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1958

The “Demonic” in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck

Louis Crompton
University of Nebraska - Lincoln

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Crompton, Louis, "The “Demonic” in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck" (1958). Faculty Publications -- Department of English. 62.
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 Published in The Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Sep., 1959), pp. 96-103
Copyright 1959 The MIT Press

rkhe"DeZMIOH"Jn
Jbsen 's e Wild 2ck
By Louis CROMPTON
Ibsen's The Wild Duck has been universally recognized as a
masterpiece of modern dramatic art. Two generations of critics,
starting with George Brandes and George Bernard Shaw, have
admired its powerful ironies and brilliant dramaturgy. Finally, it
has been made the subject of a detailed and extremely perceptive
analysis by Hermann Weigand, Ibsen's leading twentieth-century
exponent, in his study The Modern Ibsen. All have seen it as a
curious drama of mixed genre in which elements of satire, comedy,
and tragedy exist together in a state of high tension. Beyond this,
the critics have gone on to explore some particular vein in the
rich texture of the play: its exposure of the dangers of jejune
"idealism," the elaborate comic irony surrounding the figure of
Hialmar Ekdal, the teasing symbolism.
In approaching these problems, no commentator has as yet, how-
ever, weighed fully the significance of the idea of "demoniacism"
which Ibsen introduces briefly in the third act. This is perhaps not
surprising, since its introduction is hedged with even more than
Ibsen's usual equivocation. Relling, the doctor-boarder in the Ekdal
household, uses the concept of the demonic to excuse the conduct
of the drunken theological student, Molvik, before Gregers Werle:
Relling: It comes over him like a kind of possession, and
then I have to go on the loose with him. Mr. Molvik is a
demonic, you see.
Gregers: Demonic?
Relling: Molvik is demonic, yes. . . . And demonic
natures are not made to walk straight through the world;
they must meander a little now and then.
Most readers have tended to overlook this exchange, and for good
reason. Relling in the last act rejects his diagnosis as a piece of
gibberish invented to salve Molvik's self-respect. Molvik's image
of himself as a demonic, according to Relling, functions like old
Ekdal's hunting expeditions in the attic, and Hialmar's "inven-
tion"; it is a compensation for social failure, the "life-lie" that
keeps him, as it keeps the other characters, from the dangers of
paralyzing despair.
The fact is that Relling has provided us with one of the central
clues to the meaning of the play, despite his retraction. The
96
LOUIS CROMPTON 97
demonic in nineteenth-century literature was traditionally the
man whom fate had disappointed or injured (Ahab, Raskolnikov)
or the frustrated or betrayed lover (Manfred, Heathcliff). In him
we find an acute sense of grievance accompanied, first, by a com-
pulsive desire for retribution, and, secondly, by a characteris-
tically fiery defiance of conventional morality. (The demonic is
distinguished from the revolutionary in that he acts from personal
rather than social reasons: his quarrel is more often with fate or
destiny than with society.) Norwegian literature with its tradition
of the untamed Viking hero is particularly fertile in the type;
Ibsen himself uses it in the person of the "Stranger" in The Lady
from the Sea.
In The Wild Duck the idea functions ironically. The maundering
theological student who is supposed to be a "demonic" is a suf-
ficiently ludicrous figure. Nor, on the face of it, could anyone seem
so temperamentally ill-equipped for the role of a "demonic" as
Hialmar Ekdal. Hialmar is inveterately comfort-loving; given an
environment of domestic quiet and an adequate supply of bread,
butter, and beer, he seems the last person in the world to strike a
Byronic pose. His "poetic" nature at first inclines solely to render-
ing sentimental airs on the flute, and to other expressions of what
he calls "my natural melancholy." By the end of the play, how-
ever, this external calm has been shattered, and a new note has
been sounded: that of demonic protest.
There is, in fact, a double irony here. Not only is the rejected idea
of the demonic a clue to Hialmar's development, but Relling him-
self acts the licensed demonic all unconsciously. Because he func-
tions as a raisonneur in exposing the fallacies of Gregers' doc-
trinaire idealism, we should not remain blind to the confusions
and ambiguities of Relling's own character. A failure in his pro-
fession, he rationalizes his dissipations by presenting himself as
the protector of those more derelict than himself. Paradoxically,
part of his own "life-lie" is his image of himself as the creator of
judicious "life-lies": an unmistakable glint of self-esteem shines
behind his contentiousness.
But his most surprising trait and the one most relevant to the
present discussion is his self-dramatization. When Mrs. Sorby an-
nounces that she is going to marry Werle, Relling protests and
she defends herself by retorting: "He hasn't frittered away all
that was good in him, at any rate. A man who does that must take
the consequences." Mrs. Sorby is a realist, one of the few centers
of sanity in the play, and there is more compassion than scorn in
her remark. But she has nevertheless inadvertently presented Rell-
ing with what, at the end of the play, he calls one of "the con-
