(ii) THE PARENTS-AND-CHILD TRIANGLE – KLEIN, WINNICOTT
AND CREATIVITY
In her chapter on ‘Art and the depressive position’ in Dream, Phantasy and Art Hannah Segal refers to the familiar notion that the ‘work of art is often felt by the artist as a symbolic baby’ (1991, p.95). In Kleinian terms symbol-making is linked, of course, with the idea of ‘reparation’. While the rage and frustrations of infancy are vented, in imagination, against the frustrating object (the breast/mother), the ‘depressive position’ is reached when the infant becomes able to deal with ambivalent feelings of love and hate towards the frustrating object, to experience guilt and depression about his/her own destructiveness, and to wish to ‘restore’ the maternal object which has been ‘destroyed’. For Hannah Segal this line of thought leads to an important Kleinian paradox, namely that ‘the artist’s work is new and yet arises from an urge to recreate or restore’. Insofar as creative work is a restoration of lost objects in the internal world it generates a sense of re-discovery; but insofar as the process is necessarily symbolic, the subject ‘has the freedom of its use – it is something created anew’. Hannah Segal goes on to capture this Kleinian paradox in a sentence which resonates extraordinarily, I believe, with Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. Of the dual process of restoration/creation she writes: ‘It is a restoring in one’s internal world of a parental couple creating a new baby.’ (p.95)
In my view this is a beautifully succinct statement of the dynamic which engages us so deeply in Hedda Gabler. The reason why we are so actively engaged in Ibsen’s play is that we are drawn into a realm of potentiality – by the means which I have outlined. The world of the play is not given – it is not there in the list of dramatis personae, in an account of the plot, or even in the action on the stage insofar as this might be the object of a spectator’s attention. The work which Ibsen has given us is there only as we participate in the play of effects whereby the existence of a realm in which the ‘baby’ might have a life is always in question: throughout the play this realm is always being created – and destroyed.
The play concerns itself with the making and unmaking of the human world. The sense of some fundamental breakdown within the community of the play is dramatised in the strange duality of the book-child theme. In ‘Living Creatively’ Winnicott writes:
… it has to be remembered that a baby may be conceived uncreatively – that is without being conceived of, without having been arrived at as an idea in the mind. On the other hand, a baby may start up just at the right moment when it is wanted by both parties. In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Edward Albee studies the fate of a baby that is conceived of, but without taking flesh. What a remarkable study in both play and film! (1970, p.48)
Albee’s play has striking affinities with Hedda Gabler. The unborn child of the Tesmans’ marriage has been conceived but not conceived of, while the book-child of Thea and L*vborg (like George and Martha’s imaginary son in the later play) has been conceived of, but is not a fleshly child. Like Albee’s play, Hedda Gabler uses the intriguingly subtle theme of the imaginary child to explore what it means to live creatively, and more particularly, what it means when one is unable to find the clue to doing so. For Ibsen, as for Winnicott, there is no more fundamental theme. In Hedda Gabler Ibsen’s most memorable character wages a life and death struggle to overcome her sense of futility, to escape from her despair at being unable to live creatively. For Hedda is no more able to create a living conception of her own life than she is to conceive of a life for the child she has conceived with Tesman.
In ‘Living Creatively’ Winnicott summarises much of his thinking on this subject when he says that ‘Creativity… is the retention throughout life of something that belongs properly to the infant experience: the ability to create the world.’ He goes on to say that, ‘for the baby this is not difficult, because if the mother is able to adapt to the baby’s needs, the baby has no initial appreciation of the fact that the world was there before he or she was conceived or conceived of.’ (p.40) In a later paragraph he outlines the process whereby creativity is retained as the ‘reality principle’ makes itself felt:
The infant becomes ready to find a world of objects and ideas, and, at the same pace of growth of this aspect of the baby, the mother is presenting the world to the baby. In this way, by her degree of adaptation at the beginning, the mother enables the baby to experience omnipotence, to actually find what he creates, to create and link up with what is actual. The nett result is that each baby starts up with a new creation of the world. (p.49)
When ‘what we create’ and ‘what we find’ are ‘linked up’ we are of course in the realm of the transitional object, that ‘third area’ or ‘potential space’ in which play and symbol-making begin, and continue throughout life (Winnicott, 1971). In the world of Hedda Gabler it is as if there has been some tear in the fabric of things whereby she is denied access to this realm of experience. For her the actual is no more than the actual. At a loss to find the gesture which would effect the transformation she yearns for, Hedda will seek to animate her existence through manipulation of the lives others.
