Читать книгу Imagined Human Beings - Bernard Jay Paris - Страница 13

The first person to look at literature from a Horneyan perspective was Karen Horney herself. She taught courses at the New School for Social Research that were focused on literary works, and she frequently used literature for illustrative purposes in her writings. An admirer of Henrik Ibsen, she cited his works more often than those of any other author. This is not surprising, for Ibsen is the greatest psychological dramatist next to Shakespeare, and there is a remarkable congruence between his plays and her theory. Many of Ibsen’s characters seem to have stepped from the pages of Our Inner Conflicts and Neurosis and Human Growth. I could easily devote a book to a Horneyan study of Ibsen, but I shall confine myself here to two of his most famous and enigmatic characters, Nora Helmer and Hedda Gabler. At the center of Ibsen’s plays, there is often a relationship, the psychodynamics of which are portrayed with remarkable subtlety. I shall analyze Nora’s relationship with her husband, Torvald, and Hedda’s with Ejlert Lövborg.

Although Horney initially devoted herself to the study of feminine psychology, she stopped writing on this topic in the mid-1930s and developed a theory that she regarded as gender-neutral. She did not see any defensive strategies as essentially masculine or feminine but felt that all were employed by members of both sexes. The greater incidence of self-effacement in women and aggression in men is a product, she felt, of culture. Horney’s position is borne out by the study of literature. Self-effacement is more common in female characters and aggression in males, but there are many aggressive women and self-effacing men.

One of the major objectives of women’s liberation movements has been to free women from the cultural demand for self-effacement and to establish their right to full human development. At the thematic level, this seems to be what A Doll’s House is about. In the first two acts of the play, Nora Helmer is a striking example of feminine compliance, while in the last act she rebels against her doll-like role and asserts her claim to full humanity.

Indeed, the most difficult thing to understand about Nora is the speed of her transformation from a submissive, self-sacrificing woman who lives only for love and family into a self-assertive person who rejects all responsibility to her husband and children in the name of her duty to herself. At the end Nora seems so different from her earlier self that some have felt that Ibsen sacrificed consistent characterization to his thematic concerns. Nora learns that she has been unjustly treated by a male-dominated society and that she must rebel against the conventional view of her nature if she is to realize herself. “You and Father have done me a great wrong,” she tells Torvald. “You’ve prevented me from becoming a real person” (act 3).¹ She decides that she must leave home if she is to have a chance of discovering what she really thinks and who she really is. Nora’s speeches are stirring, but has Ibsen put words into her mouth that are inconsistent with her previously drawn character? Is her transformation psychologically plausible? How, exactly, does her disillusionment with Torvald produce her amazing turnabout? Can a woman who intended to drown herself near the beginning of the last act become as strong a person as Nora seems to be at the end?

I believe that Nora is a well-drawn mimetic character whose transformation is intelligible if we understand her defensive strategies and the nature of her relationship with her husband. She never becomes a mere mouthpiece but remains an inwardly motivated character, full of inconsistencies and blind spots that are psychologically realistic. Her transformation is plausible when we recognize that with the collapse of her predominant solution, her previously repressed tendencies emerge.

Nora experiences genuine growth at the end of the play, but she is not as clear-headed as she thinks she is. She fails to see, for example, that she has also participated in the creation of her destructive relationship with her husband and that Torvald has been no more of a real person for her than she has been for him. She informs Torvald that she must leave home because he has not treated her as a real person, but she also says that she stopped loving him when the wonderful thing did not happen. If Torvald had behaved heroically on the receipt of Krogstad’s letter, Nora would have been delighted, but such behavior on his part would not have shown respect for her as a person. Nora seems unaware of this, and of much else besides. She says that she has never been more sure of herself, but she is full of self-doubt, and her flight from Torvald and her children is compulsive. Turning against her failed self-effacing solution, Nora is now driven by defensive needs for aggression and withdrawal, as well as by her newly awakened desire for self-actualization.

Nora initially develops into a predominantly self-effacing person not only because of the attitudes toward women in her society but also because of the particular conditions of her childhood. She has no mother, and her father is a domineering man who wants her to remain a “doll-child” and who would be “displeased” if she expressed any ideas contrary to his own (act 3). Nora cannot afford to rebel; she is strongly attached to her father and does her utmost to please him. She retains the childlike playfulness and docility that he finds so charming and either adopts his opinions or remains silent. It seems likely that the absence of a mother increases her dependence on her father; she has no one else to turn to for love and protection. Moreover, she has no model of mature womanhood to emulate, and she acquires few skills on which to base her self-esteem. When she becomes a mother herself, she depends on her old nurse, Anne-Marie, to care for her children, whom she treats as playmates. Nora’s father rewards her compliance with fondness and indulgence, and she grows up feeling that the way to gain safety, love, and approval is to please a powerful male.

In Torvald Helmer, Nora finds a man who is much like her father, and she relates to him in a similar way. She is content to be his “lark,” his “squirrel,” his “doll-baby,” his “little featherbrain,” his “crazy little thing” (act 1). Nora does not feel demeaned by these epithets, as we feel her to be, although at an unconscious level they are destructive. She lives, as she says, “by performing tricks” for Torvald, and she is proud of her ability to keep him charmed. For Torvald there is “something very endearing about a woman’s helplessness” (act 3), and Nora is at great pains to conceal the fact that she has saved his life and almost paid off a large loan by her own efforts: “Torvald could never bear to think of owing anything to me! It would hurt his self-respect—wound his pride. It would ruin everything between us.” It is important to Nora to preserve Torvald’s feeling of mastery, for this is the price of his love and protection. She is keeping her heroic effort “in reserve,” however, for the day when she is “no longer so pretty and attractive . . . when it no longer amuses him to see [her] dance and dress-up and act for him” (act 1).

In the meantime, it gives her “something to be proud and happy about.” She is proud partly because “working like that and earning money” has given her a feeling of strength, has made her “feel almost like a man” (act 1), but mostly because it fulfills her need to be good and loving. Like Mrs. Linde, and most women in her culture, Nora glorifies sacrificing self for others, and she reveals her secret only when Mrs. Linde makes her feel inferior by contrasting Nora’s easy life with her own noble suffering.

Nora also has needs for power and mastery, which she fulfills in a typically self-effacing way by identifying with Torvald. She exults in the fact that “all the employees at the Bank [will] be dependent on Torvald now”: “What fun to think that we—that Torvald—has such power over so many people” (act 1). She bristles when Krogstad speaks disrespectfully of her husband because she participates in Torvald’s glory, and any threat to his status is a threat to her own. Her identification is so intense that she is ready to commit suicide to preserve her husband’s high position.