founded duns that keep pestering us, in our poverty, with the claim
98 The Tulane Drama Review
of the ideal." His reaction is highly neurotic; he mutters the threat
"I shall go out with Molvik this evening," and sees himself licensed
in his debauch by his "demonic" role of rejected lover.
The evolution of Relling's emotional state from apparently cool
detachment to desperation is a kind of prologue to the main drama.
In it, Hialmar passes through a similar sequence of moods. Since
Hialmar's character is "high-flown" and histrionic, and since he
suffers from a fundamental incapacity to see himself as he really
is, we have less a real person than a succession of poses, all basical-
ly inauthentic. There is the "melapcholic" pose of act one, the
"conscientious husband and father" pose of act two, and finally the
"outraged lover" pose he adopts as a result of learning, at the end
of act three, of Gina's earlier relationship with Werle. Determined
to stage a dramatic repentance and forgiveness scene with his wife
as a way of establishing his moral supremacy over her, he com-
plains, after he has explained his new knowledge of the past to her,
that she is not "writhing with penitence and remorse."
Hialmar: Oh, this dull, callous contentment! To me
there is something revolting about it. Think of it-never
so much as a twinge of remorse!
Gina: But tell me, Ekdal-what would have become of
you if you hadn't had a wife like me?
Hialmar: Like you-!
Gina: Yes; for you know I've always been a bit more
practical and wide-awake than you. ....
Hialmar: What would have become of me!
Gina: You'd got into all sorts of bad ways when you first
met me; that you can't deny.
Hialmar: "Bad ways" do you call them? Little do you
know what a man goes through when he is in grief and
despair-especially a man of my fiery temperament.
Hialmar's near speechlessness is a measure of his temporary
confusion. The usually modest and self-effacing Gina has, for
the first time, directly challenged his claim to superiority. More-
over, she does this by insisting on her own practicality, thus ex-
posing the "life-lie" with which Hialmar has, up till this point,
disguised his domestic parasitism-his fantasy of an invention
that will make them rich. Hialmar's next step demonstrates a
fundamental pattern of the play; feeling one pillar of his self-
esteem rudely shaken, he desperately shifts his ground, abandon-
ing his role of model husband in the drama of domestic virtue for
the much more threatening part of the dme damnee in a drama of
romantic passion. (Ibsen has earlier introduced into the play the
image of "The Flying Dutchman"-the demonic sailor who is
LOUIS CROMPTON 99
forced to wander through the world undergoing repeated betrayal
by the women in whom he puts his trust.') Exercising his native
right to see himself as a "mad" Norwegian, Hialmar, from this
point on continually projects himself into the part of the storm-
tossed, fate-embittered hero, desperately defying the Gods. No
development could be more humorous, more pathetically ironic, or
more fraught with tragic possibilities. Another artist would have
weighted the situation in one direction: Ibsen daringly arouses all
three dramatic responses in the audience's mind.
The dynamic pattern of the play now involves the intensification
of this conflict in Hialmar through a series of crises. Soothing and
exacerbating incidents work alternately on his sensibility to pro-
duce the final outburst. And, as is so often the case with Ibsen,
we can see dead and buried events from the past reinacted before
our eyes. For although The Wild Duck at first appears to rely on
Ibsen's famous retrospective technique to a much lesser extent than
plays like A Doll's House and Ghosts-and has for this reason
been called a "spatial" rather than a "temporal" drama-the dif-
ference is perhaps not so complete as critics have generally sup-
posed. It is one of degree rather than of kind. By a careful weigh-
ing of various hints it is possible to see how the present altercation
is repeatedly influenced by events that had taken place fifteen
years earlier.
At that time Hialmar appears to have exploited the role of
demonic following his father's ruin. We hear a faint echo of this
emotional crisis in the opening act. When old Ekdal passes un-
expectedly through the room, Hialmar exclaims dramatically,
"Gregers, I am going! When a man has felt the crushing hand of
Fate, you see- ." In reaction to this blow Hialmar had entered
into a dissolute period which, we may assume, culminated in his
making Gina his mistress. (Such a development would account
for Hialmar's uneasy hedging when Gregers asks him how his en-
gagement came about, and for Gina's real doubt as to Hedwig's
paternity.) Gina is harking back to this time when she tries to calm
Hialmar after his reference to the exigencies of his "fiery tempera-
ment": "Well, well, that may be so, and I've no reason to crow
over you neither; for you turned a moral of a husband, that you
did, as soon as you ever had a house and home of your own."
Reminding him of his material comforts is Gina's time-honored
way of managing Hialmar, but unfortunately this is the very point
on which Gregers has made him newly sensitive, and she leaves
herself open to his self-righteous rejoinder: "In a swamp of deceit,
yes."
Another detail in the "demonic" pattern is the debauch that
takes place between acts four and five: it is both a repetition of
100 The Tulane Drama Review
Hialmar's earlier juvenile revolt and a preparation for the final
catastrophe. Most commentators have failed to weigh its full
