By Jørgen Lorentzen
In the play we meet three real father figures in three father-child relationships: Werle-Gregers, Ekdal-Hjalmar, and Hjalmar-Hedvig.
One key aspect of Ibsen’s dramas is the manner in which he weaves together these father roles. He does not separate them as
three distinct forms of fatherhood, but instead demonstrates how they are interconnected through relationships, dissolutions
and continuity/discontinuity. In The Wild Duck the focus is on the family relationships, or the “family sorrows,” and more
precisely, the family represented through the father-child relationship.
I can hardly think of a more pervasive motif in Ibsen’s works than fatherhood. However, fatherhood is not what most of us
associate with Ibsen’s dramas. Fatherhood lies in the background, ahead of the drama and underlying the dramatic interactions
and scenes. Fatherhood is pervasive, yet kept discretely in the background.
Ibsen’s dramatizations of fatherhood are part of a contemporary social debate in which fathers and paternal authority are
subjected to a sweeping critique. The spotlight is placed on the father, both on and off stage, and he must explain himself.
The role of the father is not taken for granted.
The Wild Duck is especially effective at illustrating the significance that the various father roles may hold for the next
generation. Almost as in a novel, we can read of the life connections between three generations in this tightly constructed
drama.
The Patriarchal Father
Old Werle in The Wild Duck is a patriarch willing to do anything to save his own skin, including abandoning his own son. But
in the end Werle emerges as the only one who seems capable of changing both his attitudes and perspective on life, and the
only one capable of creating a relationship of truth and openness in his new marriage to Mrs. Sørby.
At the opening of the play, we become acquainted with Werle, both as a “stud” who has had erotic escapes and as a father who,
in his instrumental reason, has not publicly acknowledged for the past 16 years that he actually has a son. His estrangement
from his son is demonstrated in a number of ways. For example, Werle has not written one personal word to his son during their
16years of separation; instead, their correspondence has been strictly businesslike.
Their family life has consisted of an ongoing battle between Mr. and Mrs. Werle, and the most important fight between the
couple was for power over their son Gregers. In this fight we recognize gender-oriented positions: Mrs. Werle is emotional
and long-suffering, “sickly” and “high-strung,” as Werle calls her. Werle is rational and authoritarian. The rationality emerges
since the marriage was not based on love, but on economic motivation. Later it became apparent that Werle had miscalculated,
and a large dowry did not accompany the marriage. The economic motivation is clear in Werle’s persistent hate, as expressed
in the drama by Werle’s bitter comment:
Werle: [...] From being a child, you’ve always had a sickly conscience. It’s a heritage from your mother, Gregers... one thing she did leave you.
Gregers: (with a contemptuous smile). That must have been a bitter pill to swallow when you found you had miscalculated, after expecting her to bring you a fortune. (VI: 196)
In the same conversation between father and son at the end of the third act, the father’s authoritarian role also emerges. Gregers says:
I didn’t dare. I was scared... too much of a coward. I can’t tell you how frightened of you I was then and for a long time after, too (VI: 196).
Because Gregers was so frightened of his father, he stayed away from him for 16 years. In the end, the loss of his son has
cruel consequences for Werle, who loses his heir when Gregers rejects all his inheritance rights out of contempt for his father.
It is often overlooked that Werle loses even more than this. He also loses his other potential heir, his illegitimate child,
Hedvig. When Hedvig dies, this opportunity is also lost, and Werle finds himself completely alone again. His loneliness is
also expressed in particular passages when he touches upon his own suffering.
In a conversation with Gregers, he says: "I’m a lonely man Gregers; I’ve always felt lonely, all my life; but especially now that I’m getting on a bit in years” (VI: 148). He also says later: “Laughter doesn’t come so easily to a lonely man, Gregers "(VI: 150).
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| "Vildanden" (1963). Foto: Norsk filminstitutt |
Werle’s authoritarian and economic rationality has not achieved any results. On the contrary, he has failed miserably. The
fight between Mr. and Mrs. Werle, or a family drama based on economics rather than love, leads to loss for both husband and
wife, to the son’s blind, unrealistic idealism and, ultimately, to the death of the illegitimate child.
In 1884 The Norwegian National Assembly debated the issue of separate property rights for married women. In a petition dated
12 April 1884, Norway’s most acclaimed authors at that time, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Henrik Ibsen, Jonas Lie and Alexander
Kielland wrote to the Norwegian National Assembly, requesting that women be granted separate property rights. They also criticized
the Assembly for its unwillingness to go all the way and make these rights automatic. In April of the same year Henrik Ibsen
had begun writing The Wild Duck. Its theme was the consequences of a failed marriage, in which the issue of economics and
love played a key role.
