While Ibsen would probably be too confused to comment, Theresa Malkiel would surely have something to say about the comic-strip twaddle that is the MAGA ‘tradwife.’ A founder of modern theater, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s dramas had a profound impact in shaping the discussion of gender roles, social norms, and women’s liberation engaged in by activists, particularly radical women, in the decades before World War One. Here, as part of her series looking at his work, she reviews the marital prison of 1891’s Hedda Gabler.

‘Hedda Gabler’ by Theresa S. Malkiel from Progressive Woman. Vol. 3 No. 33. February, 1910.

Hedda Gabler is the most misunderstood, most criticised product of Ibsen’s pen. The question, what had inspired the great genius of the nineteenth century to create that cold, heartless, capricious and seemingly unnatural type, has been asked frequently by those who have read the tragedy of the incomprehensible woman’s life, or have seen it personified on the stage.

It must be remembered, however, that Ibsen’s works are all symbolic. That in his great love for the people the humanitarian artist endeavored to give the world an exact photograph of the decay of modern society, and thus warn it of the impending disaster.

The sex problem concerned him greatly. In the general world-wide female unrest, he foresaw clearly woman’s gradual awakening, as well as the danger of opposing her long slumbering, but now fast rising, force.

In little vivacious Nora he gave the world a bird’s eye view of womanhood first opening its eyes to the degradation of being cuddled, humored and treated like a toy for personal gratification, considered a nonentity where human rights are concerned, but dealt with severely at the first error, the first trespass on forbidden grounds.

From Ellida’s lips we hear the cry of womanhood against the hopelessness and helplessness of its one-sided position in society, where it has no other choice, but a passive submission to the will and desire of a possible provider; a heart-rending protest against the monstrosity of the nuptial vow–“Until death, for better or for worse do I promise to be thy wedded wife.”

Hedda is womanhood cast adrift. The portion of womanhood that has long left the ancient mooring place, but does not know where to seek a new suitable place to drop anchor once more. Like a ship without a rudder it goes hither and thither, without any definite aim, without really knowing what it seeks.

Hedda is a true type of the middle class and ultra rich girl of the present era. Her mother before had already stepped across the threshold of the old, narrow traditions and naturally rears her child in a different mold from the one she herself was reared in.

In early childhood the girl discards the quiet, modest and prime existence of bygone days and with all the vigor and enthusiasm of youth gives herself up to physical training, to outdoor exercise. She becomes an expert horse woman, a fine tennis player, a good shot, a brilliant dancer. The healthy, well developed body craves daily for new impressions, for greater activity, while mere out and indoor sport loses the attraction of novelty.

She longs for a change and commences to seek an outlet for her long accumulated energy, which is not forthcoming so readily. She matures meanwhile and feels that–speaking in the words of Hedda: “I have positively danced myself tired, my dear Assessor. My hour has come.”

But when the hour comes she must, in spite of the different environment that she was reared in, submit to the fate of her grandmother. In her search of a path for a life-long trail she comes soon to realize that the only way open to her is–marriage; that is, if some one is good enough to ask her. For she was not trained to meet life’s problems and could not battle with adverse circumstances.

Naturally enough, she becomes eager to accept any offer of a life-long maintenance. “Oh, no–I would not say it, nor think it either,” she utters, when the harsh fact stares her in the eyes. And, in order to quiet her own conscience, she, tries to find a center of gravity where the abhorrent and yet necessary deed could find at least a slight excuse.

“So you see it was our mutual enthusiasm for Secretary Folk’s villa that first constituted a bond of sympathy between Tesman and myself. From that came our engagement, our marriage, our wedding journey and all the rest of it…

“And you didn’t really care a rap about it all the while?”

“No, goodness knows, I didn’t! And now I am bored, I am bored, I tell you.

Tesman is a simple-minded, good-hearted child, with special abilities for certain studies, while Hedda, on the contrary, is a person of strong character, above average intelligence, quick perception and a strong desire to live, while she lives. Nevertheless, according to the ethical standard of modern society, she loses her identity immediately after signing the marriage contract and becomes Mrs. Tesman, nobody else but the wife of Jorgen Tesman, to be guided and protected by him until death. What wonder that, when the reality of her position dawns upon her, she concludes: “It is this which makes life so pitiable, so utterly ludicrous!”–

At this juncture, on the day of her return from the wedding journey, the coming tragedy takes root. She finds herself suddenly in her grandmother’s place, without the least desire or fitness to fulfill the latter’s mission.

“I have no desire for anything of that sort. No responsibility for me!” she exclaims, when Brack consoles her with the prospect of a new future responsibility which may fill the void in her life. Once within the walls of her new home she realizes that she is trapped and caged in a life-long prison, with no other prospect in view but to bore herself to death.

We meet with Hedda Gabler not only in Ibsen’s book, or on the stage, but every day of our life. She figures in the divorce courts, in the insane asylums, on the suicide lists and at times in the death cells of our prisons. And yet–in spite of these facts, she is not a natural criminal, but the product of unnatural conditions, the child of the existing regime, and is more to be pitied than blamed.

