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Playing with Pistols: Female Masculinity in Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler

The lead character of Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler (1890) is one of the most complex and puzzling characters in the history of theater. When the play was published and performed for the first time in the 1890s, it was received with cold surprise and disorientation, and critics found it incomprehensible (Host 1958, 12; Templeton 1997, 204). Over the years, the character Hedda has been interpreted in many different ways: as unreal, as a defective woman, as vicious and manipulative in nature, as a failed New Woman, or as a woman who is afraid of sex (Templeton 1997, 204-10). As previous scholarship has noted, Hedda does not conform to the woman's role of the time; she feels imprisoned in her gender role, her marriage, and her presumed pregnancy, and prefers to play with the pistols she inherited from her father (e.g., Finney 1989, 155; Forsas-Scott 1983; 2004; Carton 1994, 122; Johansson 2008; Shideler 1993, 80-3; Templeton 1997, 204-32). Several scholars have commented on her masculine traits (e.g., Bloom 1994, 330; Finney 1989, 157; Moi 2006, 317-8; Northam 1971, 156; Templeton 1997, 230), but no one has focused specifically on her masculinity and how it relates to the masculinities and femininities represented by the other characters in the play. Hedda continues to puzzle her audience, and, in the following analysis, I will suggest a new reading of the character: I will argue that Hedda Gabler can be seen as a case of what Judith "Jack" Halberstam has called female masculinity. According to Halberstam, female masculinity offers a possibility to understand "how masculinity is constructed as masculinity" (1998, i). She contends that female masculinity is rarely seen as a kind of masculinity in its own right. Instead, it "is generally received by hetero- and homo-normative cultures as a pathological sign of misidentification and maladjustment, as a longing to be and to have a power that is always just out of reach" (1998, 9). Halberstam sees female masculinity as a category of its own and not just as an imitation of maleness, and she "us[es] the topic of female masculinity to explore a queer subject position that can successfully challenge hegemonic models of gender conformity" (1998, 9). Moreover, Halberstam points out that female masculinity is not a recent phenomenon; she shows that there are many different variations of female masculinity even in the nineteenth century and that these have played important roles in the construction of modern masculinity (1998, 45-6). What is the point of reading Hedda as an instance of female masculinity rather than as a woman who expresses a different kind of femininity? And how does this give a new reading of the play, when previous research has, as we have seen, already noted that Hedda Gabler challenges hegemonic models of gender? The gender roles in the middle and upper classes in the late nineteenth century were narrow and strictly polarized, and I argue that Hedda's behavior is not intelligible as femininity within the gender dichotomy that Ibsen's play rests upon. When we read what Hedda expresses as masculinity rather than femininity, Hedda becomes more comprehensible as a character. Moreover, Hedda's case will help us understand how (hegemonic) masculinity is constructed. Instead of reproducing strictly polarized gender roles, the concept of female masculinity can, in fact, destabilize them; as I will show, Hedda's masculinity makes visible how masculinity is always a social construction that, in part, builds upon an inclusion of female masculinity. "I HAVE NO TALENT FOR SUCH THINGS": REJECTING FEMININITY At first glance, it seems like Hedda rejects femininity more than she actually embraces masculinity, and, in this process of rejecting femininity, the other women in the play function as foils for Hedda. They represent conventional nineteenth-century femininity, the kind of femininity that Hedda cannot and does not want to embody. Mrs. Thea Elvsted is the most obvious foil for Hedda since the two women are of similar age--they even went to school together--but have chosen different ways of leading their lives. …