Nora begins to think of suicide as soon as Krogstad threatens to reveal that she has obtained a loan from him by forging her father’s signature. She becomes panic-stricken when, ignoring her pleas, Torvald dismisses Krogstad, saying that he will bear “the whole burden” of any retaliation. “He’d do it too! He’d do it—in spite of anything!” she exclaims to Dr. Rank. “But he mustn’t—never, never! Anything but that!” (act 2). Nora is convinced that Torvald loves her so “deeply” and “intensely” that “he wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to give up his life for [her] sake.” She thinks that one way of saving him would be to pay off her debt, thereby securing the incriminating papers. She considers asking Dr. Rank for the money, but when Rank declares his love, she can accept nothing from him, even though the alternative is so terrible. Apparently, her romanticism is so intense that she would rather commit suicide than taint her devotion to Torvald. She is afraid to kill herself, however, until Krogstad boasts that within a year he will be Torvald’s “right hand man. It’ll be Nils Krogstad, not Torvald Helmer, who’ll run the Joint Stock Bank.” “I have the courage for it now,” Nora declares (act 2).

Nora’s relationship with her husband is based on a bargain she has made in her own mind. She will be a charming, obliging, self-sacrificing wife, and Torvald will love and protect her. Nora delights in being babied, coddled, and indulged. Everything Torvald does for her shows how valuable she is to him and assures her that she will be taken care of. She does not mind being weak as long as his strength is at her service. She controls him through her dependency. When he becomes director of the bank, she does not regret the fact that she will no longer have to earn money secretly but is overjoyed that there will be “no more trouble! No more worry! I’ll be able to play and romp about with the children” (act 1). She does expect to be rewarded for her years of devotion, however. Some day, somehow, Torvald is going to make a magnificent sacrifice for her, and then she will see how strong and noble he is and how much he loves her. This is the “wonderful thing” that will validate her bargain and make her dream of glory come true.

Nora is certain that when Torvald opens Krogstad’s threatening letter, the wonderful thing will happen. Torvald is too brave, too noble to submit to Krogstad’s demands. In order to protect her from prosecution, he will take responsibility for the forgery on himself. In Nora’s romantic fantasy Torvald is her knight and she is his lady. Just before he reads the letter, he tells her: “Do you know something, Nora. I often wish you were in some great danger—so I could risk body and soul—my whole life—everything, everything for your sake” (act 3). Torvald’s equally romantic version of their relationship reinforces Nora’s. She believes his professions and is convinced that he will sacrifice himself for her. Nora wants the wonderful thing to happen, but she is terrified of it as well, for Torvald will become a social outcast, like Krogstad. He will lose his power and position, and life will become unbearably bleak and mean. A ruined Torvald could satisfy neither Nora’s compliant needs for care and protection nor her expansive needs for power and glory.

The severity of Nora’s neurosis is clearly revealed by her determination to kill herself. By committing suicide she will prevent Torvald from taking the blame on himself. Her heroic sacrifice will forestall his. Instead of having to endure guilt and self-hate for having ruined Torvald, she will save his career as she had earlier saved his life. The reward will be his undying gratitude and devotion. She will be enshrined forever in his memory and will not have to fear the loss of his love when she is no longer so attractive. Her suicide will secure Nora from the ravages of time and the vicissitudes of fortune. She will die in full possession of the two things she values most, Torvald’s love and his glory.

In a relationship of morbid dependency, such as that between Nora and Torvald, there is a turning point, says Horney, for the self-effacing partner, “as the stake she is gambling for fails to materialize” (1950, 252). The turning point for Nora comes with Torvald’s reactions to Krogstad’s letter. He neither praises her for having earned so much money and saved his life nor offers to take the blame for her forgery on himself. Instead he calls her a hypocrite, a liar, and a criminal and tells her that she “won’t be allowed to bring up the children” (act 3). “All thought of happiness” between them is over. She has put him in Krogstad’s power, and he “must find some way to appease him.” If we have understood what has been going on in Nora up to this moment, we can see why Torvald’s reactions have such a tremendous impact upon her. Her dream has been shattered; her image of Torvald, her bargain, her hopes are all exploded illusions. Her sense of injustice is overwhelming, since she has been ready to die for him, and he is thinking only of himself. Enraged, she feels now that she does not love Torvald and that he has never loved her. Nothing he says could possibly repair the relationship; she has lost all faith in his assurances and regards him with contempt.

With the collapse of her self-effacing solution, hitherto repressed trends in Nora’s personality begin to emerge. All the time she was submitting to Torvald and her father, she was unconsciously resenting their constraints and hating them for making her self-abandonment the price of their love. She rebelled in small ways, such as sneaking macaroons, and was aware of a desire to say, in front of Torvald, “Damn! —damn! —damn it all!” (act 1). Now that there is no prize to be won by compliance, she cannot bear the thought of continuing to be treated in degrading, patronizing ways. Nor can she repress her resentment any longer. She accuses both Torvald and her father of having grievously wronged her and seems to want Torvald to suffer. When he says that he “can’t endure the thought” of parting with her, she replies: “All the more reason it should happen” (act 3).

Torvald is not the only object of Nora’s rage; she is angry with herself and full of self-hate. Her self-effacing side is horrified at the thought that she has been “living here for eight years with a stranger” and that she has “borne him three children”: “I can’t bear to think about it! I could tear myself to pieces!” (act 3). By leaving immediately she removes herself from sexual temptation and restores her pride in herself as a woman who is intimate only with a man she loves. She sees her bargain in a new light, and now, to avoid feeling that she has sold herself, she must reject Torvald’s help: “I can’t accept anything from strangers.” Torvald’s attack on her moral character exacerbates her doubts about her fitness as a mother.

A good deal of self-hate is generated also by Nora’s emerging aggressive trends. She perceives that in many ways Torvald is right when he calls her a child and tells her that she has “no understanding of the society we live in” (act 3). She had been content to be a pampered darling who was unfit to cope with the world, but now she hates her weakness and is determined to stand on her own feet. Here, too, the defense of her pride requires that she leave home. She feels that she is of no use to her children partly because she is so childlike herself. Nora defends herself against her self-hate by putting the whole blame on Torvald and her father and by resolving to become different. Anything that stands in the way of her determination to change, any claim of love or duty, she ruthlessly rejects: “This is something I must do.”

It seems likely that Nora becomes aggressive, rather than wallowing in self-pity and despair, because her earlier experience of working has given her a feeling that she can earn money like a man. Without this in her background, she might have reacted quite differently to the collapse of her romance. As it is, she gives up her belief in the miraculous power of love and transfers her expansive pride from Torvald to herself. She is going to prove that she is as good as a man and does not need anybody to take care of her! She has very little sense of what she is going to do, but she must escape the dependency she now so despises. Her belief in Torvald seems to have been replaced by a faith in the magic power of her will.

