One of the first principles, on which Ibsen’s glorification of woman
rests, is that woman is noble.
Nora is noble, but Rebecca is not.
Another of his principles is that woman is courageous and well fitted
for life.
Rebecca is courageous, but Ellida is cowardly.
... Let us turn to Hedda Gabler. She is what used, in older days, to
be called a “dragon.” All that she says and does, all her smiles and
her kisses are wicked, she is tormented by a love of mischief, she
is filled with an impotent, cowardly greed which incessantly turns
to an envious hatred of all things living, extending even to her own
offspring.
But she is something more, she is a symbol.
Ibsen has resumed the thread which he allowed to drop since the
appearance of _The Wild Duck_. Hedda Gabler is a daughter of the upper
middle class, the class whose moral bankruptcy has afforded a subject
for his social dramas. Hedda Gabler has the courage and the soul of
the bankrupt daughter of a race of bankrupts, whose only rule of life
is a hollow form, and she, in the guise of a woman, represents the
unfruitfulness of this exhausted class.
But Hedda Gabler is something more. She is the reverse of Fru Alving.
Fru Alving is a good woman destined to be ruined by men, Hedda Gabler
is a bad woman by whom men are ruined.
There is yet another point about her. She is the destruction of the
“ideal” in woman, the ideal which Ibsen incarnated in woman as the
absolutely good, strong, clever, pure, courageous, etc.; in her he
repudiates the worship of woman; in her he repudiates the vanguard of
women who were armed by himself, the women’s rights women and opponents
of men; all the deformities of the modern woman are concentrated in
Hedda, who hates and rejects her own offspring.
This accounts for the mysterious silence which pervaded the north when
the great prophet, “le célèbre bas-bleuiste,” began to speak with
tongues.