"Coercion Versus Individual Choice: ‘Socializing’ Hedda Gabler and Mother Courage"By L. Leigh
Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children present two strongly defined female heroines whose actions not only adversely affect the other characters’ lives but also suggest a fundamental problem with their societies. Both playwrights establish the macroscopic view of society’s ills in the microscopic, individual characters of Hedda and Mother Courage. Both characters have an indomitable magnetism that, on the one hand, allows them to control others but, on the other, causes them to make desperate choices that reflect a repressive society.
Ibsen creates in Hedda Gabler a dominating, fiercely controlling female heroine who controls everyone in her circle, from her weak husband Tesman, to Lovborg, Mrs. Elvsted and even, to a lesser degree, Judge Brack, who reverses roles with Hedda by the end of the play. Hedda, as a chameleon figure, alternately shifts her manipulative tactics to maintain control, and each character cannot stay away from her influence. Only when Hedda has lost control of Lovborg, does she resort to an act of supreme self-control: suicide. Judge Brack believes he has won in his battle of wills with Hedda and believes he remains “the only cock in the yard…” at the play’s end. Nevertheless, her suicide reinforces her superiority because she has claimed the ultimate position of control in the play. Judge Brack cannot assert his lustful intentions through coercive blackmail, and she will not relinquish the power to any character or realization, whether it is Tesman’s loving yet remonstrative pleas or Judge Brack’s slyly conniving wiles. She defines her own role by her self-inflicted death at the end and thereby defies society.
If Hedda’s death represents a kind of free choice to leave society, it cannot fail to also symbolize yet another sacrifice Hedda must make for these roles. Though Ibsen depicts Hedda as a cold, unnatural creature who cannot love her husband, her child, or even her lover Lovborg, she nevertheless remains a victim in life and, by her suicide, in death. Society holds no place for Hedda other than as a wife or mother, and the implication remains throughout the play that Hedda, as an intelligent individual, has wasted her intelligence and abilities on her domestic role. Hedda channels her creative energy into a fruitless, harmful end, and the coldness of her character matches the idea that anyone opposing the social roles set forth for them must exist as an unnatural, unfeeling creature. If her life has given her a cage, then her death, which seems to free Hedda, in actuality only gives yet another destructive manifestation of her energies. Ibsen implies, by her death, that the only way Hedda finds freedom from an oppressive system lies in the internalization of her destructive actions, or her suicide.
Though Hedda, in view of this restrictive society, potentially evokes our sympathetic emotions, she nevertheless makes choices Ibsen carefully delineates in the play that lead to her ultimate destruction. Perhaps the greatest tragedy underlying both Hedda’s character and the play as a whole remains with Hedda herself, for she ultimately chooses to take what society offers her--Tesman and the life of a social wife. When offered the choice to leave the conventional world, to go with Lovborg before the play opens or, at the very least, not to marry someone she cannot love, Hedda lacks the courage. Though she appears stronger than a figure like Mrs. Elvsted, Hedda cannot leave a loveless union for someone or something greater. By the play’s end, Hedda’s jealously of Mrs. Elvsted and her suicide reflect a realization that she does not refuse the roles society gave her and that she allows these roles to control her actions and her death. She cannot live in a world that defines life for her.
In the same way that Hedda proves destructive in her reaction to society’s fashioning of her life, so too does Brecht’s Mother Courage remain trapped in the individual choices her social situation forces her to make--decisions that ultimately lead to the deaths of all her children. Unlike Ibsen’s treatment of Hedda as the coldly calculating yet traditional wife, Brecht depicts a heroine as a single mother of three children who sells her wares to support her family. Mother Courage ventures behind enemy lines in the Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants to peddle the products on her wagon, the vehicle for her capitalistic goals. She outlines in the first scene that “Courage is the name they gave me because I was scared of going broke…[I] hadn’t any choice really” (1.1.71-72, 75), and this philosophy drives her through the war. Her struggle between earning a profit and seeing her children to safety conflicts her throughout the play. Though she has the time and resources to save her son, Swiss Cheese, from execution, she cannot rescue him in time because she continually haggles his bribe price to a minimal level.
Though Mother Courage never actually kills any of her children, she nevertheless takes them into the front lines of war to make money for self-preservation and selfish goals. Like the principles of war, the principles of business portend an equally harsh fate for those standing in the way of profit. Mother Courage must sacrifice her children to the cause of money in a cause just as base as a war that, on the surface, claims to want a religious resolution. In reality, it continues because of a less idealistic motive--power.
Mother Courage, like Hedda, remains trapped in a world that forces her to make decisions she otherwise might not have made given another opportunity. If Mother Courage could not peddle her goods, she and her family would starve. Yet, in the process, she loses them anyway, and the idea Brecht develops about these choices parallels those Hedda makes. Mother Courage, like Hedda, could have left before the war took her children, but she chose to stay. Hedda does not have to marry Tesman and remain trapped in the roles traditional society offers her just as Mother Courage does not necessarily have to choose a profession that will kill her children. But, like Hedda, she does choose this role, ultimately valuing profit over her children’s safety. She continues on this journey without her children even as the play ends.
Both characters, Hedda and Mother Courage, express values dictated by society. Though Mother Courage’s actions destroy her family and Hedda’s suicide destroys herself and her unborn child, both characters choose these destructive paths. In effect, they become like the society itself, embodying its values and motivations, its limitation and corruption. Neither Hedda nor Mother Courage possess any real individual power or self-control to overcome a society that forces them to act destructively. Ibsen and Brecht represent society’s power to coerce characters like Hedda and Mother Courage into accepting values that refract social ones as destructive to them as to the society that informs their characters.
© L. Leigh |