The Wild Duck

Overview

The Wild Duck is five acts and about a hundred and ten pages, published in 1884. It comes after A Doll’s House, Ghosts and An Enemy of the People, and it reads as a deliberate answer to them. In those plays a person sees the truth and says it and the society around them is exposed. Here a person sees the truth and says it and a child dies.

Ibsen wrote to his publisher that this play occupied a place of its own among his works and that its method differed in various respects from his earlier ones. What is different is chiefly two things. The symbolism is structural rather than ornamental: the wounded duck in the attic is not an image applied to the story, it is the story. And the tone is unstable in a new way. Much of the first three acts is comic, Hjalmar Ekdal is genuinely funny, and the comedy is what makes the ending unbearable.

It is also the play where Ibsen’s influence on everything after him is easiest to see. The attic full of dead pine trees and rabbits, the family living on a shared fiction, the raisonneur who diagnoses everyone and helps nobody: Chekhov is unimaginable without this, and so is a good deal of twentieth-century American drama.

What happens

Act I. A dinner at the house of Håkon Werle, a wealthy merchant. His son Gregers has been away for years at the works up north, and is back. Also present is Hjalmar Ekdal, Gregers’ old schoolfriend, now a photographer, out of place among the guests.

Gregers begins to piece things together. Hjalmar’s father, old Ekdal, was once Werle’s partner, was convicted in a timber fraud and imprisoned while Werle was acquitted, and now does copying work for Werle in a back room. Hjalmar’s wife Gina was Werle’s housekeeper. The marriage was arranged and the photographic studio paid for. And Werle is going blind, as is Hedvig, the Ekdals’ fourteen-year-old daughter.

Gregers, who has hated his father since his mother’s death, confronts him, refuses his offer of a partnership, and leaves, announcing that he has a mission.

Act II. The Ekdal flat, and the thing that makes the play work: it is happy. Hjalmar is vain, lazy and self-pitying, and he is loved. Gina runs the business and the accounts while he talks about the great invention he will one day complete, which will restore the family name. Hedvig adores him. Old Ekdal potters about.

And behind a curtain at the back is the attic, where the old man keeps rabbits, pigeons, dead Christmas trees and a wild duck, which he shoots at with an old pistol, and which he calls the forest. The duck was shot by old Werle, dived to the bottom to die as wounded ducks do, was fetched up by the dog, and now lives in a basket and is perfectly content.

Gregers takes the spare room.

Act III. He begins work. He is convinced that Hjalmar’s life is built on a swamp of lies and that a true marriage can only be founded on full disclosure. Doctor Relling, who lodges in the same building and knows the family well, warns him off in plain terms and is ignored.

Act IV. Gregers tells Hjalmar. The effect is not what he expected. Hjalmar does not achieve a new and honest relationship with his wife; he becomes theatrical, demands the account books, announces that he will leave, and above all turns on Hedvig, whom he now suspects is not his. He refuses to look at her.

Hedvig, who does not understand what has happened and only knows that her father will not speak to her, is devastated. Gregers, still trying to help, suggests that she prove her love by sacrificing the thing she cares most for, the wild duck.

Act V. Relling states the counter-case. He has spent his life administering what he calls the life-lie to his patients, and he says so without embarrassment: take away an average person’s illusion and you take away their happiness. Hjalmar’s invention, old Ekdal’s forest, the theological student’s demonic pose downstairs, are all prescriptions. Gregers replies that if that is true, life is not worth living, and Relling agrees that it would not be if what Gregers offered were the alternative.

A shot from the attic. Hjalmar assumes his father is at the rabbits. It is Hedvig, who has turned the pistol on herself rather than the duck.

The last exchange belongs to Relling and Gregers. Gregers says that Hedvig’s death will not be in vain, that grief will release what is noble in Hjalmar. Relling says that Hjalmar will be magnificent about it for a few months and after that she will be a theme for a fine recitation, and that within the year she will be a pretty phrase to be said over. Gregers says that if that is right his destiny is to be the thirteenth at table. Relling tells him to go to the devil.

How to read it

Read the first three acts for the comedy and do not resist it. Hjalmar’s self-importance, the attic, old Ekdal’s forest, and Gina’s flat practicality are funny, and the play needs you to have enjoyed the household before it is destroyed.

Track the duck. It is wounded by a rich man, retrieved, kept in an attic, and thriving. Everybody in the flat is the duck at some point and the play never says so.

Take Relling seriously as an argument and not as a cynic. He is a drunk who runs a boarding house, and he is the only person in the play who correctly predicts what everyone will do.

Notice how Ibsen protects Gregers from being a straw man. His convictions are the ones Ibsen’s own admirers had drawn from the earlier plays, his cause is just in the abstract, and his father did in fact do everything he is accused of. The play does not say truth-telling is wrong; it shows a man applying a principle to people he has not bothered to understand.

Watch Hedvig. She is fourteen, she is going blind, she has been told nothing directly, and she acts on a suggestion made to her by a stranger who is not thinking about her at all. Nothing in the play is crueller than how little attention anyone pays to the person it kills.

Read it after An Enemy of the People, where the truth-teller is a hero, and the pair will tell you more about Ibsen than either alone.

Questions it raises

• Is the life-lie a mercy or a cage? Relling wins the argument as the play is arranged, but he is also a man who has given up.
• Gregers wants a true marriage founded on full disclosure. Is anything wrong with that as a principle, or only with applying it to these people?
• Hedvig is advised to sacrifice what she loves most. Is her death a misunderstanding, a suicide, or something the play deliberately leaves unresolved?
• Hjalmar is ridiculous and everyone in the house is happier for his illusion. What does the play think a person is owed?
• Old Werle bought a marriage to cover his conduct and is untouched by the ending. Where does the play place the blame?
• Ibsen wrote this after a decade of plays in which truth-tellers were right. What does it mean for an author to answer his own admirers?