Mary McCarthy
THE WILL AND TESTAMENT OF IBSEN
GINA. Wasn' t that a queer thing to say-that h e'd like to
be a dog?
H EDWIG. I tell you what, Mother. I think he meant something
else by that.
GI NA. What else could he mean?
H EDWIG. Well, I don' t know; but it was as though he meant
something else all the time-and not what h e said .
This short catechism-from the second act of
T he Wild
Duck-is
at first sight only a sort of road sign to the audience to
look out for curves ahead. Hjalmar Ekdal's wife and daughter are dis–
cussing his friend, Gregers, the meddling fanatic who has inserted him–
self into the family speaking a dark language and pressing what he
calls the claim of the ideal. In the scene just before he has expressed
the wish to be a dog-an "extraordinarily clever dog. The kind that
goes to the bottom after wild duck when they dive down a nd bite fast
hold of the weeds and the tangle down in the mud." Translated out of
this idiom into pl ain speech, this means tha t he sees himself as the
rescuer of the household which his fa ther ( the hunter) has wounded
and sent down into the depths. These depths, ironically, a re located in
an attic, where Hjalmar, who plays the flute and has a windy, " artistic"
personality, also plays at being a p rofessional photographer and inventor
while his wife does the hard work. In the neighboring garret room,
behind a curtain, Hjalmar's disgraced, drunken old fath er, wearing a
brown wig and his lieutenant's uniform, plays at being a hunter with an
old double-barreled pistol, some barnyard fowls, pigeons, rabbits, and
a real wild duck. Father and son "go hunting" in this make-believe
forest, which is rather like photographers' scenery. Hedwig, the percipient
little girl, who is not Hjalmar's real daughter but the illegitimate child
of Gregers' father, is going blind. This blindness is a metaphor for the
state of darkened self-deception in which the little family lives. Gregers
believes that he has the duty to
open Hjalmar's eyes
to the true facts
of his marriage. At the house of Gregers' father, who is also losing his
sight, they are drinking Tokay wine and playing Blind Man's Buff.
