in the dialogue with devoted Thea
Rysing, whose hair at school had aroused envy in Hedda! She pulled it
whenever she got a chance, just as she pulled from its hiding-place
the secret of the timid Thea. Simply to say that Hedda is the
incarnation of selfishness is but a half-truth. She is that and much
more.

Charmless never, disagreeable always, she had the serpent's charm, the
charm that slowly slays its victim. Her father succumbed to it, else
would he have permitted her to sit in corners with poet Eiljert
Loevborg and not only hold hands but listen to far from edifying
discourses? Not a nice trait in Hedda--though a human, therefore not a
rare one--is her curiosity concerning forbidden themes. She was sly.
She was morbid. Last of all she was cowardly. Yes, largely cerebral
was her interest in nasty things, for when Eiljert attempted to
translate his related adventures into action she promptly threatened
him with a pistol. A demi-vierge before Marcel Prevost. Not as
admirable as either Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina, Hedda Gabler married
George Tesman for speculation. He had promised her the Falk
villa--the scene plays up in Christiania--and he expected a
professorship; these, with a little ready money and the selflessness
of Aunt Julia, were so many bribes for the anxious Hedda, whose first
youth had been heedlessly danced away without matrimonial success.

Mark what follows: Ibsen, the sternest moralist since old John Knox,
doesn't spare his heroine. He places her between the devil of Justice
Brack, libertine and house friend, and the deep sea of the debauched
genius, Loevborg. To make a four-square of ineluctable fate she is
flanked on either side by her mediocre husband and the devoted bore,
Thea Rysing--Elvsted. Like a high-strung Barbary mare--she was of good
birth and breeding--her nerves tugging in their sheaths, her heart a
burnt-out cinder, Hedda saw but one way to escape--suicide. She took
that route and really it was the most profound and significant act of
her life, cowardly as was the motive. She was discontented, shallow,
the victim of her false upbringing. In a more intellectual degree
Eiljert, her first admirer, is her counterpart. Both could have
consorted with Emma Bovary and found her "ideals" sympathetic. Emil
Reich has called Hedda Gabler the tragedy of mesalliance. It is a
memorial phrase. George Tesman and Charles Bovary are brothers in
misfortune. They belong to those husbands "predestined" t