‘The capacity to give and to preserve life,’ writes Melanie Klein, ‘is felt as the greatest gift and therefore creativeness becomes the deepest cause for envy’ (1957, p.40). Observations such as these are grounded of course in Klein’s reading of the relationship between infant and mother in some of its earliest phases. The ‘good breast’ – the mother’s life-giving nurturance of the child – is experienced as the first, the primal ‘good object’. While identification with this good object provides a first ‘impetus to creativeness’, these processes are always complex: envy and aggression may also be engendered against the magical but at times frustrating powers of the good object, and while these primitive dynamics will as a rule be more or less overcome when, in the ‘depressive position’, the capacity to live with ambivalence begins to develop, envy of creativeness will (like the Oedipus complex) remain in varying degrees as a component of the individual psyche.
From a Kleinian point of view the choice of alcoholism as the weakness of character which Hedda is able to exploit – in order to wreak havoc upon the relationship between L*vborg and Thea – is by no means an arbitrary one. If it is obvious enough that Thea Elvsted plays the part of the good mother who literally weans L*vborg, lovingly, from his addiction, how is Hedda Gabler’s cruel exploitation of that addiction to be understood? Like a number of other accounts of her motives which she puts forward, Hedda’s claim that in driving L*vborg back to drink she is liberating him clearly lacks authenticity. Like Iago’s more or less fantastic rationalisations, and indeed John Doe’s claim that for him to carry out a series of psychotic murders is to preach a sermon to humanity, her assertion bears all the signs of a perverse rationalisation. Gnawed by her emptiness Hedda gives herself the phantasy ’satisfaction’, through her identification with L*vborg, of both greedily consuming and wreaking vengeance upon the frustrating good object.
HEDDA GABLER, J+RGEN TESMAN AND THE MASKS OF ENVY
The stereotypical reading of Hedda Gabler, which sees Tesman, with his relatives and household, as representing a claustrophobically bourgeois complacency – and Hedda, by a simple antithesis, as the imprisoned spirit of authentic protest – makes the real complexities of Ibsen’s play impossible to discern. Within the terms of this conventional opposition Hedda’s marriage, for example, can only remain an unaccountable riddle. Her own explanation – ‘I had simply danced myself out…’ (HG, p.299) – is patently inadequate, another characteristic rationalisation. Are we not invited to ponder the idea that in some very much unacknowledged fashion Hedda Gabler is actually drawn to J*rgen Tesman and what he represents for her? A powerful insight of Melanie Klein’s seems to me to make clear how this might be so:
A particular cause of envy is the absence of it in others. The envied person is felt to possess what is at bottom most prized and most desired – and this is a good object, which also implies a good character and sanity. Moreover the person who can ungrudgingly enjoy other people’s creative work and happiness is spared the torments of envy, grievance and persecution. Whereas envy is a source of great unhappiness, a relative freedom from it is felt to underlie contented and peaceful states of mind – ultimately sanity. (p.41)
The subject of envy comes up at a crucial moment in one of the scenes between Hedda and Tesman, when Tesman is about to reveal that he has L*vborg’s manuscript in his possession. Before revealing this he makes clear in his own way how much the book has impressed him:
TESMAN. You can’t think what a book that’s going to be. I should think it’s going to be one of
the most remarkable things that’s ever been written. Just think!
HEDDA. No doubt. That doesn’t interest me.
HEDDA. I must admit one thing Hedda. When I read it, a perfectly detestable feeling came over me.
TESMAN. Detestable?
TESMAN. There I was envying Ejlert for having been able to write a thing like that. Just think, Hedda.
HEDDA. Yes, yes. I am. (HG, pp 330-1)
The ironies which arise from this interchange are by no means what might be expected. To begin with let us note that it is Tesman who is stirred by the book, and Hedda who is too self-enclosed to take any interest in it, even though the play leads us to believe that she is one of its begetters, and the critics would have us believe that she is the poetic-imaginative spirit of the play. At the same time, if the kind of innocence which Tesman displays in this passage makes him frequently appear comically na ve in the eyes of the audience and tediously limited in Hedda’s, the ‘relative freedom’ from discontent which very much goes with it, is also itself enviable.
That Hedda should despise what she is drawn to is a not unfamiliar trait in human nature. In my view she is not only drawn to Tesman’s good nature in itself, but to the atmosphere of motherly concern which has given him a sense of well-being not always distinguishable, it’s true, from the self-centredeness of the spoilt child. Nor is Aunt Julle’s affectionate concern for those around her merely shallow or sentimental. Her care for her sister is uncomplaining and long-suffering, and whether Hedda Gabler’s dealings with death are any more ‘authentic’ is, I would suggest, at least debateable. At any rate Hedda’s irrational attacks on Tesman’s world, as exemplified by the episode with Aunt Julle’s new hat, can clearly be read as expressions of her destructive envy.
