Heddda, Get Your Gun Poem by gershon hepner

Hedda, get your gun, appears to be
the message Ibsen hopes we’ll take away
from watching Mrs. Gabler breaking free,
though bound in marriage. It’s not just a play
we’re watching when we see how she reacts
to boredom, which the author labels “wife.”
It is a new life that this wife redacts,
and it is labeled “Hedda, ” meaning “Strife.”

The play’s an illustration of the tension
existing between matrimony and
a wife’s right to be more than an extension
of what her husband wants for her. Like sand
in which an ostrich hides its head, a marriage
may bury the ambitions of a wife,
and, disappointing, cause her to disparage
not only the routines, but joys that life
had promised her when single. Always toxic,
her envy of the freedom she renounces
may make her gasp for air, yet stay, anoxic,
within relationships that she still denounces.

This all is history, for since the time
that Ibsen wrote the play a lot has changed.
Bad marriages are now seen as a crime
both partners can correct when they’re exchanged
for others, who may do far better jobs,
or not, whatever. Thanks to women’s lib,
wives needn’t lie with husbands who are slobs,
and guns may be less useful than a fib.

Inspired by John Lahr’s review of a performance of Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler, ” with Mary-louise Parker palying the title role (“Hedda Gabler, ” The New Yorker, February 9,2009) :
“Hedda”—a name that means “strife”—was Henrik Ibsen’s working title for his 1890 masterpiece (now in revival at the American Airlines, in a new adaptation by Christopher Shinn) . To the first name, Ibsen added the surname of his character’s military father, Gabler, a general whose portrait is meant to be visible on the set—an image of power that haunts his newlywed daughter’s household and underscores Hedda’s sense of her own powerlessness. “My intention in giving it this name was to indicate that Hedda as a personality is to be regarded rather as her father’s daughter than as her husband’s wife, ” Ibsen wrote. A beautiful aristocratic woman trapped by marriage in a bourgeois provincial Norwegian community, Hedda struggles to assert over her existence some of her father’s command and control. (The only other physical vestige of him in the play is a pair of duelling pistols, with which Hedda is something of a quick draw.) “I want to have power over a human destiny, ” she says. “I have never had that. Not once in my life.” Strife is Hedda’s fate; at first, it also seemed to be the play’s—“Hedda Gabler” was the worst received of any of Ibsen’s great works. “A horrid miscarriage of the imagination, ” “an ungrateful play, ” “one doubts whether reality can provide an example of Hedda Gabler, ” the press snarled. The playwright August Strindberg, who saw himself as the model for Ejlert Løvborg, a debauched but inspired writer, spat spiders at the play and its author, whom he called a “decrepit old troll.” At a rehearsal of “Hedda Gabler” at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1899, Chekhov exclaimed, “Look here, Ibsen is not a playwright.” In fact, this profound play, in which Hedda’s contradictory desires both compel her and are concealed from her, foreshadows Freud’s notion of the unconscious. (Freud is said to have learned Norwegian in order to read Ibsen’s work.) “Our whole being is nothing but a fight against the dark forces within ourselves, ” Ibsen said. He, like Freud, was an archeologist of the modern psyche, one of those visionaries, as Freud observed, whose findings “troubled the sleep of the world.” In this production, directed by Ian Rickson, we first see Hedda (Mary-Louise Parker) in her own troubled sleep, sprawled on a sofa, her face to the back wall, exposing part of her alabaster ass—a sort of “Rokeby Venus” with venom, whose bared backside hints at the nihilism to come. Rickson’s stage picture is startling, but it skews Ibsen’s game—what Henry James called the “demure preservation of the appearance of the usual in which we see him juggle with difficulty and danger.” The playwright’s stage directions call for a bright, well-ordered drawing room. Here, instead of light, there is dark; instead of order, there is clutter; instead of Hedda’s father’s portrait, there is a glazed mirror, which reflects only Hedda’s alienated self; instead of the external space, Rickson shows us her internal one. The choice, it seems to me, is bold but wrong. It tilts the stakes from psychological perplexity to didactic melodrama. For a person as unhappy and hate-filled as Hedda, the villa’s luxury, beauty, and comfort—Ibsen’s stage directions emphasize the carpeting—are an awful oppression, perpetual reminders of what she lacks and, therefore, what she must attack and spoil. This opening robs both the character and the audience of an insight into her toxic envy.


2/9/09