Aggressive trends are not the only hitherto suppressed components of Nora’s personality to surface at the end. A person living in a suffocating environment like Nora’s is bound to develop tendencies toward detachment, to have strong urges to run away, to get free of the constant pressure on her thoughts and feelings. Nora insists that she must be alone if she is to “think things out” for herself. She rejects all responsibility toward others and refuses Torvald’s help partly because she is afraid of anything that will interfere with her independence: “You mustn’t feel yourself bound any more than I shall. There must be complete freedom on both sides” (act 3). Torvald wants to write to her, but Nora anxiously pleads with him not to. She expresses no interest in hearing about the children and makes no effort to see them before she departs.

Nora’s detachment is not only a response to past oppression but also a defense against present conflicts. She has to be callous toward her husband and children, she has to run away from them, because they threaten to rouse up her self-effacing side, of which she is now afraid. There is something decidedly cold-blooded about Nora at the end. She is not allowing herself to be aware of the complexities of her situation, to feel a sense of loss, or to experience tender emotions.

Although part of Nora’s transformation involves the adoption of new defenses, there are signs of genuine growth. Nora has seen the severity of her self-alienation and has understood some of its causes. She wants to find herself, to discover her own thoughts and feelings, and to grow from this authentic center of her being. She sees that her humanity has been stunted and is determined to become a capable, functioning, fully responsible person. Her insistence that she has a sacred duty to herself is healthy self-assertion.

How far Nora can grow is a question on which we can only speculate. In the absence of a supportive environment, her prospects do not seem promising. It will be very difficult for her to arrive at a true knowledge of herself and the world around her. She has made contact with previously repressed feelings, such as rage and the desire to throw off her bonds, but this is not the same thing as getting in touch with her real self. Her discovery of her self-alienation is an essential first step, but it is difficult to see how she can recognize and relinquish her defenses without help, and none is available. At the end of the play Nora is like a person in an early stage of therapy who is so afraid of losing contact with her new perceptions and so determined that nothing shall interfere with her growth that she cannot be worried about doing justice to others or caring about their feelings. It is at this stage, of course, that many marriages break up.

If Nora continued to grow, there might be a chance for her marriage, for she would come to see both Torvald and herself more clearly. She would relinquish her over-simple perception of him as a detestable tyrant or a contemptible weakling and recognize that his defenses had complemented hers in many ways but had also been in conflict with them. Nora and Torvald have had such an intensely romantic relationship because they have satisfied each other’s neurotic needs. Nora needed to merge with a powerful, dominant male, and Torvald loved being master. She was excited by his strength and he by her weakness and dependency. She wished to be possessed and Torvald was extremely possessive. She dreamt of being cherished and protected and he of rescuing her from peril. Each was the center of the other’s existence. Torvald was as emotionally dependent on Nora as she on him; at the end, it is he who cannot bear the thought of their separation. Each was “in love” with an idealization of the other rather than with the real person.

When Torvald’s illusory version of Nora is shattered, he cries out, “God! What an awakening!” (act 3). The play has been building toward this moment. We see from the beginning that Nora and Torvald have different attitudes toward borrowing money, social responsibility, and scrupulousness in the management of their affairs. Although she knows that Torvald is opposed to being in debt, Nora proposes that they borrow on the promise of his new job in order to splurge for Christmas. When Torvald asks what would happen if “on New Year’s Eve a tile blew off the roof and knocked my brains out,” Nora replies that under such circumstances it would not matter if she owed money (act 1). “But,” Torvald asks, “what about the people I’d borrowed from?” “Who cares about them?” replies Nora. “After all they’re just strangers.” Torvald dismisses her response as a joke, but Nora is serious. When Krogstad asks if it had not occurred to her that she was not being honest with him when he lent her money on the basis of her father’s signature, Nora answers: “I really couldn’t concern myself with that. You meant nothing to me.”

The Helmers have not had a great deal of money because as a lawyer Torvald has refused “to handle any cases that are in the least bit—shady” (act 1). Nora tells Mrs. Linde that she “agree[s] with him, of course,” but she does not observe his code of rectitude herself and seems to feel that he is too strict. Governed by the values of her self-effacing solution, Nora feels justified in doing whatever is necessary to care for the members of her family. She cannot imagine that “a daughter has no right to spare her dying father worry and anxiety” or that “a wife has no right to save her husband’s life.” Nora’s claims are that she cannot be adversely judged because she acted out of love and that there “won’t be any trouble” because she has “three little children” (act 2).

Her belief system is shaken, however, when Torvald attacks Krogstad at the end of act 1. After committing a forgery, Krogstad had escaped punishment through “tricks and evasions.” When a man behaves like that, says Torvald, “his life becomes a tissue of lies and deception. He’s forced to wear a mask—even with those nearest to him—his own wife and children.” Krogstad “has been deliberately poisoning his own children for years, by surrounding them with lies and hypocrisy.” Nora recognizes herself in this description, since her life is a tissue of lies and deception. She, too, has committed forgery, and she has deceived Torvald about the loan. She lies habitually, about eating macaroons, about what she does with the money Torvald gives her, about what she is doing with the time she spends working, and so on. She justifies many of these lies as being in a good cause and required by Torvald’s rigidity, but after Torvald’s speech about Krogstad she becomes terrified. Afraid that she is harming her family and corrupting her home, she begins to withdraw from her children and to contemplate going away. The self-hate and self-doubt thus activated remain with her through the rest of the play.

It is because Mrs. Linde is appalled by the “deceit and subterfuge” on which Nora’s relationship with Torvald is based that she insists on exposing Nora’s secret, even though Krogstad is willing to take back his threatening letter. She feels that Nora and Torvald must come “to a thorough understanding,” that “Helmer must know the truth” (act 3). She tells Nora that she has “nothing to fear from Krogstad” but that she “must speak out.” Nora’s reaction to this is remarkable: “Now I know what I must do”—that is, she must commit suicide. Why? If she has nothing to fear from Krogstad, she does not have to kill herself to save Torvald’s career and prevent the wonderful thing from happening. Does she want to die so as to avoid a confrontation with Torvald? Does she sense what his reaction will be? Does she fear that he will despise her, as he does Krogstad.