The Fallen Father
The other form of fatherhood in The Wild Duck consists of the relationship between old Ekdal and Hjalmar Ekdal.
The fallen father has received little attention although this form of fatherhood was probably not so unusual in the 1800s.
This omission has a likely cause: The patriarch who does not master the task of building a masculinity that is solid, acceptable
and strong of character, and who thus falls by the wayside, leaves little source material about his own demise. While bourgeois
men write autobiographies about their masculine achievements, there are very few who write extensively about their own failures
and unmanliness.
There is a much-discussed fallen father in the Norwegian material from the 1800s, though, namely Henrik Ibsen’s own family
history. His father, Knud Ibsen, was a successful businessman in Skien, who married Marichen, the daughter of the well-to-do
John Andreas Altenburg. When Knud Ibsen received an inheritance following the death of his father-in-law in 1830, the Ibsen
family became one of the most prosperous in Skien. However, just a few years later in 1834-35, Knud Ibsen lost the entire
fortune. Partly due to over-investment and poor management and partly due to an economic recession, the family was forced
to give up all its property. The family had to move from their patrician villa in Skien to a smaller house in the country.
The father never recovered from this fall from their economic and social class. He died a poor, lonely alcoholic in 1877.
Henrik Ibsen, who was the family’s eldest son, left his father immediately after his confirmation in 1843 and probably made
a visit home in 1850 before leaving for Christiania. After this, father and son never saw each other again. Nor did Henrik
ever send a letter or greetings directly to his father and this can be seen as evidence of the pain the father’s downfall
inflicted on the son.
While historical documentation on Knud and Henrik Ibsen lacks reflections on the downfall, it nonetheless tells indirectly
of the great emotional cost of such a downfall: social marginalization, loss of face and position, isolation and loneliness,
cooling of family relationships (between mother and father, as well as between father and son), and finally alcoholism and
abject poverty. In this context, the term unmanliness is relevant. Henrik Ibsen’s relationship to his father emerges, though,
in the continual problematizing of fatherhood throughout his works. The most amenable of the fallen fathers is possibly old
Ekdal in The Wild Duck.
Old Ekdal experiences a greater fall than Knud Ibsen. He is prosecuted for illegal logging, imprisoned for several years,
and returns a broken man. His punishment is even harder to bear because his partner and friend, Werle, lets him down by allowing
him to take all the blame for the illegal logging. He has been both punished and betrayed, and upon his return he finds that
the man who betrayed him has become one of the city’s most prominent men. He seeks isolation in the attic and drowns his sorrows
in alcohol. Old Ekdal has lost his masculinity and tries to restore it metaphorically by putting on his old lieutenant’s uniform
once in a while and going on an illusionary hunt in the attic.
His son, Hjalmar Ekdal, is also greatly affected by his father’s downfall. He withdrew behind the blinds when his father was
imprisoned, he has since moved into the dark attic with his own family, and we come to know him as a person with amazingly
little self-insight and inflated notions of his masculinity and of his own role as provider. Hjalmar’s self-absorption falls
into a totally different category than old Werle’s authoritarian egoism. Therefore, it is not his striking egocentrism, but
his comical way of taking himself too seriously that makes him a rather pathetic and wretched fellow.
This creates a strong ambivalence in the character; clearly comical, but utterly without self-insight into his own comic effect,
and at the same time, clearly pathetic, but apparently with great self-confidence.
Hjalmar behaves exactly the opposite of what we saw in Henrik Ibsen’s relationship to his own father. While Henrik leaves
his father at an early age and never sees or contacts him again, Hjalmar and his father seek out each other in their sorrow
over the father’s downfall.
Hjalmar’s relationship to both his father and his illegitimate child Hedvig is unusual. He is the only man in the drama, and
one of the few in all of Ibsen’s works, who openly expresses love. For this reason, this part must be taken seriously, and
I will do just that in the next aspect of fatherhood brought forth in The Wild Duck.
The Loving, but Helpless Father
Many Ibsen critics have taken Gregers’ plan in relation to the Ekdal family too literally. That is, a genuine idealism lies
at the bottom of his play-acting, and he knows the truth about the Ekdal family’s false foundation.
There are good reasons to doubt that Gregers’ discourse is the truest one in this work. Everything suggests that Werle is
Hedvig’s biological father and that Werle has actively manipulated the situation so that Hjalmar is prepared to marry Gina.
