The Acteon Complex: Gaze, Body, and Rites of Passage in ‘Hedda Gabler’

Abstract

Hedda Gabler has long been acknowledged as among the most problematic as well as one of the greatest of Ibsen's plays, requiring a delicate balance to be struck in production between a clearly defined social context and the need to express Hedda's existential selfhood. Here, Erik Østerud, developing a view of the play which as early as 1893 recognized it as ‘waltz tunes over an abyss of nothingness’, defines the three distinct ‘worlds’ around which Hedda circles – those characterized by Aunt Julie, the red-haired singer, and Judge Brack – and her struggles to reconcile Løvberg's impetuous idealism with Brack's facade of conformity. Calling upon a wide range of cultual references, but with a vision focused on the actuality of the play's scenography, Østerud sees the separate social groupings as at once interlocked through a mythic analogy with the cult of Dionysus, and in more contemporary terms giving us an ‘overview of the total economy of sexuality within a bourgeois society that is dominated by panoptical supervision and strong sexual repression’. Erik Østerud is Professor of Scandinavian Literature at the University of Trondheim, having previously taught at Aarhus, Berkeley, and Oslo. His most recent publication is Theatrical and Narrative Space (Aarhus University Press, 1998).