda Gabler has married is much more of a girl than she is. She has been reared by a general on pistols and horses. He has been protected, brought up by women, two loving, self-sacrificing maiden aunts. His good old servant, another female parental figure for him, is now brought in to work for Hedda. All of these worn, old, thrifty, recessive ladies have loved their clean, innocent, A-student George. But in a way they are more worldly than he. They show a rational worry about his marriage to Hedda Gabler. It is as strange to them, as to us, that she would have chosen George Tesman.
    The truth is that Hedda did not choose George. She says she “had danced herself out” and speaks without much conviction of Tesman’s rather bare respectability and his lean future hopes. “And then, since he was bent, at all hazards, on being allowed to provide for me — I really don’t know why I should not have accepted his offer?” Tesman’s blind foolishness is not even redeemed by an overwhelming passion for Hedda. He seemed to have drifted into