(iii) THE PRIMAL SCENE
What are the obstacles to the creative realisation of the powerful energies embodied in the heroine of Hedda Gabler and those around her? How is it that the birth and survival of the child-book, bound up as they are with the gestation of the play itself, are attended by so much anxiety and apprehension? An initial part of the answer to this question concerns the way in which Freud’s ‘primal scene’ figures in the play – haunts it indeed, from beginning to end. The opening exchange of the play, between Tesman’s Aunt Julle, and his servant Berte, notify us that the young couple, J*rgen Tesman and Hedda Gabler, having returned the previous evening from a six month honeymoon trip, are still in bed, though it seems to be quite late in the morning. These events, especially as they are spoken of by these two good-hearted and motherly women, are natural enough in themselves, but everything which subsequently happens in the play serves to make the nature of the sexual relationship between the off-stage couple (which is of course variously constituted) a source of great perplexity for the ’spectator’ both on and off the stage, this of course being the essence of the primal scene experience. Here then we have the third variation of the triangular figure which structures the play. The primal scene, in Ibsen’s play at least, is the troubling shadow of the process outlined by Hannah Segal. ‘The restoration…of the parental couple creating a new baby’ constitutes a set of good object relations in the ‘inner world’, but the primal scene engenders jealousy and, as Melanie Klein suggests, envy. The one promotes a secure relationship between self and world, the other a disturbing confusion between reality and fantasy: the benign autonomy of the inner stage on the one hand, and the anxious fascination of the peep-show – with the voyeur as victim, on the other.
Projected for us by Aunt Julle and Berte, our initial impression of the sexual couple is, it seems, perfectly wholesome. In every aspect of the play, however, benign impressions rapidly give way to a sense of unease, anxiety and menace. If the primal scene effects are complex and multi-layered, however, one reason for this is that while Hedda Gabler features as the female partner in that opening sequence, for much of the play she figures as the child-spectator. Her intimacy with Judge Brack, for instance, is constituted not so much by any mutual passion but by his feeding her sexual curiosity with gossip about the goings on in circles which are closed to her:
BRACK. And so the procession starts, gentleman. I hope we shall have a gay time, as a certain charming lady puts it.
HEDDA. Ah, if only that charming lady could be there, invisible -
BRACK. Why invisible?
HEDDA. So as to hear a little of your gaiety – uncensored, Mr Brack. (HG, p.323)
On the following morning Brack describes to Hedda how L*vborg ‘fetched up at a party at Mademoiselle Diana’s rooms’, and how – when L*vborg created a scene about the disappearance of his pocket-book, the result was ‘a general fight in which both the ladies and the gentlemen were involved’ (HG, p.336). And all this comes to a climax when Brack later reveals to Hedda that L*vborg did not die in hospital but was actually ‘found shot in – in Mademoiselle Diana’s boudoir’ (HG, p.358. Though the nuance of Ibsen’s text is apparently untranslatable, we are to understand that the bullet destroys L*vborg’s sexual organ. See Durbach, p.47.) During the course of the play the scene of sexual coupling, which remains pretty constantly before the mind’s eye, is transformed from the domestic picture of the newly-weds asleep in bed, to that of an indiscriminate and deadly combat taking place in a house of ill-repute. Freud noted that the primal scene is felt by the child to be sadistic in nature, but he did not explain this finding. Melanie Klein holds that the child projects its own envious hatred into the scene – and into the phantasy of the ‘combined parent figure’ – which both denies the parents’ sexuality and embodies the child’s hostility (’a general fight in which both the ladies and the gentlemen were all involved’). The processes of splitting, doubling and inversion in the play are beyond anything like exhaustive analysis, but perhaps the most important version of the primal triangle is that constituted by L*vborg and Thea – with Hedda as ’spectator’. In my view Hedda’s notion that she breaks up the L*vborg-Thea relationship in order to ‘liberate’ L*vborg is a transparent rationalisation of the ruthless envy which impels her to destroy this creatively parental liaison. In the end it seems that the only staging of the primal scene which Hedda will be prepared as it were to live with is the dreadful inversion of it which is constituted by the scene of her own death – where she turns the paternal pistol-phallus against herself and seeks an astonishingly paradoxical affirmation of selfhood through the psychic erasure of any trace of her own origin.
SECTION II -’THE WORST SYNNE THAT IS’
CREATIVITY, ENVY AND DESTRUCTIVENESS
The restoration within the play of a realm embodied in ‘the parental couple creating a new baby’ is menaced, as I’ve said, by its shadow – in the form of primal scene anxieties, and more obviously by the drama of sexual conflict and rivalry. The dramatis personae in Hedda Gabler can rather crudely be classified in two categories – the concerned (Thea Elvsted, Tesman, Aunt Julie, Berte) and the demonic (L*vborg, Brack, Hedda). If the play is viewed in this way then the theme which I have explored might be expressed as a search for a profoundly elusive sense of integration. But if it is the case that creativity would be realised in the marriage of imagination and concern, then this union seems to be (almost) beyond the play’s conceiving, for within the collective psyche of the play imaginative energy seems to be entirely dissociated from concern and inseparably linked with ruthlessness. It is clear in fact that the sense of creative potentiality which the play generates is matched, if not overborne, by a will to destruction which threatens to leave us with nothing but its own epitaph to contemplate.
