Modern Drama

Text: The Wild Duck (1884), trans. Frances E. Archer. Contemporary Drama: 13 Plays. Ed. Stanley Clayes and David Spencer. 2nd ed. New York: Charles, Scribner's, 1970. 7-54.

Setting (time) - 1880s

Setting (place) - Hakon Werle and Hialmar Ekdal's homes.

Protagonists - Hialmar Ekdal, Gregers Werle

Major Conflict - Gregers Werle has returned home from a self-imposed exile to avenge his father's ancient crimes and demystify the "life-illusion" that sustains his friend Hialmar Ekdal's household.

Rising Action - The rising action for the first climax involves Hialmar and Gina's confrontation of her past, the progressive revelation of Hedvig's uncertain parentage, and the arrival of Hedvig's birthday gift that ultimately precipitates this revelation in its explicit form. The second climax involves a more complex structure of suspense. Hialmar's repudiation of Hedvig sends her into the attic with the gun. This component of the action is momentarily held in expectancy as Hialmar grudgingly returns home. Hialmar then ironically denounces Hedvig to Gregers as a traitor. Hedvig's suicide violently intrudes into the playing space anew with the gunshot that interrupts their dialogue.

Climax - The Wild Duck features two immediately discernable climaxes: Hialmar's exit from his home and Hedvig's suicide.
Falling Action - Falling action in the wake of Hedvig's suicide consists of the discovery and the display of her body as well as the final dialogue between Relling and Gregers. This dialogue leaves Gregers utterly disillusioned and precipitates his exit from the world.

Themes - The "claim of the ideal" and the "life-illusion," the romantic hero, the myth of the fathers

Motifs - Light/dark, the garret, the tableau

Symbols - The wild duck

Foreshadowing - Foreshadowing occurs throughout this superstitious play. The shot in Act III foreshadows Hedvig's death and Ekdal's enigmatic reference to the revenge of the woods.

In The Wild Duck Ibsen concerns himself with the life-lie or life-illusion which seems necessary to bolster up some people's lives. The idealist in this play is Gregers Werle, whose stupid attempts to satisfy his craving for truth lead eventually to tragedy.

The image: the wild duck

1. It represents Gregers Werle, the idealist who fails.
2. It represents any such idealist whose aspirations are misplaced.
3. It represents Hjalmar Ekdal, limited by marriage and parenthood, and saddled with a business (photography) in which he has no real interest. this interpretation is suggested by Gregers in the text.
4. It represents Ekdal Senior, broken in mind and weakened in body, whose only contact with the bright world of nature is in the model woods set up in Ekdal's attic.
5. It represents Ibsen's own reforming and moralizing spirit.
6. It represents the social castaways in the play: the outcast Gregers, the pretentious Hjalmar, the tipsy play-hunter old Ekdal, the washed-out Doctor Relling, and the alcoholic theology student Molvik.

Major Characters:

Gregers Werle: (Pronounced "Grayghers Verle") The impractical, impassioned, idealistic son of Hakon Werle. He has returned from self-imposed exile to avenge his father's crimes against the Ekdal family. In this sense, his appearance in the Ekdal household figures as a "returned of the repressed." Vengeance consists of the unmasking of Hialmar's family life-the revelation of his wife's liaison with his father, their continued debt to Werle, and, inadvertently, Hedvig's uncertain parentage-a mission demanded by the "claim of the ideal." This urge manifests itself in a desire to place the Ekdals' marriage on a firm basis of fact. He idolizes Hjalmar Ekdal, whom he considers graced with a noble soul and high mind. In preaching this claim, Gregers subscribes to an inexorable Christian logic: he speaks in a language of forgiveness, exaltation, redemption, martyrdom, confession, absolution, and sacrifice. Like the wild duck, Hialmar has lost himself in the "poisonous marshes" of his delusions and should raise himself into the light of truth. Despite the ruin he brings to the household, Gregers will preach his gospel up to the end of the play. The disjuncture between his fanatical exhortations-that the family should seek "true frame of mind for self- sacrifice and forgiveness"-and the suffering of the Ekdals is comic and grotesque.

