The Gun (and the Pomegranates) Must Go Off: Literary Unity Part 1

In the late nineteenth century, playwright Anton Chekov knew a thing or two about guns. One, they’re designed to be fired. Two, if you have no desire to shoot someone, you’re better off not having one. Was Chekov ahead of his time in our national gun debate?

No. What he actually wrote was “if in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired.”[1] He was writing about literary necessity, or Aristotle’s principle of unity, and the importance of including in your literary work only those details essential to telling the story and moving it forward. No extraneous details. Not even as part of the set or setting. Every word, every visual, should contribute to plot, characterization, or theme.

Chekov’s contemporary, Henrik Ibsen, echoed Chekov’s sentiment. He put the bullet in the chamber in Hedda Gabler—two, actually, one in each of two pistols. Only he didn’t hang these pistols on the scenery wall. Instead, he hung there a picture of Hedda’s father, the general.

Setting the Stage
Hedda Gabler is a fascinating four-act play by the Norwegian playwright. Despite its disturbing resolution, the play delves into a theme quite forward for its time: the detrimental consequences of shutting out half the human race from fully using all their talents and faculties.

Here’s the summary (spoiler alert): Emotionally cold Hedda Gabler has settled for marrying cultural history research fellow George Tesman, thinking his prospects will afford her a rich and entertaining place in society and give her some outlet to participate in the lively, unconstrained world of men. As the pair returns from a long honeymoon abroad, they find Tesman’s teaching appointment less secure than they thought. Faced with imprisonment in a meager-resourced, conventional female role and discovering that her and her husband’s old flames have flouted social constraints to forge a mutually beneficial partnership, Hedda conspires to derail what those two have and she lacks. She manipulates her way between the couple, drives one to suicide, and finds herself even more trapped by the outcome. Despairing of her future, she ends her life.

Firing the Pistol
Ibsen gives a short treatment of the setting at the beginning of Act 1: All onstage action takes place in two rooms of the Tesmans’ new home, the main drawing room and a smaller “inner room” behind it, seen through a wide doorway. The picture presides over the sofa in the middle of this upstage inner room.

Why does Ibsen hang the general’s picture center stage? We don’t know the answer as the curtain opens, but gradually we see that the general’s shadow overhangs Hedda. The general, after all, was her father. Taking the inner room as a representation of Hedda’s inner psyche, the portrait, seemingly a silent piece of period decor, becomes the finger that pulls the trigger, driving theme, character, and plot forward.

Ibsen tells us quickly in Act 1 that George Tesman’s very particular new wife, someone no one dreamed would marry a reserved scholar, is not only “General Gabler’s daughter” but a young woman who had quite an unusual upbringing “in the general’s day.” Tesman’s aunt remembers “seeing her out with her father—how she’d go galloping past in that long black riding outfit, with a feather in her hat.”[2] And when Hedda learns that her new husband may not be able to spoil her with the riches and entertaining activity she craves, she tells him, “Well, at least I have one thing left to amuse myself with. … My pistols, George. … General Gabler’s pistols.”[3] The general, it seems, gave his daughter a taste for male pursuits. She has little interest in the female role of nurturing, subservience, and fading into the background. Her “hunger for life” yet fear of scandal[4] are a legacy granted her by her father.

And Ibsen leaves no time for the general’s pistols to lie fallow. Act 2 begins with Hedda loading one of the pair and shooting. As society friend and playboy Judge Brack walks toward the house from the garden offstage, Hedda fires through the door over his head, remarking, “That’s what comes of sneaking in the back way.”[5] We see Hedda’s need to assert dominance over this man, to level the playing field between them. Brack, irritated but not unnerved, asks her “Are you still playing such games?”[6]

She is, but for Hedda, it’s not a game. And the pistols have yet to fulfill their purpose, to hit their mark. By Act 3, desperately in denial about the child in her womb (and the cage motherhood represents to her), Hedda burns the “child” born of the new relationship between the previous love interests of both Hedda and Tesman: Eilert Løvborg and Mrs. Elvsted. This “child” is the revolutionary manuscript this society-flouting pair created together, the engaging and forward-thinking product of the balanced efforts of both male and female.

Hedda’s actions bring Løvborg’s new success to ruin, and she incites him to suicide, loading and loaning him her pistol. But rather than solve her problems, Hedda has managed only to position the target on her back. Her pistol is one of a pair, and Ibsen plans to pull both triggers.

Judge Brack, knowing that Hedda has provided the gun to Løvborg, blackmails her into becoming his plaything. The two “bucks” have circled and charged, and Brack wins. Not even Tesman remains in her controlled territory—for despondent over the lost manuscript, Tesman strikes up an intimate partnership with Mrs. Elvsted in a plan to recreate what had been lost. The tedious professor sees the future, warms to new life, and leaves Hedda out in the cold.

Finding herself trapped in a future of purposelessness, Hedda retreats to the inner room where she uses the remaining pistol to complete its mission, directly under the shadow of the general.

Literary necessity, or unity, is a principle important not only for writers to understand but also readers. Stay tuned for part 2 of this series, where I will explain why reader should always pay attention to the pomegranates.

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[1] Letter to Aleksandr Semenovich Lazarev. 1 Nov 1889.
[2] Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler, in Ibsen: Four Major Plays, trans. Rolf Fjelde, vol. 1 (Signet Classic, 1965), .p.222

[3] p. 247

[4] p. 255, 256

[5] p.248

[6] p. 248