Torvald’s denunciation of Krogstad had been extraordinarily passionate: “It would have been impossible for me to work with him. It literally gives me a feeling of physical discomfort to come in contact with such people” (act 1). The perfectionistic Torvald is pursuing a flawless excellence in the whole conduct of life, and he discharges onto Krogstad the contempt he would feel for himself should he behave as Krogstad has done. Krogstad is, in effect, his despised image, what he cannot bear to be, and he finds his very presence disturbing, especially when Krogstad, an old school friend, treats him with familiarity. His repudiation, condemnation, and defiance of Krogstad confirm his high standards and solidify his sense of identity.

Nora dreads Krogstad partly because her father had been attacked in the newspapers, and she fears that Krogstad will attack Torvald. Confident of his rectitude, Torvald dismisses her fears: “My dear Nora, there is a distinct difference between your father and me. Your father’s conduct was not entirely unimpeachable. But mine is; and I trust it will remain so” (act 2). Torvald feels that his strength is the strength of ten because his heart is pure. His bargain is that he will ultimately triumph and have nothing to fear as long as his conduct is unimpeachable. At the beginning of the play, his bargain seems to be working. He suffered financially because he would not take shady cases, but he has received a splendid new appointment as the reward of his virtue.

Torvald’s reaction to Krogstad’s letter is so intense because his well-earned success has been poisoned, and he has been put in the power of a man he detests. Since he will be in a false position whatever he does, the flawless excellence of his life has been lost forever. Perhaps the greatest blow for him is that his idealized image of Nora and their relationship has been shattered. He has awakened after eight years to discover that the woman who had been his “pride and joy” is “lawless” and “unprincipled” (act 3). He has had intimations of the conflict between his values and Nora’s before, but he has dismissed them because of his need to hold onto his exalted image of her and their relationship. When he catches her in a lie about Krogstad’s not having been to see her, he does not take the matter seriously: “(Threatens with his finger) My little bird must never do that again! A song-bird must sing clear and true! No false notes! (Puts arm around her) Isn’t that the way it should be? Of course it is! (Let’s her go) And now we’ll say no more about it” (act 1). Torvald now believes that Nora has inherited her father’s lack of principle; she has “no religion, no moral code, no sense of duty” (act 3). She embodies everything Torvald abhors in other people and is afraid of in himself.

Torvald can be easily seen as a coward and hypocrite, but the situation is more complicated than that. He had made a show of courage as long as his conduct was unimpeachable, but Nora’s behavior has compromised his honor and undermined his belief in his power to control his destiny. Horney observes that for the perfectionistic person the appearance of rectitude may be more important than rectitude itself, and appearances are very important to Torvald. The “matter must be hushed up at any cost” in order to avoid a scandal, and he and Nora must pretend to have a marriage in order to “save appearances” (act 3). Nora’s dream was that Torvald would take the responsibility for the forgery on himself, thus showing how much he loved her, but given his own defenses, this is something that Torvald could never do. She is asking him to present his despised image to the world as his true reality. When Torvald says that “one doesn’t sacrifice one’s honor for love’s sake,” Nora replies that “millions of women have done so.” She is expressing values that belong to her defense system and he values that belong to his.

Krogstad’s letter plunges Torvald into a state of psychological crisis. His solution has failed and his “whole world seem[s] to be tumbling about [his] ears” (act 3). He is going to pieces not only because Nora has exposed him to disgrace, but also because his misfortune forces him to realize that he has violated his own principles. His code is that one should not sacrifice honor for love, but that is what he did when he was sent to investigate Nora’s father and engaged in a cover-up for her sake: “If you hadn’t . . . been so kind and helpful—he might have been dismissed” (act 2). Torvald now feels that he is being punished “for shielding” Nora’s father (act 3). By failing to live up to his shoulds, he has exposed himself to catastrophe. This generates a sense of helplessness and panic and also a great deal of self-hate, which he externalizes by feeling victimized and blaming his wife. Like Nora, he feels unjustly treated by his mate: “And to think I have you to thank for all this—you whom I’ve done nothing but pamper and spoil since the day of our marriage” (act 3). As we have seen, Nora is also feeling self-hate, which she externalizes by blaming her father and Torvald.

Torvald’s panic subsides when Krogstad withdraws his threat, and he immediately resumes his patronizing behavior. After forgiving Nora, he assures her that she is safe and that he will cherish her as if she were “a little dove” he had “rescued from the claws of some dreadful hawk” (act 3). Despite his craven behavior, Torvald wants to revive the old scenario in which he is Nora’s protector, but she no longer believes him. He becomes even more paternalistic than he was before. Nora will become his child as well as his wife, and he will be “both will and conscience” to her.

Torvald’s behavior is incredibly inappropriate, and it may seem to some that Ibsen is presenting a caricature of a chauvinistic male. It is understandable, however, in terms of Torvald’s psychology. He is a male chauvinist, of course (“I am not a man for nothing”), but there is more to his behavior than that. His description of Nora as his “dearest treasure” is not an exaggeration (act 3). He is an emotionally needy man who, spellbound by Nora, wants to possess her entirely and live in a world of their own. When they are with other people, he romantically pretends that they love each other in secret, and he thinks that Rank’s death may be for the best, since now they will be “more than ever dependent on each other.” He is proud of Nora’s beauty and charm, which bolster his own sense of worth, much as Torvald’s success feeds Nora’s pride. He has blinded himself to anything faulty in Nora because he does not want to relinquish his idealization of her or to have any flaw in their relationship.

There is an inner conflict in Torvald between his dependency on Nora and his perfectionism. He tries to resolve that conflict by treating her like a helpless, uncomprehending female who was not “able to judge how wrong” her behavior was (act 3). If he continued to condemn Nora, he would lose her. By regarding her as too immature to be held responsible, he is able to forgive her and continue their relationship. He will keep Nora straight, and thus protect himself, by being her will and conscience. He envisions merging with Nora more completely than ever before.

Torvald’s fantasy is profoundly oppressive to Nora, who no longer respects his judgment. When he starts regarding her as his little doll again, “whom you would have to guard more carefully than ever, because she was so weak and frail” (act 3), she realizes the degree to which she has been infantilized and demands to be treated like a real person. This does not produce a sudden leap into maturity for Nora, nor could it. She herself is conscious of her inadequacy and uncertainty. She knows that she is not fit to teach her children, that she does not understand society or religion, and that she is bewildered about ethical questions. What she is clear about is that she is not clear. She knows that she is out of touch with herself and the world and that she must get away from Torvald if she is to “learn to face reality.” She is aware that she is at the beginning of a long process and that she does not “know what sort of person” she will become.

