THE WILL AND TESTAMENT OF IBSEN
75
In short, as Hedwig indicates to her uninstructed mother, the
dramatist means something else all the time and not what he says.
Everything, H edwig precociously understands, is symbolic. The real wild
duck is the child, Hedwig, who picks up Gregers' "loaded" suggestion
and shoots herself. The tragic climax of
The Wild Duck
is brought
about, thus, by an act of over-interpretation. Gregers, for once, was
speaking literally when he said to the
little
girl: "But suppose, now,
that you of your own free will, sacrificed the wild duck for
his
sake?"
But Hedwig, confused and terrified the next morning by her supposed
father's harshness, thinks that she has finally grasped Gregers' under–
meaning and, presuming that she is the "sacrifice" alluded to, goes into
the garret room and puts the pistol to her breast.
This ending, like so many of Ibsen's dramatic finales ("The mill
race! The mill race!"), seems a little heavy and strained, like the last
crashing- chords of movie music. Yet it is utterly just. The child's
suggestibility h as a semantic grounding. She has been led by the Higher
Critics around her to look for the real reality under the surface of
language-that is, to schematize her life as she lives it.
Gre~ers,
with
his "claim of the ideal," Hjalmar, with his talk of "a task in life,"
are both inveterate schematizers, one a truth-speaker, the other an
aesthetician. As his wife says of Hjalmar, "Surely you realize, Mr.
Werle, that my husband isn't one of those ordinary photographers."
Everything has conspired to make Hedwig distrust the
ordinary
way of
looking at things. In a peculiarly sinister scene in the third act, Gregers
has been talking to Hedwig about the garret room where the wild duck
lives. She tells him that sometimes the whole room and all the things
in it seem to her like "the ocean's depths," and then she adds: "But
that's so silly."
GREGERS. No, you mustn't say that.
HEDWIG. It is ; because it's only an attic.
GREGERS
(looking hard at her).
Are you so sure of that?
HEDWIG
(astonished).
That it's an attic?
GREGERS. Yes. Do you know that for certain?
(Hedwig is silent, looking at him with an open mouth.)
Gregers preaches mysteries. Hjalmar's daily conversation is a flow of
oratory. He always speaks of his brown-wigged bald father as "the white–
haired old man." And his pretended "purpose in life" is a sort of parody
of Gregers' "purpose to live for." He too conceives of himself as a savior,
the rescuer of his father. "Yes, I will rescue that ship-wrecked man. For
he was ship-wrecked when the storm broke loose on him.... That
pistol there, my friend-the one we use to shoot rabbits with-it has
played its part in the tragedy of the House of EkdaJ." Again, a flight
