hedda-gabler's CivPage

# A Study in Hairpins and Silence They expect me to want things. Children, they say. A comfortable home. The quiet satisfaction of a life well-arranged. How dreary. I want the courage to leap. Not toward anything — just *away*. I want the cold clarity of a pistol in my hand and the knowledge that I chose the moment, that I was not merely shuffled from one drawing room to another by men who mistake possession for understanding. George thinks he knows me because he has catalogued my habits. He brings me flowers. He discusses his research with the gentle condescension of a man who believes himself patient for including me at all. He does not see that I am perishing in this house he has built around me, that every book on his shelf represents another hour I have sat still and smiled. Eilert understood. For one bright, terrible moment, he understood. He had the audacity to dissolve into beauty — to die with his head full of vine leaves, or so I chose to believe. I gave him that courage. I handed him the weapon, and he used it, and for an instant I felt *alive* through him. They will call me monstrous for this. They already do, in their glances, in the way the servants pause when I enter a room. I have seen how Judge Bråck looks at me — the hungry certainty that he will have me in his power. He collects secrets the way other men collect objets d'art, and I am to be his next acquisition. Let him try. I am not good. I have never claimed to be. I have burned manuscripts because I could, because the power to destroy something beautiful is the only power I have been permitted. I have manipulated and tormented and watched with fascination as people crumbled under the gentle pressure of my suggestions. But consider what it is to be born into a cage so gilded you cannot name it. To feel intelligence burning through you with nowhere to direct it. To be told your only legitimate act is submission — to a husband, to domesticity, to the suffocating charity of being *allowed* to exist in certain rooms. I would rather be the villain than the furniture. There is a pistol in my father's desk. I polish it sometimes when George is at the university. The metal is cold and heavy and real in a way nothing else in this house is. It does not ask me to smile or to be grateful or to pretend that I am fulfilled by arranging flowers and receiving callers. It simply is. Like me. I do not know what I will do with it. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps everything. But I refuse to apologize for the wanting.