HEDDA GABLER AND HER WORLD OF OBJECTS
If the play gives us many indications of the benign experiences which Tesman has incorporated in his psyche, what does duty for the good object in Hedda’s inner world is the pair of pistols previously belonging to her father. The inner poverty of which she speaks to Thea is highlighted by the fact that the pistols are indeed the only objects, animate or inanimate, real or imaginary, with which she has what might be refered to as positive relationship. It is an obvious feature of the play that whereas Tesman’s world is a maternal one, it appears that for Hedda the only available identifications are with paternal objects. What is equally obvious from a Kleinian point of view is that the phallic pistols substitute as good object for the maternal breast. If the portrait of Hedda’s father presides over the action of the play and his pistols figure so significantly within it, of course it is conspicuously the case that no reference is made to Hedda’s mother. That the mother figures as absence is highlighted, I think, when Hedda explains to Brack in Act III how she and Tesman have come to be living in ‘the very home [she] wished for’. Hedda recalls that once when Tesman was at a loss for something to talk about, and feeling sorry for him, she said – ‘quite casually – that I should like to live here in this villa.’ This ‘thoughtlessness’, she goes on, ‘had its consequences’, for it led to their marrying:
HEDDA. …You see, it was through this passion for the villa of the late Mrs Falk that J*rgen Tesman and I found our way to an understanding. That led to our engagement and marriage and wedding trip and everything. Well, well. As one make’s one’s bed one
must lie on it, I was going to say.
BRACK. This is delightful! And all the time, it seems, you weren’t interested in the least?
HEDDA. No. Heaven knows, I wasn’t.
BRACK. Well, but now? Now that we have made it more or less comfortable for you?
HEDDA. Oh! I seem to smell lavender and dried roses in all the rooms. But perhaps Aunt Julle brought the smell with her.
BRACK [laughing]. No, I should think it’s more likely the late Mrs Falk bequeathed it to you!
HEDDA. It reminds one of the departed, all right. Like one’s bouquet, the day after a ball… My friend you can’t imagine how horribly bored I’m going to be out here.
BRACK. But won’t there be some object or other in life for you to work for, like other people, Madam Hedda?
HEDDA. An object … that would have something fascinating about it?
BRACK. Preferably, of course.
HEDDA. Lord knows what kind of an object it could be… (HG, pp 304-5)
According to Hedda’s account her interest in the house of the late Mrs Falk is as casually motivated as her marrying Tesman, but the intensity of the play of effects in this passage again gives the lie to Hedda’s dismissive rationalisations. The house is not only that of a dead woman, but is linked by sensuous association with the world of Aunt Julle, who represents loving concern on the one hand, but is linked with the dying Aunt Rina on the other. It reminds Hedda of ‘the departed’, and like ‘one’s bouquet the day after a ball’, it seems to be associated with absence and loss, with a bliss which is gone forever.
In her conversation with Brack, Hedda goes on to toy with the notion that Tesman might go into politics, but, having pointed out why this is an unlikely development, Brack hints broadly that before long she might have another kind of responsibility to live for, whereupon Hedda declares that she has ‘no gift for that kind of thing’, and that indeed the only thing she does have a gift for ‘is boring [herself] to death.’ (HG, pp 306-7) A sequence is established here which will be repeated later in the play. It is in Act III that the book-child comes into Hedda’s possession, and it is at the end of the act that, bloodcurdlingly, she burns it. Meanwhile, when Tesman has told Hedda how he came to find the manuscript and has confirmed that such an ‘inspired’ production could not be re-written, she hands him – ‘casually’, as the stage direction says – a note in which, as he quickly informs Hedda, Aunt Julle tells him that her sister is dying. At certain moments, when Hedda faces the prospect of motherhood, it is as if she finds herself haunted by the shadow of a dead or dying mother figure; and her impulse at this moment is to erase the existence, real or imagined, of any offspring she herself might have. That is to say, it is as if she seeks to destroy the creative at the very roots of her own being.
SECTION III – FATE OR DESTINY?
Why is Hedda Gabler so preoccupied with style? Why is the aesthetic of suicide of such importance to her? And how are we to judge this final action of hers? If Hedda is bidding for the full tragic effect, does the setting of her action after all render it grotesque, absurd, overblown? Is she in the wrong play – a tragic heroine framed by the elements of farce? When the curtain falls, has the play’s heroine brought about a transformation of her life, or been mocked in the attempt? Imposed her own poetic shape upon her life and circumstances, or lent herself, in the endeavour, to scandal and derision – or mere incomprehension?