I have suggested that if Nora continued to grow, there might be a chance for her marriage. That would depend on Torvald as well, but he, too, has begun to change and may have as good a chance as she of arriving at the necessary insights. He does not accept Nora’s position that he should have sacrificed honor for love, nor, given his personality, is he ever likely to do so. Nora needs to see the sources of that expectation in her own psychology. Torvald does respond, however, to Nora’s indignation at not having been treated as a person. He understands that there is “a great void” between them and asks Nora to believe that he is capable of change. She thinks that he might be when he “no longer [has his] doll to play with” (act 3). Again she is right. The separation is as essential for Torvald as it is for her. Nora appears to be somewhat vindictive when she says that his inability to endure the thought of parting with her is all the more reason why she should go, but perhaps she recognizes that she must be cruel in order to be kind.

The question we are left with at the end of the play is whether Nora and Torvald can change enough so that their “life together might truly be a marriage” (act 3). Unless this happens, says Nora, they will always be strangers. If it were to happen it would be “the most wonderful thing of all,” but Nora says that she “no longer believe[s] in miracles.” Torvald, however, clings to this hope. The last line of the play is his: “The most wonderful thing of all—?” Given the severity of Nora and Torvald’s problems and the absence of therapeutic help, it would be a miracle indeed.

Hedda Gabler is above all a study of character; to comprehend the play, we must understand Hedda. It is difficult to establish Ibsen’s thematic intentions, but he shows with brilliant psychological insight how Hedda’s plight as a woman in an extremely restrictive society produces inner conflicts that make her life sterile and lead to her destructive behavior. Hedda is not portrayed sympathetically, like Nora, but psychological analysis reveals that beneath her cold, haughty demeanor she is a suffering human being.

As in A Doll’s House, the heroine’s relationship with a man is the focus of the play. Hedda’s most important relationship is not with her husband but with Ejlert Lövborg, whom she had known before her marriage. After the scene is set in act 1, the dramatic action is initiated by Thea Elvsted’s visit, which leads to Lövborg’s reentry into Hedda’s life. Act 2 is focused on Hedda’s rivalry with Thea, as she induces Ejlert to take a drink and go to Judge Brack’s party. Act 3 shows us her disappointment when Ejlert fails to enact the scenario she had envisaged for him, and it ends with Hedda urging him to kill himself beautifully and burning his manuscript. In act 4, Hedda is driven to suicide when all her solutions collapse after Ejlert’s death. If we are to appreciate the subtlety of Ibsen’s psychological portrait and make sense of what happens in the play, we must understand Ejlert’s role in Hedda’s life.

The most widely held view of Hedda’s behavior in act 2 is that she is trying to undo Thea’s constructive influence on Ejlert, who had been leading a wild bohemian life in the days when he and Hedda were friends. Inspired by Thea, he has stopped drinking, has published a highly acclaimed book, and has written another that is more brilliant still. Envious of Thea, Hedda wishes to exercise a more powerful influence of her own by turning Lövborg back into the man he was when she knew him. She seeks to disrupt Ejlert’s relationship with Thea and to replace her as the dominant force in his life. Thea is afraid that Ejlert will be destroyed if he reverts to his old ways, and most people seem to feel that Hedda is trying to undermine him in order to feel that for once in her life she, too, has “the power to shape a human destiny” (act 2).

There is much in this view with which I agree, but I do not think that Hedda induces Lövborg to take a drink and go to Brack’s party in order to undermine him. In response to Thea’s concern about “what will come of all this,” Hedda confidently predicts that “At ten o’clock he will be here, with vine leaves in his hair. Flushed and fearless!” (act 2). She envisions him as a triumphant figure. Hedda is disappointed rather than pleased when she hears from her husband that the drunken Ejlert carelessly dropped his manuscript and learns from Judge Brack that he finally turned up at Mademoiselle Diana’s, where he insisted that he had been robbed, raised a row, and was taken away by the police: “So that’s what happened! Then, after all, he had no vine leaves in his hair!” (act 4). He is behaving like the Ejlert of old, but that is not, evidently, what Hedda had wanted. In order to understand what Hedda was hoping for we must examine her inner conflicts and Ejlert’s role in her effort to manage them.

Some of Hedda’s conflicts are presented quite vividly in her reminiscence with Ejlert about the old days, when there was a “secret intimacy” between them that “no living soul suspected” (act 2). With General Gabler reading his paper in the same room, Ejlert would describe his “days and nights of passion and frenzy, of drinking and madness” to Hedda. She evoked his confessions by boldly asking “devious questions” that he perfectly understood. Rejecting Lövborg’s idea that she was trying to wash away his sins, Hedda explains her motive: “Isn’t it quite easy to understand that a young girl, especially if it can be done in secret . . . should be tempted to investigate a forbidden world? A world she’s supposed to know nothing about?”

Hedda is a socially prominent woman with a very strong sense of propriety who needs to maintain her dignity at all costs and who cannot bear the thought of doing anything that would diminish her respectability. At the same time, she has powerful sexual and aggressive impulses that she wants to express as men do and that she is bitter at having to deny. She lives in a society that imposes enormous constraints upon a woman of her social class, constraints to which she outwardly conforms but against which she inwardly rebels. Her “secret intimacy” with Ejlert Lövborg enabled her to escape these constraints vicariously, since he acted out her forbidden impulses and then told her about it. When Ejlert wonders how she could have brought herself “to ask such questions,” Hedda insists that she did so “in a devious way,” that is, without directly violating decorum (act 2). We see Hedda looking for a similar kind of safe, voyeuristic gratification when she makes oblique references to Judge Brack’s affairs and relishes the thought of his stag party, which she wishes she could attend unseen.

Hedda’s problem, then, is how to satisfy her “craving for life” (act 2), as Ejlert describes it, without sacrificing her position as a lady. Hedda’s need to conform to the rules of propriety is so great that it both alienates her from her real feelings and makes it impossible for her to express the resulting rebellious impulses. It is not a healthy craving for self-actualization but her suppressed neurotic needs that Ejlert Lövborg is acting out. To Hedda, however, he is a man who has “the courage to live his life” as he sees fit (act 3), in a way that she cannot live hers. It is not only his escapades that she vicariously enjoys but also what they symbolize, his freedom from the constraints by which she feels herself to be suffocated.

Ejlert provides a solution to Hedda’s problem until he drags their intimacy down to reality by making sexual advances. Hedda is so alarmed by this that she threatens to shoot him, but she is afraid to do so because she has “such a fear of scandal” (act 2). When Lövborg accuses her of being “a coward at heart,” she wholeheartedly concurs: “A terrible coward.” She confesses that her “greatest cowardice that evening” was in not responding to his advances.

