7b
PARTISAN REVIEW
of metaphors, more disjointed and
ad libitum
in Hjalmar's case, a fact
which points to the difference between the two rhetoricians. Hjalmar
improvises idly on the instrument of language, but Gregers is in earnest,
with his single unifying metaphor, of the duck and the bird dog and the
hunter, which he pursues to the fearful end.
The men are poet-idealists; Hedwig is a budding poetess. Gina, the
uneducated wife, belongs to the prosy multitude that was patronized
earlier in the century by Wordsworth: "A primrose by the river's brim,
A yellow primrose was to him. And it was nothing more." "That there
blessed wild duck," she exclaims. "The fu ss there is over it!" When
Gregers, true to his metaphor, speaks of the "swamp vapor" that is
morally poisoning the Ekdal household, Gina retorts: "Lord knows there's
no smell of swamps here, Mr. Werle; I air the place out every blessed
day."
The Wild Duck
was written in the middle of Ibsen's career, after
Pillars of Society, A Doll's House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People
and
before the sequence of plays beginning with
Rosmersholm.
Ibsen re–
garded it as a departure from his earlier work, and it is often taken to
be a satiric repudiation of "the Ibsenites" or even of Ibsen himself
as a crusading social dramatist. In the figure of Gregers Werle, an ugly
man in a countrified gray suit who appears on his mission of truth to
rip the veil of illusion from a satisfied household, it is certainly pos–
sible to see a cruel self-portrait of the dramatic author who sought
to "let in the air" on the stuffy Norwegian community, to expose
its hypocrisy and commercial chicanery, its enslavement to a notion of
duty and to a sentimentalized picture of family life. Gregers Werle's
harping on the concept of "a true marriage," which shall not be based
on lies and concealment, is certainly a mocking echo of the doctrines
of
Ghosts
and
A Doll's House.
Moreover, Gregers Werle has been a radi–
cal before the opening of the play, and Ibsen, though he was a stock fig–
ure of respectability in private life, looked upon himself as a radical, even
an anarchist, and throughout his plays, up to the very end, there is a
doctrinal insistence on freedom and the necessity of self-realization that
today has a somewhat period and moralistic flavor, as though the notion
of duty, reappearing in the guise of Duty to Oneself, had become, if
anything, more puritan, more rigid, more sternly forbidding, than the
notion of duty to God or family or bourgeois custom.
If
Gregers Werle
is Ibsen in his tendentious and polemical aspect, then indeed he is a
demon that Ibsen is trying to cast out through the exorcism of this
play-a grotesque and half-pathetic demon, in that he will never under-
