Free Seduction and Betrayal by Elizabeth Hardwick Page B

the marriage out of a sort of stumbling vanity that allowed him to believe that he, a dry scholar without even a professorship, was, in winning the reckless, restless daughter of General Gabler, simply doing something natural.
    There is very little pathos in George Tesman’s feeling for Hedda Gabler, and that is one of the most interesting things about Ibsen’s vision in the play. This is one of those dim, loveless marriages on both sides. When Hedda kills herself, Tesman cries out, “Shot herself! Shot herself in the temple! Fancy that!” She is a stranger to him. The truth about her is that all of her suitors, including Judge Brack who is still on the scene, were attracted to her but aware that there was something deeply menacing to happiness in her nature. She is not marriageable. What, except personal charm, can she offer? There is vitality in her but it is all horses and shooting and emptiness. She does not move forward, go deeper, with anyone. Even with Lövborg, who in his own recklessness had tempted her to feeling, she will not admit that there was love at the bottom of their seductive friendship. “No, not quite,” she says.
    George Tesman is too inexperienced and too cut off from appropriate feelings to size up these things. He has been doing his dissertation on “Domestic Industries of Brabant during the Middle Ages,” and that study did not teach him to back off from Hedda. Instead, he goes on trying to believe that disaster is good luck, that debts and indifference will vanish. The only hope he could reasonably have hidden in his mind is that the heartless Hedda would gradually show herself to be like the other women he had known — the devoted, sacrificing, adoring old aunts and nurses. There is something almost sordid in Tesman’s willful inanity.
    Hedda’s first act of meanness is brilliantly conceived in its lack of necessity and in the depth of its pettiness. This skillful scene is the kind that gathers great rewards from the realistic rules of dramaturgy: the author places a cue, leaves it, and then suddenly pounces upon it again. We know that Miss Tesman, George’s beloved aunt, has bought a new bonnet in honor of the returning bridal couple. The smallness, the pettiness of the insult Hedda hurls at the new bonnet are a measure of her meaningless cruelty. The old aunt can ill afford anything new, having signed away and mortgaged everything, including her annuity, for the furnishings of the villa. She puts her new hat on a chair as the play opens. Hedda spots it and turns upon it with indignation as an unsightly intrusion; she pretends that it must belong to the old servant. This is disgusting and we have not even the excuse that it might have been unintentional, since Hedda later admits it to be the kind of compulsion she is given to. “Well, you see — these impulses come over me all of a sudden; and I cannot resist them.”
    Interesting characters enter Hedda’s gloomy parlor. She is suddenly visited by Thea Elvsted, a school friend. Thea has had the narrow, bitter time of a nineteenth-century girl without means. She is attractive, fair, a little younger than Hedda — and desolate. Her first words are anxious ones, about despair, having no one to turn to. Her history is the miserable one of intelligent women, serious, penniless, thrown back upon the stingy, uncertain offerings of chance and the meager, degrading work of a governess. Thea had taken such a position as governess, deep in the country, hired to serve the children of Sheriff Elvsted. As it turned out, the wife was an invalid and Thea fell from the position of governess to that of housekeeper, all of it lonely and loveless, and without any kind of future. The wife died, and in hopelessness she married Sheriff Elvsted.
    One of those opportunities for transcendence suddenly changed Thea’s nothingness to the most joyful promise. She meets Eilert Lövborg, an old