Hedda is caught in a conflict between a desire to act out her rebellious aggression by leading a wild, free, bohemian life, like Lövborg, and an even stronger need to comply with the norms of her society, to be a refined, respectable lady, the proper daughter of an eminent general. To escape the agony of this conflict, she becomes cold, aloof, detached, out of touch with her own emotions and indifferent to other people. She does not believe in love, marries for convenience, and then is terribly oppressed by the boredom of her empty existence. When she returns from a lengthy wedding trip with a husband she cannot bear, she wants a butler, a saddle horse, a new piano, and an active social life partly for reasons of status and partly because she is spoiled, but mostly because she feels desperate and is searching for distractions. She becomes even more frustrated when she learns that they will have to curtail their expenses.

Hedda’s plight is vividly depicted in her conversation with Judge Brack at the beginning of act 2. After greeting him with pistol shots and explaining that she is “just killing time” because she doesn’t know “what in heaven’s name” she is to do with herself “all day long,” Hedda complains about the boredom of her wedding trip. She makes it clear that she does not “love” Jörgen (“Ugh! Don’t use that revolting word!”), and that she married him because he had a promising career and she “wasn’t getting any younger.” Hedda is twenty-nine and has a dread of aging. Brack and Hedda then engage in a devious exchange in which Brack proposes an affair and Hedda makes it clear that she would rather continue her tête-à-tête with Jörgen than enter into a triangle that would compromise her respectability. She has no objection to Brack’s coming over to amuse her, however.

In response to Hedda’s complaint about how “incredibly I shall bore myself here,” Brack suggests that she find “some sort of vocation in life,” but Hedda cannot imagine a vocation that would attract her. Perhaps she could get Jörgen to go into politics, despite the fact that he is completely unsuited for such a career. Like most of the women in Ibsen’s plays—and in his culture, no doubt—Hedda can find an outlet for her expansive tendencies only through identification with or manipulation of a man. There are variations on this theme in A Doll’s House (as we have seen), The Master Builder, and Rosmersholm.

Hedda feels that life is “so hideous” because of her “genteel poverty”; but, sensing her detachment, Judge Brack astutely observes that “the fault lies elsewhere,” in the fact she has never “really been stirred by anything.” He suggests that this may change when she finds herself “faced with what’s known in solemn language as a grave responsibility.” Hedda angrily replies, “Be quiet! Nothing of that sort will ever happen to me.” She is already pregnant, however, and is trying to deny her condition, both to herself and to others. Not only is she confined to a woman’s narrow sphere in life, but she can find no satisfaction in what her culture regards as feminine joys. She puts off marriage as long as she can, partly because its restrictions do not appeal to her and partly because the men who attract her are not eligible and the men who are eligible do not attract her. She is appalled by the prospect of motherhood, again because of her detachment: “That sort of thing doesn’t appeal to me, Judge. I’m not fitted for it. No responsibilities for me!” Terribly frustrated herself, she has nothing to give a child, who will further limit her freedom. In rebellion against the feminine role but unable to find any other, she tells Judge Brack that the only thing she is “really fitted for” is “boring myself to death!”

Hedda is in despair about her life. From the beginning of the play, she is full of frustration, irritability, and anger, which she displaces at first onto the self-effacing Aunt Juliane, who lets in too much sunlight, thus revealing Hedda’s aging face and filled out figure, and whose hat Jörgen has indecorously left on a drawing room table. When Judge Brack scolds her for tormenting “that nice old lady,” Hedda explains that she suddenly gets “impulses like that” and cannot “control them” (act 2). She is not callously amusing herself, but is compulsively discharging some of her pent-up rage, just as she does when she fires off her father’s pistols, those symbols of male power.

Constantly looking for something that might interest her, Hedda regards the possible competition for the professorship between Ejlert and Jörgen as an event in which she can take “a sporting interest” (act 1), despite the fact that her husband’s professional and financial fortunes are at stake. The arrival of Thea takes her in a new direction, since Thea announces the presence of Ejlert Lövborg, who had once provided Hedda with a way of dealing with her frustrations and inner conflicts. When she learns that Ejlert is in town she has a vague hope that he can somehow be of help to her, and she immediately asks Jörgen to invite him.

Upon Lövborg’s arrival, Hedda becomes involved in a competition with Thea for influence over him. Hedda is threatened by Thea and has a powerful need to triumph over her. When they knew each other at school, Hedda used to pull Thea’s hair and once said she was “going to burn it all off” (act 1). Ibsen describes Thea’s hair as “extremely thick and wavy,” while Hedda’s is “not especially abundant.” Thea’s thick hair symbolizes fertility and makes Hedda all the more conscious of the sterility of her own existence, despite her pregnancy. The contrast between the two women is developed throughout the play. Whereas Hedda reveled in Lövborg’s debauchery, Thea inspired him to write books, which he describes as their children. Hedda’s fear of scandal made her afraid of responding to Ejlert’s advances, but Thea leaves her husband in order to follow him to town: “But, Thea, my darling!”—exclaims Hedda—“How did you dare do such a thing?” (act 1; my emphasis). When Thea declares that she will never go back to her husband, Hedda is shocked: “But what will people say about you, Thea?” “They can say,” replies Thea, “whatever they like.” In pursuit of what is really important to her, Thea ignores public opinion in a way that Hedda cannot. Hedda’s envy is exacerbated when Lövborg praises Thea’s “tremendous courage” where her “comrade is concerned”:

Hedda: God, yes, courage! If one only had that!

Lövborg: What then?

Hedda: Then life might perhaps be endurable, after all . . . (act 2)

Thea is Hedda’s nemesis, the woman who demonstrates that it is possible to have a fruitful life if one has the courage to defy convention.

There can be no doubt that Hedda manipulates Lövborg into taking a drink and going to Judge Brack’s party in order to disrupt his relationship with Thea and to show that she has more power over him. But she is not yet out to destroy Lövborg, as she is later when she conceals the fact that Jörgen has found his manuscript. At this point in the play she wants Ejlert to enact a scenario she has conceived for him in which he will be a triumphant author who is free of self-doubt and anxiety about himself. She wants “the power to shape a human destiny” in what she regards as a positive way.

Lövborg’s refusal to take a drink and go to Brack’s party disturbs Hedda because it seems to be motivated by the same kind of fear that has made her life unendurable and filled her with self-contempt. Hedda despises herself for her conformity, her dread of scandal, her cowardice. She taunts Ejlert with not daring to take a drink or go to the party: “Didn’t dare! You say I didn’t dare!” (act 2). She cannot bear to see him afraid and eggs him on because she wants him to lead the free, uninhibited life that she cannot lead herself. She is caught in a crossfire of conflicting shoulds, since she hates herself for her cowardice but knows that she would hate herself even more for any breach of propriety. She wants Lövborg to rescue her from her impasse by being both rebellious and triumphant, by returning “flushed and fearless,” “with vine leaves in his hair.” Then he “will have regained confidence in himself. He’ll be a free man forever and ever.”

