The Function of Symbols 1

Criticism of the naturalistic plays of Ibsen has been so

largely directed toward establishing his stature as
psychologist and social iconoclast that his characteristic use
of functional imagery in Hedda Gabler has been for the most
part neglected. During the course of the play, Ibsen places
considerable emphasis upon Theas hair, upon the
manuscript as her child, and upon General Gablers pistols.
Hedda and the death of Loevborg and Ibsens treatment of
these items suggest that he intended them to have symbolic
significance. In Hedda Gabler Ibsen examines the possibility
of attaining freedom and fulfillment in modern society.
Hedda is a woman not a monster neurotic but not psychotic
thus she may be held accountable for her behavior.
However, she is spiritually sterile. Her yearning for self-
realization through exercise of her natural endowments is in
conflict and is complicated by her incomplete understanding
of what freedom and fulfillment mean and how they may be
achieved. She fails to realize that one must earn his
inheritance in order to possess it and she romanticizes the
destructive and sensational aspects of Dionysiac ecstasy
without perceiving that its true end is regeneration through
sublimation of the ego in a larger unity. Therefore there are
many symbolic significations in the play Hedda Gabler.

While all the other characters in Hedda Gabler are implicitly

compared to Hedda and serve, in one way or another, to
throw light upon her personality, Thea Elvsted is the one
with whom she is most obviously contrasted. Furthermore,
their contest for the control of Loevborg is the most
prominent external conflict in the play. The sterility-fertility
antithesis from which central action proceeds is chiefly
realized through the opposition of these tows. Hedda is
pregnant, and Thea is physically barren. Hedda is
emotionally renouncing her unborn child, Hedda rejects what
Ibsen considered womans opportunity to advance the march
of progress. Ibsen uses Thea, on the other hand to indicate
freedom, which Hedda never apprehends. Through her
ability to extend herself in comradeship with Loevborg, Thea
not only brings about the rebirth of his creative powers, but
 The Function of Symbols 2

also merges her own best self with his to produced a

prophecy of the future conceivably of the Third Kingdom in
which Ibsen believed that the Ideals of the past would unite
in a new and more perfect unity. Having lost herself to find
herself she almost instinctively breaks with the standards of
her culture in order to ensure continuance of function.
Despite her palpitating femininity, she is the most truly
emancipated person in the play. And it is she who wins at
least a limited victory in the end. Although Loevborg has
failed her, her richness is remorseless: as Hedda kills herself,
Thea is busily preparing to recreate her child with Tesman,
thereby at once enabling him to realize his own little talents,
and weakening even further the tenuous bond which ties him
to Hedda.

The contrast outlined above is reinforced by the procreative imagery of

the play. The manuscript is Loevborgs and Theas child, the idea of
progress born of a union between individuals who have freed
themselves from the preconceptions of their environment. This
manuscript the sterile Hedda throws into the fire at the climax of her
vindictive passion. Her impulse to annihilate by burning is directed
both onward Theas child and toward Theas hair and calls attention
to the relationship between them. Even without other indications that
Ibsen was using hair as a symbol of fertility; such an inference might
be made from the words, which accompany the destruction of the
manuscript:
Now I am burning your child, Thea! Burning it, curly-
clock! Your child and Eilert Loevborgs. I am burning- I
am burning your child.

There is, however, considerable evidence, both before and

after this scene, that Theas hair is a sign of that potency
which Hedda envies even while she ridicules and bullies its
possessor. Ibsen, of course, had ample precedent for
employing hair as a symbol of fertility. Perhaps the best
support for the argument that he made a literary adaptation
of this well-known, ancient idea in Hedda Gabler is a
summary of the instances in which the hair is mentioned.
Although Ibsens unobtrusive description of the hair of each
of these women at her initial entrance may seem at the time
only a casual stroke in the sketch, it assumes importance in
 The Function of Symbols 3

retrospect. Heddas hair is not particularly abundant,

whereas Theas is unusually abundant and wavy. Heddas
strongest impression of Thea is of that abundance:
She recalls her as
the girl with irritating hair that she was always
showing off. Moreover Thea fearfully recollects Heddas
schoolgirl reaction to her hair. Later, when the women are
alone, Hedda, now fully informed of the extent to which Thea
has realized her generative powers, laments her own
meager endowment and renews her threat in its adolescent
terms:
Oh, If you could only understand how poor I am, and
fate has made you so rich! (Clasps her passionately in
her arms) I think I must burn your hair off after all.
Heddas violent gesture and Theas almost hysterical
reaction indicates the dangerous seriousness of words which
otherwise might be mistaken for a joke; the threat prepares
us for the burning of the manuscript, which follows in Act III.
These scenes in which the hair plays a part not only call
attention to Heddas limitations but show her reaction to her
partial apprehension of them. In adapting a primitive symbol,
Ibsen slightly altered its conventional meaning, substituting
physical for physical potency. Its primitive associations
nevertheless pervade the fundamental relationships
between the two women. The weapons Hedda uses against
Thea are her hands and fire.