TRANSITION AND TRANSFORMATION
This familiar array of unresolvable questions indicates that the d nouement of the play is the climax of the oscillating relationship between Hedda and her environment which has been apparent from the earliest scenes. I have already suggested that, in spite of herself, Hedda is drawn to Tesman’s world on account of the enviably benign object-relations which it appears to embody. In the final section of this paper I extend the argument by calling on Winnicott’s thinking about ‘the use of an object’ (Winnicott, 1969), especially as it has beeen elaborated by Christopher Bollas, through the concepts of the ‘transformational object’ and the ‘destiny drive’. I suggest, paradoxically enough, that in throwing in her lot with J*rgen Tesman, Hedda Gabler is seeking an environment in which she might experience a transformation of her life. In the event she is unable to use the objects in her internal and external worlds to give shape to her belief in the ‘beautiful’, or what Northam calls her ‘residually creative sense of human potentiality’. At the end of everything what she stages is a dramatisation of her strange illusion that only through destruction can her world come into being – that destruction is creation.
The audience is alerted to the problematic relationship between Hedda and the setting in which she finds herself even as the play begins. Almost her first words are: ‘One has to get used to anything new. By degrees.’ (HG, p. 273) During the next few moments she appears concerned about the open veranda door, the sunlight pouring in, and the flowers which fill the room. It is then that Aunt Julle presents Tesman with a package containing the old pair of slippers to which she knows he is attached. ‘Aunt Rina embroidered them for me in bed, lying ill like that. Just imagine how many memories are worked into them’, he says to Hedda. ‘Not for me, particularly’, she replies. For readers of Winnicott it must be evident that the slippers are for Tesman a transitional object; they belong to a mode of experience in which past and present, self and other are interwoven to create a fabric which is always in the making and therefore gives point to life. Moreover we sense that his preoccupation with ‘domestic crafts’ in Brabant in the middle ages is a continuation of the same theme – which has carried him little further into adult life. It is precisely because Tesman remains caught up in his early attachments of this kind that Hedda is drawn to him in spite of herself. Tantalisingly, for Hedda, Tesman and his slippers represent the baffling clue to the way in which ‘objects’ are used to create a world.
Several moments of related significance follow the exchange about the slippers, in an interesting series. Hedda’s unconscionable behaviour over the hat dramatises her immediate response to this initial episode. Though she later tells Brack that such behaviour ‘just comes over [her]‘ and she has no idea ‘how to explain it’ (HG, p.303), her impulse in this case is clearly to desecrate the signifier of her deprivation. A moment later, when Tesman invites his Aunt to notice how ‘plump’ Hedda has grown, Miss Tesman is overjoyed to think that she is pregnant. Hedda’s reaction during the subsequent exchange gives the first indication of the way she recoils from the prospect of motherhood. There is no potential space in her life for a child to come into; she cannot, as I’ve argued, conceive of the idea. If Tesman can scarcely conceive of it either, the reason is that he himself is still in the place of the child. From this point of view, then, there is an oddly inverted mirror relationship between Hedda and her husband.
When Miss Tesman has departed we see Hedda, alone on the stage, ‘raising her arms and clenching her hands, as if in fury’ (HG, p.276). On Tesman’s return she remarks to him how withered the flowers look, and goes on to reject her husband’s appeal to her to behave a little more like one of the family. There follows a brief discussion on the question of her piano. It is a conversation which shows how different is Hedda’s life-world from Tesman’s. What we would like to feel at this point is that the piano suggests one way in which Hedda might be accustomed to express her potentia, to elaborate a personal aesthetic, and to acquire a sense of ‘living creatively’. But the turn of the conversation oddly undermines any such expectation. For Hedda’s concern is simply that this ‘old piano’ of hers ‘doesn’t go with these other things’ (HG, p. 277). She wishes to see it moved to ‘the back room’ and a new one purchased for the drawing room. The result is that we see the piano, after all, as a mere physical object occupying a physical space in the house. We do not feel that two pianos would fill up the absences in Hedda’s life any more than one.
If the first act of the play is among other things a remarkable study of the life-worlds of Hedda and Tesman through their relationships with a range of environmental objects, then of course the two most dramatically significant of these objects are the portrait of Hedda’s father, and the pair of pistols. Each of these emphasises the dissonant relationship between Hedda and her new environment – the portrait because it is a presence which, hauntingly, is never refered to directly throughout the play; the pistols because, somewhat similarly, they create the impression of a potential detonation which would destroy this world at a stroke. In psychoanalytic terms the portrait and the pistols are signifiers of Hedda’s ‘object-relations’ (as are the slippers in Tesman’s case). Hedda’s desire is to articulate her inner world (her object-relations) in a way which would promote a sense of living creatively, but the way in which the portrait and the pistols figure in her world suggests that she is caught up in the repetition of a ghost-filled past rather than engaged in the creation of a future.