When he finally realizes that he has failed to redeem his friends, he will make a melancholic exit from a world in which he in a sense has no place. His destiny is to be the "thirteenth at the table," or the guest outside the circle of diners. His number of course recalls the figure of Judas at the Last Supper; Relling also identifies him as a spiritual "quack," the devil or Antichrist. Gregers's insistence on the ideal condemns him to a false gospel that drives him to the betrayal of his friends and brings ruin to their houses.

Hjalmar Ekdal: (Pronounced "Yalmar Aykdal") The comic double of the romantic hero Ibsen so famously unmasks in his theater. Hialmar, a true cousin of Peer Gynt, quite happy to loll about the studio while his ego is fed by his wife and daughter as well as by the admiring Gregers. Hialmar, fiery and melodramatic, likes the sound of his own voice and incessantly moralizes on his position as worker, bread-winner, and future inventor, none of which he has ever been or is ever likely to be. He inclines toward the spectacular, and enjoys creating little scenes of which he is the center.

Hialmar's handsomeness, "superficially emotional temperament," "sympathetic voice," and talent for declaiming the verses and thoughts of others have always made him appear the "great light of the future" among his intimates. Hialmar would imagine himself as a great father and provider. As Relling notes, Hialmar has always figured as a "shining light" within his private circles. The play of course thoroughly debunks this fantasy throughout, from his humiliation, beginning at Werle's banquet in the first act. Convinced he is on the brink of a great invention, Hialmar dreams of restoring his family name to honor. His dismissal of the petty concerns in life and dawdling in the garret while he awaits the necessary inspiration is a parody of romantic notions of creation and creativity. Hialmar is most explicitly unmasked in the exchange between Relling and Gregers in Act V.

On his own part, Hialmar understands himself as a great father, provider, and inventor, the redeemer of the family line. Little does he know his continued debt to the man who ruined his father and the reasons for Werle's facilitation of his marriage with Gina. The revelation of both will lead him to abandon temporarily his household. Soon, however, his need for domestic comfort as well as a space where he might continue to play the shining idol quickly returns him home. Hialmar's dismissal of the petty concerns in life and dawdling in the garret while he awaits the necessary inspiration for his invention is certainly a parody of romantic notions of creation and creativity.

Gina Ekdal: (Pronounced "Cheena") Ekdal's wife and the former house servant of the Werles. By far the most practical members of the family, she refrains from her relatives' flights into fancy and occupies herself with the management of the household and photographic studio. She has suppressed her past with Werle Senior to ensure the survival of her marriage. A sound, steady type of woman, she (lack of education) keeps the Ekdal household together by feeding her husband's stomach as well as his ego, while at the same time she takes care of the family business.

Hedvig: The Ekdals' fourteen-year-old daughter. Hedvig is perhaps the play's most pathetic figure: its innocent, martyred child. She is of uncertain parentage, belonging either to Hialmar or Werle and potentially passed from the former to the latter in a marriage designed to circumvent public scandal. Hedvig's beloved father dispossesses her at the moment when her future is assured through Werle's beneficence. She comes to double the wild duck in being the wayward daughter. Like the duck, she is no longer certain of her origins and has been adopted into a second home.

Hedvig's doubling with the wild duck particularly distinguishes itself from that of the rest of the cast in taking metaphoric substitution to a lethal conclusion. This shift occurs when the two figures both become the object of sacrifice. When Hialmar abandons Hedvig, Gregers will exhort her to sacrifice the duck, her most precious possession, to prove her love for her father. Hedvig will enter the garret to kill the duck but end by killing herself in a chaste and bloodless suicide. She dies for her father's love. The irony is that throughout the play Hedvig intuits the lunacy of Gregers's gospel and nearly awakes from it before committing suicide.

Hedvig is also marked by an incipient blindness, a degenerative eye-disease that she has inherited from either Werle or Hialmar's line. Her inherited disease is the legacy of crimes past, crimes of which she is again innocent. Her blindness also symbolizes the predominance "life-illusion" in the Ekdal household.