The pistols, like many other symbols used by Ibsen, quite

obviously are not merely symbols, but have important plot
function as well. Moreover, their symbolic significance
cannot be reduced to a simple formula, but must be thought
of in the light of the complex of associations, which they
carry as Heddas legacy from General Gabler. Through
Heddas attitude toward and uses of the pistols, Ibsen
constantly reminds us that Hedda
is to be regarded rather as her fathers daughter
than as her husbands wife.
Clearly the pistols are linked with certain values in her
background, which Hedda cherishes. Complete definition of
 The Function of Symbols 4

these values is difficult without a more thorough knowledge

of Ibsens conception of a Norwegian general in the play.
Perhaps, as Brands said, nineteenth century audiences
recognized that Heddas pretensions to dignity and grandeur
as a generals daughter were falsely based, that a
Norwegian general is a cavalry officer, who as a rule, has
never smelt powder, and whose pistols are innocent of
bloodshed. Such a realization, however, by no means
nullifies the theoretical attributes and privileges of
generalship to which Hedda aspires.
These conceptions, as embodied in Heddas romantic ideal of
manhood, may be synthesized form the action and dialogue.
The aristocrat possesses, above all, courage and self-control.
He expressed himself through direct and independent action,
living to capacity and scorning security and public opinion.
Danger only annoys his appetite, and death with honor is the
victory to be plucked from defeat. Such a one uses his pistols
with deliberation, with calculated aim. And such power, as
Hedda Gabler shows us, delivered into the hands of a
confused and irresponsible egotist, brings only meaningless
destruction to all who come within its range.

The manipulation of the pistols throughout the play is a

mockery of their traditional role. Except at target practice,
Hedda does not even shoot straight until her suicide. Both
men whom she threatens recognize her potential danger,
but both understand that her threat is a theatrical gesture,
and that she has no real intention of acting directly. She uses
the pistols to be sure, to ward off or warn off encroachments
upon her honor This honor, however, is rooted in social
expedience rather than in a moral code. Having in-directly
encouraged Loevborg by a succession of intimate
dallies, she poses as an outraged maiden when he makes
amorous advances, thereby, as she later hints, thwarting her
own emotional needs. Subsequently she dallies with Tesman
as cynically as Madame Diana does with her admirers. Both
Hedda and Brack become aware of the cold ruthlessness of
the other and the consequent danger to the loser if his
delicate equilibrium of their relationship should be disturbed.
 The Function of Symbols 5

But until the end Brack is so complacently convinced that

Hedda is his female counterpart that he has no fear she will
do more than shoot over his head; even as she lies dead, he
can hardly believe that she has resorted to direct action.

People dont do such things.

The part the pistols play in Loevborgs death makes a central

contribution to our understanding of the degree to which the
ideals they represent are distorted by the clouded
perspective from which Hedda views them. She has no real
comprehension of, nor interest in, the vital creative powers
that Thea helps Loevborg to realize. Instead, she glorifies his
weaknesses, mistaking bravado for courage, the indulgence
of physical appetites for god-like participation in the
banquet of life, a flight from reality for a heroic quest for
totality of experience. Even more important is the fact that
as she inhibits her own instinctive urge for fulfillment. Thus,
having instigated his ruin, she incites Loevborg to commit
suicide with her pistol. This radical denial of the will to live
she arbitrarily invests with the heroism and beauty one
associates with a sacrificial death; Hedda is incapable of
making the distinction between an exhibitionistic gesture
that inflates the ego, and the tragic death, in which the ego
is sublimated in order that the values of life may be
extended and reborn.

In conclusion, it would appear, then, that the symbols while

they do not carry the whole thematic burden of Hedda
Gabler, illuminate the meaning of the characters and the
action with which they are associated. As Eric Bentley has
suggested, the characters, like those in the other plays of
Ibsens last period, are the living dead who dwell in a
wasteland that resembles T.S Eliots. And, like Eliot later,
Ibsen emphasized the barrenness of the present by
contrasting it with the heroic past. Indeed, Hedda Gabler
may be thought of as a mock-tragedy, a sardonically
contrived mockery of tragic action, which Ibsen shows us is
 The Function of Symbols 6

no longer possible in the world, which is sick with a disease

less curable than that of Oedipus Thebes or Hamlets
Denmark.