Character, Conflict, and Meaning in The Wild Duck

CHARACTER, CONFLICT, AND MEANING IN THE WILD DUCK WHEN A PLAY IS WIDELY ACCLAIMED as a masterpiece by critics who disagree radically about its nature and meaning, it may be that the work possesses such richness of content, such poetic density, that critics are unable to comprehend its totality; it may be that it contains an element so alien to conventional notions that they are unwilling to follow where the playwright's vision has led. The critical confusion generated by Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck since it was first published in 1884 suggests that sometimes both elements are involved. Although many of its earliest readers and audiences found it "obscure and morbid," as Professor Otto Reinert of the University of Oslo noted several years ago, "today it is generally considered one of Ibsen's greatest plays in prose."l Yet there is currently very little more agreement about the kind of play it is than there was during Ibsen's lifetime. George Brandes, an admiring contemporary, said in 1898 that it was "perhaps the most pessimistic play that Ibsen had yet written."2 Nine years later, Edmund Gosse categorized it as a "brilliant , but saturnine and sardonic tragi-comedy,"3 whose theme was of such a "topsy-turvy nature" that it had "made Ibsen as nearly 'rollicking ' as he ever became in his life." (p. 174) Ibsen, who also regarded it as a tragi-comedy, complained of a Copenhagen production in 1898 because "it exaggerated the play'S farcical side."4 Recently, British critic F. L. Lucas, who considers it a "bitter tragedy," marveled that an American critic ("a Professor Weigand") had said: "The Wild Duck does not begin as a comedy and end as a tragedy. It is a comedy from start to finish." (p. 193) Robert Raphael, another American critic, has labeled it an analysis and satire of transcendentalism, "only potentially frightening and often even quite £arcical."5 The mode of representation partly accounts for the play's being held, like the players in Hamlet, best for "tragical-comical-historicalpastoral "-what the critic will. Highly realistic in its rendering of "ordinary" people in an "ordinary" world of social events and institutions , of domestic occupations and preoccupations, it records the 1 Modern Drama (Boston, Toronto, 1962), p. 83. 2 Henrik Ibsen, A. Critical Study (New York. 1964), p. 99. B Ibsen (London, 1907), p. 170. 4 F. L. Lucas, The Dramtl of Ibsen and Strindberg (New York, 1962). p. 193. 5 "Illusion and the Self in The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, and The Lady from the Sea," Ibsen: A. Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Rolf Fjelde (Englewood Cliffs, 1965), p. 124. 419 420 MODERN DRAMA February details of existence with a photographic literalness. The Wild Duck is also naturalistic in its emphasis on the importance of heredity and environment as dominant forces in shaping men's destinies and in its emphasis on the mean and trivial facts of daily life. But above all, it is an intensely poetic, highly "romantic" play dominated by the symbolism of the wild bird and the "heavenly" attic, where it dwells with the poor and the meek and the "wounded" in the blessedness of love. Although the action itself is relatively unified and simple, following the pattern of homecoming and holocaust set in Ghosts and other plays, the complexity of the antecedent action, revealed with tantalizing skill during the five acts, is also partly responsible for the varied responses to the play. The sequence of tragic events was set in motion many years earlier by Hakon Werle, a wealthy Norwegian merchant and manufacturer, during his ruthless rise to fortune and his only somewhat less ruthless career as a sexual adventurer. The "battlefield" of his past is strewn with victims. His wife, a puritanical, impoverished gentlewoman , was driven to madness and death by his treatment. His son, Gregers, passionately attached to his mother while loathing and fearing his father, had fled the house to a fifteen-year exile at one of Werle's enterprises in the mountains. Some outsiders fared no better by their association with him. Lieutenant Ekdal, Werle's business partner and the father of Gregers' best friend, Hjalmar, had been imprisoned and...