Dr. Relling and Molvik: two examples of social wreckage, like Krogstad in A Doll's House. The Doctor, despite the ruin he made of his own life, is still intelligent, and is Ibsen's own mouthpieces at times. Relling - Hialmar's longtime antagonist from the Hoidal. The cynical Dr. Relling works and his rival over the fate of Hialmar. Clearly appearing as a figure of critical knowledge, he incarnates Ibsen's famous turn to the psychological. Relling pits himself against Gregers's appeals to the ideal as all so much "quakery." Rather than engage with Gregers on his own terms-that of "spiritual tumults" and a Christian logic of forgiveness and redemption-Relling recasts their discussion in a quasi-medical discourse of pathology. Thus Relling considers the ideal as little more than a lie: the two are related as typhus is to putrid fever. Man does not require redemption but treatment, an inoculation he terms the "life-illusion" or "life-lie." The life-lie, be it the delusions of Ekdal in his garret or Molvik's conviction that he is possessed, makes the patient's survival possible, guarding against his complete disintegration.

Relling above all offers diagnosis, evaluating the pathologies of both the play's romantic protagonists. In his eyes, Hialmar has too long figured as the "shining light" within his private circles; he has done so since in the care of his "hysterical" spinster aunts. Gregers suffers from an "integrity-fever" in his guilt over the Ekdals' ruin and a "delirium of hero-worship." With such diagnoses, Relling would replace metaphysics with metapsychology.

Molvik - Like Relling, Molvik is a tenant who lives below the Ekdals. A drunken student of theology, he lives under the care of Relling, keeping himself alive through a "life-illusion" of demonic possession. Only this illusion keeps him from sinking into self-contempt. He subtly functions as a double for the other preacher of the play-Gregers.

Old Werle : a former libertine, he is equally unscrupulous in business. Old Ekdal went to jail in his place as a result of one of his illegal business deals. Werle salves his conscience by paying the broken old man a high price for the little copying he does.

Hakon Werle : a former libertine, he is equally unscrupulous in business. Old Ekdal went to jail in his place as a result of one of his illegal business deals. Werle salves his conscience by paying the broken old man a high price for the little copying he does. Werle, a wealthy industrialist, is responsible for the ruin of his former partner, Old Ekdal, and his family. Werle has attempted to make amends by becoming the Ekdals' provider. He also hides a liaison with Hialmar's wife Gina, a liaison that drove him to facilitate their marriage to avoid public scandal. By the time the play opens, Ekdal does not appear the tyrannical and perverse father. He is man who would tidy up his affairs and maintain the suppression of the past at all costs.

Old Ekdal - The victim of Werle's betrayal, he suffered public disgrace years ago. He is a socially tabooed figure. Note how his intrusion into Werle's house brings the dinner party to a halt. Ekdal's ruin has left him a wounded duck, so to speak, a drunken man who spends his hours dreaming of his hunting days in the "forest" he has built in the garret and parading about in his old military uniform when at home.

Dramatic irony is evident when Gregers tells Hialmar that Hedwig may make a sacrifice for her father's sake. The sacrifice she finally makes is not what Gregers is thinking of. Also is ironic is Hjalmar's remark about his great love for Hedwig. By now it is fairly obvious that the only person he ever really loved is himself. At the end of the play we see more evidence of his selfishness when he asks why this was done to him.

Important Quotations Explained

1. GREGERS: Oh, indeed! Hialmar Ekdal is sick too, is he! RELLING: Most people are, worse luck. GREGERS: And what remedy are you applying in Hialmar's case? RELLING: My usual one. I am cultivating the life-illusion* in him. ("Livslognen," literally "the life-lie.") GREGERS: Life-illusion? I didn't catch what you said. RELLING: Yes, I said illusion. For illusion, you know, is the stimulating principle. [Explanation]
Explanation: This dialogue toward the beginning of Act V introduces the motif of the "Livslognen" or "life-illusion." It takes place between the play's rival "doctors," two men in conflict over the Ekdals's fate. Relling opposes Gregers's continuous appeals to the "claim of the ideal" with a quasi- medical or psychological discourse. This turn to a discourse of psychology is one of the defining aspects of Ibsen's drama. For Relling, Hialmar suffers not from spiritual tumult but illness. He requires a remedy; the "stimulating principle" of illusion. The ideal does not figure as some moral or spiritual imperative but is yet another pathology, as closely related to the lie as typhus is to putrid fever. The "life-lie" is an "inoculation" against the pathological effects of these delusions, an illusion that makes the patient's survival possible.