ENVY IN CHAUCER AND DAVID FINCHER’S SEVEN
In my view the treatment of human destructiveness in Hedda Gabler presents us with a remarkable anticipation of Melanie Klein’s writings on the theme of envy. In everyday speech the word envy carries no very sinister vibration perhaps, but there is nevertheless a variety of testimony to the effect that this sin is the most deadly aberration of which human nature is capable. In Chaucer’s ‘Parson’s Tale’, for instance, we are told that ‘Envye… is the worst synne that is’, for two very similar reasons: one is that envy is the malicious enemy of ‘bountee’ – which is the quality which characterises the ‘Hooly Goost’ itself; and the second is that envy is ‘ageyns alle vertues and alle goodnesses’. Envy, we are told, is the only sin which does not have ’som delit in itself’ but only ‘angwissh and sorwe’ (Chaucer, 1957, pp.242-3). The medieval theme of the seven deadly sins is re-examined in David Fincher’s horrifically gruesome but highly intelligent film with the laconic title Seven. What is of particular interest here is that while the sins come up in more than one order as the action proceeds, the traditional list is in the end re-arranged so that envy features, very dramatically, as the final one – underwriting, as it were, all the others. In the course of the film the psychotic character refered to as ‘John Doe’ (Kevin Spacey) stages a series of seven murders, each of which revolves around one of the seven sins, each of his victims being guilty of one of them. John Doe’s project is to preach a shattering sermon on the condition of the times: his view of their grim corruption links him, ironically, with one of the two detectives who are pursuing him – the humane but very disillusioned Detective Lieutenant played by Morgan Freeman. In the d nouement of the film John Doe contrives so to work upon the irascible temperament of Morgan Freeman’s younger colleague, Detective Mills (Brad Pitt), that the latter shoots John Doe himself, as Doe had always intended that he should. This final episode dramatises the last two sins on John Doe’s list – wrath and envy – for John Doe has revealed that this latter is his own sin: ‘I wish I could have lived like you’, he says to Mills, ‘I envy your normal life.’ While no summary can evoke the appalling grimness of this d nouement, and all that has led up to it, the logic of the final revelation is clear enough. As we are told in the ‘Parson’s Tale’, envy is different from and worse than the other sins, and, as understood here – as the envy not merely of the other’s possessions (covetousness) but of the quality of his life – it is the most consuming and destructive of those seven sins. This view of the matter is also exactly in keeping with Ren Girard’s analysis, as he summarises it in the introduction to A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare: ‘Envy involuntarily testifies to a lack of being that puts the envious to shame… that is why envy is the hardest sin to acknowledge.’ (1991, p.6)
IAGO, ‘JOHN DOE’, AND HEDDA GABLER
Mention of Shakespeare in this context will not necessarily bring to mind Othello, but I shall suggest that both this play and Hedda Gabler are dramas of jealousy – each of which masks a more rooted tale of envy. Hedda and Iago are compulsively driven to destroy that which puts them to shame – the creative being of the other. One of the metaphors which animate the speeches of Iago is the notion of riches and poverty as a figure for the individual’s sense of himself and his relationship with the other:
…Poor and content is rich, and rich enough,
But riches, fineless, is as poor as winter
To him that fears he shall be poor… (III iii 176-8)
Like many of Iago’s speeches which are apparently calculated to create a certain effect upon others, these lines are in reality expressive of something in Iago’s own nature. Hedda Gabler is also a calculatingly ruthless manipulator of other people’s lives, and in a transitory moment of self-revelation she gives expression to the link between her desire to control and her own poverty of being in similar terms:
HEDDA… I want, for once in my life, to have power over a human being’s fate.
MRS ELVSTED. But haven’t you got that?
HEDDA. I have not. I never have had.
MRS ELVSTED. Not over your husband’s?
HEDDA. That would be worth having wouldn’t it? Ah, if you could only realise how poor I am. And here you are, offered such riches! [Throwing her arms passionately round
her.] I think I shall burn your hair off, after all. (HG, p.324)
There is, then, a certain affinity between Iago, ‘John Doe’, and Hedda Gabler – a gnawing life-emptiness which drives on to extreme solutions. If it is obvious enough that each of these three characters is a manipulator of other people’s lives, what is so revealing is that none of them has in view any object which might be classified as worldly gain. (Iago is ostensibly put out over Cassio’s promotion, but this no more explains Iago than his fantastical notion that Othello has cuckolded him does so.) Frighteningly unable to find the experience of guilt, still less the impulse to make reparation, each of them seeks to fill the void of his or her own being through control of the lives of others. What is then above all so strikingly similar is that each of these characters is driven to stage a scene, or scenes, of appalling human destruction; for envy, of the kind we are dealing with here, emerges as the most dramatic – or rather the most dramaturgical – of the seven deadly sins. Envy in Hedda Gabler presents us with the antithesis of the ‘restoring in one’s internal world of a parental couple creating a baby’. It stages the destruction of the parental couple and the abortion/murder of the life of the baby. Once the exposition is complete this dynamic shapes the action of the play: Hedda undermines the relationship between L*vborg and Thea; she burns the manuscript which they created; she incites L*vborg to commit suicide, providing him with one of her pistols so that he may do so; and with the other pistol she shoots herself, thereby ending the life of the child she has conceived with Tesman.