Moreover Lovborg's allusions to the fiord, and the suggested
picture of Sheriff Elvsted, his family and his avocations are all
distinctively Norwegian. The truth seems to be very simple--the
environment and the subsidiary personages are all thoroughly national,
but Hedda herself is an "international" type, a product of civilisation
by no means peculiar to Norway.
We cannot point to any individual model or models who "sat to" Ibsen
for the character of Hedda.(5) The late Grant Allen declared that
Hedda was "nothing more nor less than the girl we take down to dinner
in London nineteen times out of twenty"; in which case Ibsen must
have suffered from a superfluidity of models, rather than from any
difficulty in finding one. But the fact is that in this, as in all
other instances, the word "model" must be taken in a very different
sense from that in which it is commonly used in painting. Ibsen
undoubtedly used models for this trait and that, but never for a
whole figure. If his characters can be called portraits at all, they
are composite portraits.
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