2. EKDAL: It's Hakon Werle we have to thank for her, all the same, Gina. [To GREGERS] He was shooting from a boat, you see, and he brought her down. But your father's sight is not very good now. H'm; she was only wounded. GREGERS: Ah! She got a couple of slugs in her body, I suppose. HIALMAR: Yes, two or three. HEDVIG: She was hit under the wing, so that she couldn't fly. GREGERS: And I suppose she dived to the bottom, eh? EKDAL: [sleepily, in a thick voice] Of course. Always do that, wild ducks do. They shoot to the bottom as deep as they can get, sir - and bite themselves fast in the tangle and seaweed - and all the devil's own mess that grows down there. And they never come up again. GREGERS: But your wild duck came up again, Lieutenant Old Ekdal. EKDAL: He had such an amazingly clever dog, your father had. And that dog - he dived in after the duck and fetched her up again. [Explanation]
Explanation: Having just revealed the treasure of the garret to Gregers, Ekdal recounts the story of the wild duck in Act II. The wild duck is a "quilting point" for most of the characters' fantasies of themselves and those around them; its tale comes to serve as an allegory for much of the play's action. Thus Ekdal figures as the wild duck in having been betrayed and shot down by his old partner Werle. He has sunk into his reveries never to return. Gregers imagines Hialmar as the wild duck in his entrapment in the "poisonous marshes" of his household, the tangle of deceit that makes his marriage possible. In contrast, he imagines himself in the figure of the clever dog that would rescue the wounded bird. He also considers himself the wild duck in becoming the Ekdals' adopted tenant. Lastly Hedvig figures as the wild duck in losing her family and place of origin-she is in some sense her father's adopted child.

3. HIALMAR: [comes in with some manuscript books and old loose papers, which he lays upon the table] That portmanteau is of no use! There are a thousand and one things I must drag with me. GINA: [following with the portmanteau] Why not leave all the rest for the present, and only take a shirt and a pair of woolen drawers with you? HIALMAR: Whew!-all these exhausting preparations-! [Pulls off his overcoat and throws it upon the sofa.] GINA: And there's the coffee getting cold. HIALMAR: H'm. [Drinks a mouthful without thinking of it, and then another.] GINA: [dusting the backs of the chairs] A nice job you'll have to find such another big garret for the rabbits. [Explanation]
Explanation: This excerpt comes from Act V during Hialmar's comic return to the household. Much of The Wild Duck's action consists of domestic activity, generally performed or supervised by the ever-practical Gina. Gina will, for example, tabulate the day's expenses, prepare and serve lunch, clean the apartment, and onward. In contrast, Hialmar cannot bear these banalities-they only divert him from his "mission" to redeem the family name. Ibsen repeatedly deploys petty household concerns to deflate Hialmar's fiery tirades in his attempt to undermine the romantic stage hero. Even if he screams that he cannot stomach living amongst traitors, Hialmar has no intention of leaving his home as it is there that he is cared for. Moreover, as the first act makes all too clear, it is only here that he can play what Relling describes as the "shining light," the idealized father and provider even if, as Gina's quiet management of the household economies reveal, this is hardly the case.

4. HEDVIG: And there's an old bureau with drawers and flaps, and a big clock with figures that go out and in. But the clock isn't going now. GREGERS: So time has come to a standstill in there - in the wild duck's domain. HEDVIG: Yes. And then there's an old paint-box and things of that sort; and all the books. GREGERS: And you read the books, I suppose? HEDVIG: Oh, yes, when I get the chance. Most of them are English though, and I don't understand English. But then I look at the pictures. - There is one great big book called Harrison's History of London. It must be a hundred years old; and there are such heaps of pictures in it. At the beginning there is Death with an hour-glass and a woman. I think that is horrid. But then there are all the other pictures of churches, and castles, and streets, and great ships sailing on the sea. [Explanation]