Thea may have reclaimed Ejlert, but she has also tamed him, made him fearful of spontaneity, just as Hedda is. She acts boldly on his behalf but is terribly anxious for him. Hedda feels a similar anxiety for herself at the thought of daring behavior, but she wants to believe that Lövborg can act upon his impulses with impunity. She wants to triumph over Thea, to shape a human destiny, and to gain a vicarious fulfillment of her needs to be independent and courageous by having Lövborg owe his freedom and fearlessness to her. Having no hope of becoming what she wants to be herself, she seeks to escape her impotence and self-hate by making Ejlert into a man through whom she can live and with whom she can proudly identify.

Hedda’s is an impossible dream. Since Lövborg is an alcoholic, freeing him of his fears and inhibitions is bound to destroy him. When he refuses to join the other men at the punch bowl, Judge Brack says, “Why, surely, cold punch is not poison.” “Perhaps not for everyone,” Ejlert replies, with the implication that it surely is for him (act 2). Thea is so anxious because she understands Ejlert’s vulnerability. Desperate, Hedda blinds herself to his condition and constructs a scenario that will satisfy her contradictory needs but that he cannot possibly fulfill.

When Ejlert has not returned by the next morning Thea is in panic, but, holding onto her dream, Hedda envisions him at Judge Brack’s “sitting with vine leaves in his hair, reading his manuscript” (act 3). Tesman comes back with a glowing account of the new work, but finds it “appalling” that Lövborg, “with all his great gifts, should be so utterly incorrigible.” “Because he has more daring,” Hedda asks, “than any of the rest of you?” This is Hedda’s idealized image of Lövborg. It is Ejlert’s excessive drinking, however, to which Jörgen is referring, since it has led him carelessly to drop his precious manuscript. Jörgen has found it and leaves it with Hedda when he is summoned to the bedside of the dying Aunt Rina.

Judge Brack’s account of the evening shatters Hedda’s dream of living through a liberated Lövborg. Having conceived of Lövborg as a kind of romantic hero, an untamed superior being, she is sickened by his sordid fight with Mademoiselle Diana and his arrest. If Hedda had simply wanted to show her power over Lövborg and break up his relationship with Thea by inducing him to revert to bohemian ways, she would have been pleased by his night of drinking and madness.

It is at this point that Hedda turns destructive. Since she has not been able to make Ejlert into the hero of her dreams, she exerts her power in a different way by first concealing and then burning his manuscript. Ashamed to confess that he has lost their “child,” Lövborg tells Thea that he has torn the manuscript into a thousand pieces and that he will “do no more work, from now on” (act 3). Thea “despairingly” asks what she will “have to live for,” accuses him of “child-murder,” and sees “nothing but darkness” before her. Lövborg is also in despair, for he knows “it won’t end with last night,” and debauchery no longer appeals to him: “she’s somehow broken my courage—my defiant spirit.” “To think,” says Hedda, that that pretty little fool should have influenced a man’s destiny.” Hedda might have been able to save Lövborg had she revealed that she was in possession of the manuscript, but she allows him to believe it is lost. When he announces that he wants “to make an end of it,” Hedda does not try to dissuade him or produce the manuscript but instead gives him a pistol, urges him to use it, and enjoins him to “let it be beautiful.” After Ejlert leaves, she burns the manuscript, calling it his and Thea’s child.

Hedda’s behavior can be explained as a continuation of her rivalry with Thea and of her desire to shape a man’s destiny—for ill if not for good; but these are not her only motivations. With the collapse of her dream of triumph for Lövborg, and vicariously for herself, Hedda is confronted once more by her contradictory needs, which she now has no hope of fulfilling. She, too, is in despair, and wishes to make an end of it. She is afraid to commit suicide, however, partly because, as Brack says at the end, “people don’t do such things!” After Lövborg disappoints her, she develops a new scenario in which he will commit suicide in just the way that she would like to do, and she will glory in this new form of freedom and daring and in her own contribution to it. When Brack announces that Lövborg has shot himself through the heart, Hedda is exultant: “It gives me a sense of freedom to know that an act of deliberate courage is still possible in this world—an act of spontaneous beauty” (act 4). Hedda feels herself to be incapable of such an act, but Lövborg has done it for her, she thinks. Judge Brack destroys her “beautiful illusion” by revealing that Ejlert was accidentally shot in the bowels while demanding his “lost child” in Mademoiselle Diana’s boudoir. “How horrible!” exclaims Hedda. “Everything I touch becomes ludicrous and despicable!—It’s like a curse!”

Hedda is driven to kill herself by the collapse of all her solutions. She can no longer hope to gain a sense of freedom and to satisfy her suicidal impulses vicariously through Lövborg, and she is put into an impossible position by Judge Brack’s effort to blackmail her.

As soon as she returns from her wedding journey, Brack begins pressing for “a triangular friendship” in which he will be her lover (act 2). Hedda welcomes Brack’s attentions, but given her fear of scandal, an affair is unthinkable. This is the same Hedda who had drawn a gun on Ejlert Lövborg when he wanted to bring their relationship down to earth. After confessing to Ejlert that she does not love her husband, she hastens to add, “All the same, no unfaithfulness, remember” (act 2). Brack welcomes Lövborg’s disgrace after he is arrested at Mademoiselle Diana’s because he senses Ejlert as a rival and hopes that Hedda’s home will be closed to him, like other “respectable house[s]” (act 3). His aim is to be “cock-of-the-walk,” and “for that,” he tells Hedda, “I will fight with every weapon I can command.” Hedda realizes that he is “a dangerous person” and is “exceedingly glad” that he has “no sort of hold” over her.

Brack gains a hold over Hedda, however, when he recognizes the pistol with which Lövborg was shot. Hedda is now faced with three possibilities, all of which are unbearable. Brack suggests that she can declare the pistol to have been stolen, but she says that “it would be better to die” than to do that (act 4). Brack dismisses her speech: “One says such things—but one doesn’t do them.” Why the threat of suicide here? Because lying about having given Lövborg the pistol is an act of cowardice that would exacerbate her self-hate? I have no better explanation. If the police trace the weapon to Hedda, says Brack, she will have to appear in court with Mademoiselle Diana and explain why she gave it to Lövborg: “think of the scandal .... of which you are so terrified.” If Brack keeps quiet, however, the weapon will not be traced, and Hedda will neither have to lie nor be exposed to scandal. This means, however, that she will be in Judge Brack’s power: “Subject to your commands and wishes. No longer free—not free! . . . No, I won’t endure the thought. Never!”

