Imagined Human Beings. Bernard Jay Paris

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

       4 The End of the Road

      While Ibsen’s plays clearly lend themselves to Horneyan analysis, it may seem that John Barth’s The End of the Road is a less appropriate choice. Nora, Torvald, and Hedda are mimetically drawn characters in realistic works, but Jake, Joe, and Rennie have been treated by most critics as illustrative figures in a philosophic tale. Although Barth may not have been aiming at psychological realism, his characters are brilliant mimetic portraits nonetheless. This novel is a little masterpiece that I have taught every year for the past several decades and have found to be endlessly elusive and fascinating. Jacob Horner is an excellent example of the detached protagonist common in modern literature, and the bizarre marriage of Joe and Rennie Morgan will remind us of Nora’s morbid dependency on Torvald. It will also help us to understand the equally bizarre relationship between patient Griselda and Walter.

      Like Ibsen’s, Barth’s characters are presented with almost no prior history and would be difficult to analyze with a theory that explains the present in terms of the past. But they display the kinds of defenses and inner conflicts that Horney describes and are intelligible in terms of her structural approach. The plot of the novel evolves from the interaction of the characters’ defensive strategies, which both draw them together and cause them to clash. Although there are triangles in Ibsen, his great psychological dramas tend to be focused on a dyadic relationship—between Nora and Torvald, Hedda and Ejlert, Solness and Hilde, Rosmer and Rebekka West. The situation is more complicated in The End of the Road, since the Jake-Rennie-Joe triangle is at the heart of the book. There are three relationships to be considered—Jake and Joe, Jake and Rennie, and Rennie and Joe—each of which is complex in itself and must be understood in relation to the other two.

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