The other true narrative in this drama is in fact that Hjalmar clearly married Gina for love and that he has always regarded
Hedvig as his own daughter, loving her more than anything else in the world. Hjalmar has achieved a good marriage based on
love rather than economic motives, in contrast to the marriage of old Werle.
Similarly, the relationship between Gina, Hedvig and Hjalmar (and old Ekdal) is characterized by solidarity and a great deal
of trust in and caring for each other. There is love within the Ekdal family, in contrast to the Werle family. In a conversation
with Gregers in the fifth act, after Gregers has disclosed Werle’s plot against the family, Hjalmar exclaims:
Hjalmar: I can’t tell you how I loved that child. I can’t tell you how happy I felt every time I came home to my modest room and she would come running across to me, with her poor sweet, strained little eyes. (VI: 235)
Hedvig’s relationship to her father is also shown in a clearly positive light. She runs to meet him, sits on his lap, expresses
love for her father and manifests purity and goodness, always seeking out love. As the others, however, Hedvig is a product
of the family she grows up in, and her feelings of love are spawned from the Ekdal family and no other. While Gregers and
Hjalmar are each in their own way negatively affected by their childhoods, Hedvig is the exact opposite. She has grown up
with love and expresses love.
Gregers does not see this. He is so deprived of love that he is not able to see love when it is present. His admission of
the truth is therefore based on blindness to the truth that is right in front of him, the Ekdal family’s relative happiness.
And it is in this context that we must understand the inversion of the stage rooms.
The Werle family is wealthy, but loveless, while the Ekdal family is poor, but filled with love and warmth. Werle is characterized
by a patriarch’s rationality and emotional absence, while Hjalmar is continually present, overemotional and non-rational.
Werle’s choice of a spouse was based on economics, Hjalmar’s on love.
However, it should not be ignored that Hjalmar’s ability to care is limited at times. His self-pity makes it sometimes difficult
for him to show real caring. He forgets to bring something tasty to Hedvig from the party at old Werle’s as he promised, and
asks her to be satisfied with a menu instead. He is not willing to take responsibility for her eyes when she takes over his
job to earn money for the family, so that he can go up to the dark attic:
Hjalmar: But don’t ruin your eyes! D’you hear? I’m not taking any responsibility; you have to take the responsibility yourself. Understand? (VI: 179)
Hjalmar is not a mature, responsible father. He likes to be seen as the father in the house, but he does not act with the
authority, which would indicate that he in fact is the father. In many ways he is truly “a man with a childish disposition,”
as Relling points out within the play. He trusts others with an absolute naivety and changes according to whom he is talking
to. The consequence of this is that it becomes difficult to talk about Hjalmar as egotistical in the true meaning of the word
since we can hardly speak of the presence of any ego in Hjalmar at all.
When Hjalmar pulled down the blinds, his mind and soul remained undeveloped, and thus we meet a childish disposition with
the same longing for love as Hedvig. As a grown person who tries to act like an adult, he becomes cowardly and helpless, largely
guided by the whims and suggestions of others (which he does not manage to see through), except at home, where he attempts
to play the role of the father. It is thus a loving, but helpless father role that he plays.
A reading such as this, emphasizing Hjalmar’s ability to love, makes the tragic aspect of the play emerge even more clearly.
Hjalmar becomes more than a self-absorbed idiot without the ability to understand what is happening. In his own way he has
tried to achieve a genuine marriage and give Hedvig a life of love. Gregers not only leads Hedvig into death - he also kills
the attempt to establish a family based on love. Hjalmar thus becomes even more of a tragic figure, first subjected to old
Werle’s game, then exposed to Gregers’ game, which he believes in just as much. He believes just as easily in Gregers’ proposition
as in Werle’s. The tragedy lies in this combination of Gregers’ false idealism and Hjalmar’s lack of inner strength and sense
of responsibility.
The Ekdal family is the personification of the patriarchy as comic tragedy and a portrait of the infeasibility of the loving
father role at the end of the 1800s.
Notes:
Bjørnson, Bjørnstjerne, Henrik Ibsen, Jonas Lie and Alexander Kielland 1884: Skrivelse til Stortinget ang. gifte kvinners
særeie. Oslo: Stortinget, Dokument no. 92.
Høst, Else 1967: The Wild Duck av Henrik Ibsen. Oslo: Aschehoug.
Ibsen, Henrik 1960: “The Wild Duck.” In The Oxford Ibsen, Volume VI.Translated and edited by James McFarlane. London: Oxford
University Press.
Ibsen, Henrik 1964: Ibsen’s Letters and Speeches. Edited by Evert Sprinchorn. New York: Hill and Wang.
Tosh,John 1999: A Man’s Place. Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England. London:Yale University Press.