Explanation: This dialogue appears in Act III, offering a view into the space in the Ekdal household dedicated to the production of fantasy: the back room garret. As we recall, the garret is the home of the wild duck and dream-space of the more fanciful members of the Ekdal household. It is here that Hedvig daydreams her fantastic journeys, Ekdal theatrically returns to his hunting days, and Hialmar finds a diversion from his toil. Accordingly, the dialogue between Hedvig and Gregers lends the garret a frozen, mythic temporality. Its broken clock indicates that time has come to a standstill. The allegorical image of Death, the hourglass, and the woman suggest that a mythic or cosmic time is at work within. This mythic time becomes especially important with Hedvig's ultimate suicide, her death figuring in a sense as a revenge for the mysterious crime committed against the woods many generations ago. With this in mind, note that Hedvig does not so much read her history book as a chronicle than as a visual point of departure for her flights of fancy.

5. RELLING: Oh, life would be quite tolerable, after all, if only we could be rid of the confounded duns that keep on pestering us, in our poverty, with the claim of the ideal. GREGERS: [looking straight before him] In that case, I am glad that my destiny is what is. RELLING: May I inquire,-what is your destiny? GREGERS: [going] To be the thirteenth at table. RELLING: The devil it is. [Explanation]
Explanation: This dialogue between Relling and Gregers closes the play. Hedvig has died to no redemptive end. The sardonic Dr. Relling thus delivers a sort of epitaph on the romantic, Salvationist hero cut here by Gregers. Life would be "quite tolerable" if missionaries left men in their poverty rather than preaching the delusions of the ideal. Thus Gregers makes a melancholic exit from a world in which he in a sense has come to have no place. His destiny is to be the "thirteenth at the table," that is, the guest outside the circle of diners. His number recalls the figure of Judas at the Last Supper, and Relling also identifies him as the devil or Antichrist. Gregers's insistence on the ideal condemns him to a false gospel that drives him to the betrayal of his friends and brings ruin to their houses.

Study Questions on The Wild Duck (1884)

1. A number of critics have noted how Relling and Gregers compete over Hialmar's fate. What does Relling think of Gregers's appeals to the ideal? How does he change the terms of the discussion of Hialmar's situation?
2. Many critics have noted that Ibsen's plays stage the demystification of the romantic stage hero. How does this demystification take place in The Wild Duck?
3. Consider the use of space in The Wild Duck. What is the significance, for example, of the structure of the Ekdal home?
Suggested Essay Topics
4. Why does the action of the play take place in a photography studio? How do photographs function in the play?
5. Consider the difference symbols of temporality in the play. What is the significance, for example, of the garret's stopped clock? Hedvig's history book? The image of the woman, Death, and the hourglass?
6. How does lighting function in the play? Consider the change in lighting between acts, the use of artificial light (lamps), and the lighting in different playing spaces (the studio as opposed to the garret).
7. Consider the trope of revenge in The Wild Duck. Who is out for revenge? On what terms? In whose name? For what injuries? How might one read Ekdal's refrain that the woods avenge themselves?

Suggestions for Further Reading

Fjelde, Rolf, ed. Ibsen: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965.
Goldman, Michael. Ibsen: The Dramaturgy of Fear. New York: Columbia UP, 1999.
Johnston, Brian. Text and Supertext in Ibsen's Drama. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1989.
Marker, Frederick and Lise-Lone. Ibsen's Lively Art: a Performance Study of the Major Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.
McFarlane, James, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.
Meyer, Hans-George. Henrik Ibsen. Trans. Helen Sebba. New York: Ungar, 1972.
Mueller, Janet. "Ibsen's Wild Duck." In Modern Drama. Volume eleven, Number four, February 1969. pp. 347-355.
Northam, John. Ibsen: A Critical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1973.
Shaw, Bernard. Major Critical Essays: The Quintessence of Ibsenism. The Perfect Wagnerite. The Sanity of Art. London: Constable, 1932.
Tammany, Jane Ellert. Henrik Ibsen's Theatre Aesthetic and Dramatic Art. New York: Philosophical Library, 1980.
(Source: http://www.sparknotes.com/drama/wildduck/)