She is still young, beautiful, full of vigor and desire to partake of that life for which she was striving all along, but failed inevitably to reach. Her surplus energy seeks an outlet, and more often, like the blind feeling their way, she takes a wrong step which brings in time her own destruction.

Ibsen’s master-mind saw far ahead of his time and understood that, if society persists in offering upon its altars of mistaken morality the youth, energy, flesh and blood of our womanhood, it will soon reach a point of chaos and utter ruin. He created Hedda in order to demonstrate his views that womanhood, torn away from its old traditions and not given a chance to find a legitimate outlet for its awakening intelligence, will break in time all the barriers of its artificial sphere, hastening heedlessly, perhaps its own destruction, but surely the downfall of modern society.

Today current events in marital relations have reached the point where they have become a matter of great uneasiness to the government, the church and all other pillars of society. Brought face to face with the grave problem of our numerous, daily increasing divorces, these upholders of present-day morality to not conceal any longer their unspeakable horror regarding the future of the family. Theodore Roosevelt, the great advocate of race preservation, appointed a special commission to investigate the cause and number of divorces in the United States. It took the commission four long years to accomplish its task, but he seems to be the only one so far who has benefited by this task. For, besides informing us that at present the rate of divorces amounts to one in every twelve marriages, it tells us nothing new. Its statement that the majority of divorces are due to desertion loses its effect when we come to think that, out of the two main causes which constitute a ground for divorce, people will always prefer to give desertion to that of adultery.

But granted that desertion does constitute the main cause of our numerous divorces, the question arises wherefore this wholesale desertion? It is impossible that the women of the different states have conspired to desert their homes, or vise versa, though the commission tells us that the women deserters are in the majority. (We must bear in mind that the poor do not figure much in the divorce courts, for they do not possess the required cash.)

Here Hedda serves once more as a mirror of the passing show. When asked by her former friend Lovberg whether she considers it an insult to her love for Tesman to be addressed in the singular, she replies with a sarcastic smile on her lips: “Love, did you say? What an idea!” She scorns the very thought of having any love for her husband.

At the same time the real motive of her marriage to Tesman, the luxurious life she had hoped to lead, has proved only a myth. She dropped once more into that genteel poverty from which she had expected to run away. In rage she blames him and not herself for the heedless deed. The more so that her only plausible excuse for it, their mutual enthusiasm for Secretary Folk’s villa, has disappeared as spontaneously as it had come upon her.

The thought of being forever and a day in the company of one and the same person, for whom she has no sympathy or feeling appalls her. She broods over her girlhood days when she was free to choose her male companions of whose friendship, she says:

“As I look back upon it all I think there was really something beautifully fascinating in that free and frank comradeship of ours. It was the only opportunity to have a peep into a world which a young girl is forbidden to know anything about.”

It is to this desire to have a peep into the outside world, to the longing for a frank comradeship and, last but not least, to the union for mercenary reasons and not for love, that we can trace the beginning of most marital difficulties. It is not the lenient divorce laws which, as Our clergy state, cause all the numerous divorces, but the lack of sentiment, equality and friendship between the uniting parties. To the unnatural code of false morality that persists in maintaining a woman’s sphere one must attribute this wholesale family disruption.

If Hedda had free access to the general sphere of life, if she had been taught the means of guiding her own destiny and had some definite aim in life, she would have, to all probabilities, never married Tesman, thus saving herself from destruction and society from the loss of two human lives. Her fate is the more pitiable for, though she realized fully the horror of her position, she had nothing to turn to. This part of womanhood, which Hedda personifies in herself, is drifting about without a mission in life, without knowing what it is really seeking. And in the heat of a distracted mind, bowed down under the weight of stored-up energy this unhappily mated part of humanity tries to find an outlet for its powers–on the state, in clandestine love affairs, in the destruction of somebody else’s happiness, and so forth. All in the hope that “then life would perhaps be livable after all.”

The Socialist Woman was a monthly magazine edited by Josephine Conger-Kaneko from 1907 with this aim: “The Socialist Woman exists for the sole purpose of bringing women into touch with the Socialist idea. We intend to make this paper a forum for the discussion of problems that lie closest to women’s lives, from the Socialist standpoint”. In 1908, Conger-Kaneko and her husband Japanese socialist Kiichi Kaneko moved to Girard, Kansas home of Appeal to Reason, which would print Socialist Woman. In 1909 it was renamed The Progressive Woman, and The Coming Nation in 1913. Its contributors included Socialist Party activist Kate Richards O’Hare, Alice Stone Blackwell, Eugene V. Debs, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and others. A treat of the journal was the For Kiddies in Socialist Homes column by Elizabeth Vincent.The Progressive Woman lasted until 1916.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/socialist-woman/100200-progressivewoman-v3w33.pdf