Given her psychological needs, Hedda can neither defy Brack nor submit to him. Hedda strikes us as a masterful person who knows how to get what she wants, but the fact is that she is extremely compliant where propriety is concerned. She could not endure the loss of respectability that would result from her defiance of Brack. Confined to the narrow range of activities suitable to a woman of her station, Hedda compensates for her lack of control over her destiny by manipulating the people around her, and especially by seeking to influence the fate of an important man. Being subject to Brack’s wishes and commands would render her utterly powerless and would be as unendurable as the consequences of defiance.

Hedda’s need for freedom is as compensatory as her craving for power. The product of a highly restrictive environment that has allowed her few choices, she has a suppressed desire to rebel and a longing for liberty. As is typical of detached people, she is hypersensitive to anything that seems to impinge upon her, such as the expectations of others, the march of time, or being touched. She recoils from the gentle embrace of Aunt Juliane: “Please! Oh, please let me go!” (act 1). She cannot bear being pregnant or the responsibilities that parenthood will entail. She pursues a freedom from constraint rather than a freedom to fulfill herself. She is much too alienated from herself and dominated by her culture to know what she really wants to do with her life. Driven as she is by both social and psychological coercions, Hedda’s sense of freedom is an illusion, of course, but it is essential to her to preserve it. Given her phobic reaction to ordinary intrusions, expectations, or constraints, we can imagine her desperation at the prospect of being at Brack’s “beck and call from now on” (act 4).

When Hedda says that she “won’t endure” the thought of not being free, Brack “half mockingly” replies, “People manage to get used to the inevitable” (act 4). But since Brack threatens Hedda’s compulsive needs for respectability, for power, and for freedom, she cannot possibly get used to this situation.

To make matters worse, Jörgen and Thea begin reconstructing Lövborg’s manuscript, depriving Hedda of her triumph over Thea and putting her even more into Brack’s hands. Like Hedda, Thea has been trying to live through Lövborg. He acknowledges her as the co-creator of his new book, and she follows him to town partly out of anxiety and partly because she wants to be with him when it is published: “I want to see you showered with praise and honors—and, the joy! I want to share that with you too!” (act 3). When Ejlert announces that he has destroyed his manuscript and will do no more work, Thea feels she has nothing to live for. Her reaction to the news of Ejlert’s death is remarkable. Instead of being stupefied by shock and grief, she digs his notes out of the pocket of her dress and immediately begins rewriting the book with Jörgen. Ejlert may be dead, but Thea’s search for glory is alive. She has gotten from him what Hedda never could and in the process has thwarted Hedda’s effort to gain a sense of power by burning the manuscript.

Thea’s triumph is all the more complete because she has now begun to influence Jörgen, who says he will devote his life to rewriting Ejlert’s book. Thea will move in with Aunt Juliane, and Jörgen will spend his evenings there working with her on the project. When Jörgen asks Brack to keep Hedda company while he is away, Brack readily agrees, anticipating “a very jolly time” (act 4). “That’s what you hope,” says Hedda from the next room, “Now that you are cock-of-the-walk.” Then she shoots herself.

Hedda’s suicide is a desperate act of escape—from the collapse of her efforts to fulfill her neurotic needs for respectability, power, and freedom, and from the unresolvable conflict between these needs that had led her to try to live vicariously through Ejlert Lövborg. She is fleeing her self-hate, her boredom, her marriage, her unwanted pregnancy, and the prospective burden of motherhood.

From Hedda’s perspective, her suicide is also a triumph, of the sort she thought had been accomplished by Lövborg. Her response to Brack’s initial report that Ejlert had shot himself through the heart gives us her view of her own act. “At last,” she exclaims, “a deed worth doing!” “I know that Ejlert Lövborg had the courage to live his life as he saw it—and to end it in beauty.” He has “made up his own account with life” and done “the one right thing” (act 4). When Hedda learns the truth about Lövborg’s death, she realizes that if an act of “deliberate courage” and “spontaneous beauty” is to be performed, she must do it herself. She has not had the courage to live her life as she saw it, but she escapes her self-contempt by defying public opinion and behaving with daring at last. She would be pleased by Brack’s comment that “people don’t do such things.” She ends her life beautifully, by her standards at least, with a shot in the temple. She thwarts Judge Brack, who had counted on her cowardice, and punctures her husband’s complacency. In the last fleeting moment of her life, she actualizes an idealized image of herself and becomes a person she can respect.

Ibsen has painted a brilliant portrait of a neurotic woman, a product of her restrictive society, who can escape her problems and attain the glory for which she is searching only by killing herself.

As we can see from the preceding discussions, although characters can be identified as displaying one or another of Horney’s defensive strategies, they are mixed cases, not to be thought of simply in terms of one personality type. Nora Helmer is strikingly self-effacing through much of the play, but when her predominant solution fails, her aggressive and detached trends emerge, revealing inner conflicts that have been there all along. The domineering, perfectionistic Torvald has dependency needs that make him cling to Nora at the end. Conflicting trends are so evenly balanced in Hedda Gabler that it is difficult to say which is her predominant solution. She is extremely detached, but she is also very compliant in relation to social conventions, and there is so much aggression in Hedda that she is most commonly thought of as manipulative and domineering. All categories are reductive, of course. Horney’s are least so when they are used not to classify characters but to reveal their individuality and inner conflicts.

We can also see from our analyses of A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler that a Horneyan approach enables us to understand motivation and explain behavior even when we have little or no knowledge of a character’s childhood. We know most about Nora’s history because of her references to her life with her father. We can utilize the information she supplies, but we are not overly dependent upon it, and we do not have to inflate its importance. We know nothing about Torvald’s early life and not much about Hedda’s. Hedda’s problems derive in part from the restrictions that her culture places on a woman of her social class, but we have almost no information about her early experience, and we really cannot say why she responds to her situation in the particular way that she does. Not all women in her position were driven to such sterile, destructive lives. Although we know little about the childhoods of these characters, their personality structures are portrayed in considerable detail, and with the help of Horney’s synchronic theory we can analyze them psychologically without having to postulate a history that is not in the text.

A Horneyan approach helps us to understand not only the leading characters of these plays but also the relationships on which they are focused. The interaction between Nora and Torvald becomes intelligible only when we see how their defenses both harmonize and clash. The relationship between Hedda and Ejlert is at the center of the play, and we can appreciate why Ejlert is so important to Hedda only when we recognize how she tries to use him to escape her inner conflicts through the vicarious fulfillment of her needs.