Commentary: Animalism and Fatherhood

Reading Rachel Price's article on The Wild Duck, animalism, and theatricality augmented my understanding of the play and suggested new ideas on the position of the father in Ibsen's drama. However, on another level, it also increased my awareness of the lack of collective circulation of intellectual ideas within critical practice. While universities across Europe are involved in strategies that involve rather different types of integration, cooperation, and transmission of academic resources, (we) individuals who deal with critical practice within the humanities still live in a nineteenth-century haven of isolation and subjectivity. We have established our critical private practice and sent our diagnostic solipsism out into the world.

The chance to develop theory or readings in togetherness with others within the humanities is very rare. It is as though we will always be thirteen at the table and, therefore, unfit to sit together. Reading Price's article and commenting upon it before it is published is like sharing an intellectual quest to understand and read one of Ibsen's finest plays.

I admit I did not take the duck seriously enough. Even though the duck does not speak, as does the goose (and the other animals) in Selma Lagerløf's remarkable story of Nils Holgersson, it is certain that the duck produces meaning. The play's earliest reception history, for example, tells us not to underestimate the duck. The duck created considerable disturbance and negativity among the audience and the critics in the beginning. Why a duck? What is an animal doing on stage? In the foreword to The Wild Duck in the Hundreårsutgaven, Francis Bull writes about these almost hilarious reactions to "seeing" a duck on stage. After awhile, the reactions cooled down, and the audience became accustomed to the duck. Later, the animalism became the subject of several allegorical and symbolical interpretations of the play. When Price reads the duck in a history of animal theatricality and an ethics of alterity, she approaches an important problematic within gender studies. The gaze of the other and the meaning of the existence of the other is the first question related to reading gender since Simone de Beauvoir. One of the positions we certainly can assign to the animal, the duck, is that of the other who needs care. By focusing on the duck, and the meaning of the duck, it is difficult to deny the fact that an ethics of care is at play in this play. Both the vulnerability and the alterity of the duck dissect both discourse and power and demand obligation and care. Ibsen's radical answer to this position is that it is not the mother who provides this care (to the duck), but the fallen fathers and the loving daughter.

Several elements connect the duck to old Ekdal and Hjalmar. Not only do the two Ekdals run away from the ordinariness of this world into the dream world of the loft and the duck, but all three have unsuccessfully tried to take their own lives. G. W. F. Hegel's argument that the animal cannot destroy itself is not valid for ducks, who are able to remain on the bottom of the sea until they drown. Instead of dying, all three, Ekdal, Hjalmar, and the duck, have become stranded in the loft; Hjalmar, and Ekdal try to support each other, and both of them try to take care of the duck.

The relationship Ekdal-Hjalmar-"the duck" is related to the relationship Ekdal-Hjalmar-Hedvig. The duck is the representation of Hedvig, but the ethics of alterity is confused when it relates to Hedvig. Hjalmar is not fully able to see the otherness of his daughter; he is already too blinded by his own wounded narcissism to acknowledge her fully. This is the tragedy of the play. He is caring, but helpless. For example, in the most famous of all dialogues in the play, when Hjalmar returns from the dinner at Werle, Hedvig is there waiting for her little taste of the dinner, and Hjalmar on this occasion shows both his helplessness and his loving capability. None of the...