Mixed Media: Hedda Gabler (2013)

Theatre Review from the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ibsen's 1890 drama Hedda Gabler was recently staged at the Old Vic theatre in London starring Sheridan Smith as Hedda and Darrell D'Silva as Brack. The play is a plea for bourgeois liberal feminism but also a portrayal of a Nietzschean existential heroine. Hedda is in a lineage of strong women constrained by patriarchal society from Clytemnestra in Aeschylus to Medea by Euripides.

Ibsen dissects middle bourgeois family life, its morality, niceties, home, hearth and happiness which Nietzsche castigated as 'it is not your sin but your moderation that cries to heaven'. It is a place where women have a subordinate role to men and the expectation that Hedda become pregnant. In his preliminary notes Ibsen wrote 'women aren't all created to be mothers' but Marx saw that 'the bourgeois sees his wife as a mere instrument of production'. Hedda refers to 'love' as 'that glutinous word'. Alexandra Kollontai saw that 'the outward observance of decorum and the actual practice of depravity, and the double code, one code of behaviour for the man and another for the woman are the twin pillars of bourgeois morality'.

Hedda says to Brack 'I’m content so long as you don't have any sort of hold over me, subject to your will and your demands. No longer free! That's a thought that I'll never endure'. Emma Goldman wrote 'true emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in the courts. It begins in woman's soul' although Eleanor Marx wrote of women 'that the question is one of economics. The position of women rests, as everything in our complex modern society rests, on an economic basis'.

Hedda is an existential heroine in the sense of 'Vivre ? les serviteurs feront cela pour nous' ('Living? Our servants will do that for us') from Axël by Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Brack is enamoured of Hedda's feminine strength but fears her advocacy of what Nietzsche described as 'to live dangerously' and does not understand Hedda's views on Lovborg's suicide; 'there is beauty in this deed, an act of spontaneous courage to take his leave of life so early'. This is reminiscent of Nietzsche's dictum 'voluntary death that comes to me because I wish it'. However Hedda cannot meet Nietzsche's idea of 'amor fati', the ultimate affirmation of life and instead accepts a terrifying nihilism.

In socialism Engels wrote 'what will most definitely disappear from monogamy, first, the dominance of man, and secondly, the indissolubility of marriage'. Eleanor Marx concluded that 'the woman will no longer be the man's slave but his equal'.

Steve Clayton