significance. Again it is Relling's attitude that is most likely to lead
us astray. When Relling replies to Gregers' pompous question,
"What is your explanation of the spiritual tumult that is now go-
ing on in Hialmar Ekdal?" with the derisive reply: "Devil a bit
of spiritual tumult have I noticed in him," we should not allow
our satisfaction in seeing Gregers worsted to blind us to Relling's
own obtuseness. If Gregers is too idealistic, Relling is too cynical,
and Hialmar becomes a shuttlecock at the mercy of two opponents
of equally limited vision.
For, in reality, there is a spiritual conflict going on within
Hialmar, though it is different from what Gregers supposes. If
Hialmar is a ludicrously theatrical and comically self-deceiving
person he is also extremely sensitive, and the night's dissipation
has unstrung him completely. We catch the full force of his feel-
ings in his sotto voce mutterings: "You're a scoundrel, Relling!-
You're a low fellow!-Ah, you shameless tempter!" and in his
amazing declaration: "I wish I could get some one to stick a knife
into you." The emotion is for once authentic and no mere postur-
ing to excuse himself in Gina's eyes; the extremely unheroic notion
of the hired assassin assures us of this.
Hialmar is, in short, suffering from very considerable guilt feel-
ings. This feeling of guilt leads, in turn, to his over-dramatization
of his sense of betrayal at Gina's hands and to his entertaining the
preposterous fantasy that Hedwig is also leagued against him.
With consummate artistry and touches of real theatrical brilliance
he piles absurdity on absurdity in the face of Gregers' anguished
reassurances:
Gregers: Hedwig will never, never leave you.
Hialmar: Don't be so sure of that. If only they beckon
to her and throw out a golden bait-! and, oh! I have loved
her so unspeakably! I would have counted it my highest
happiness to take her tenderly by the hand and lead her,
as one leads a timid child through a great dark empty
room!-I am cruelly certain now that the poor photog-
rapher in his humble attic has never really and truly been
anything to her. She has only cunningly contrived to keep
on a good footing with him until the time came.
Gregers: You don't believe a word of that yourself,
Hialmar.
Hialmar: That is the terrible part of it-I don't know
what to believe,--I never can know it. But can you really
doubt that it must be as I say? Ho, ho, you have far too
much faith in your claim of the ideal, my good Gregers!
LOUIS CROMPTON 101
If those others came, with the glamor of wealth about
them, and called to the child: -"Leave him: come to us:
here life awaits you-!"
Gregers (quickly): Well, what then?
Hialmar: If I then asked her: Hedwig, are you willing
to renounce that life for me? (Laughs scornfully.) No
thank you! You would soon hear what answer I should
get.
Instantly the fatal pistol shot rings out. The play-acting has ended
in the bloody irony of Hedwig's suicide.
Here anyone else might well be paralyzed by the bizarre dis-
parity between reality and theatrical pretense. However, even
after the catastrophe, when his grief is for a moment real and
touching, Hialmar cannot resist the temptation to play the demonic
hero, particularly since his own guilt can now be regarded as
trivial in the face of heaven's guiltiness:
O thou above-! If thou be indeed! Why hast thou done
this thing to me?
We need only set the hollow rhetoric of this speech against Glouces-
ter's "As flies to wanton boys" or Ahab's "There can be no hearts
above the snow-line" to savor the full irony of the moment. Only
Ibsen would have ended on a note so dramatically powerful and
at the same time so ambiguous. What is an audience to do: weep,
or laugh derisively? Satire and pathos remain inextricably mingled
to the end.
It remains only to say a word about the symbolism of the play.
Critics have been generally agreed on only one point: its perplex-
ing nature. One approach has been to isolate it from the action
and commend it as being in itself "beautiful and poetic"; such a
judgment, however, is open to the rather obvious objection that
the play itself does not strike one as being, in any simple sense,
the one or the other. A contrasting attitude has been to take the
symbolism as completely ironic and to see the drama as a satire on
"symbolmongers." In favor of this point of view it may be said
that it is, after all, Gregers who describes the duck in terms of
religion and that his linking of the duck with "the depths of the
sea" and with a rite of expiation strikes the reader as both morbid
and dangerous. The "depths of the sea" are murky indeed and
"the devil's own mess that grows down there" is not only Hial-
mar's evasions of reality but the mess that Gregers makes of Gina's
orderly domestic arrangements.
Hermann Weigand argues strongly for the second reading:
There can be no doubt that its prime function is to
characterize Gregers; for all this symbolism, applied to
102 The Tulane Drama Review
Hialmar, is grotesquely inept. There is nothing of the wild
duck in his make-up. The more Gregers harps on their
fancied likeness, the more vividly does the incongruity
between Hialmar's domestic rabbit-soul and that creature
of the wilds impinge upon our consciousness. What this
symbolism does is to reveal the mentality of Gregers. We
perceive his penchant for wallowing in symbols to be one
of the most conspicuous traits of his character.2

Weigand abandons the attempt to give a coherent interpretatior

of the symbolism with the remark that it can best be taken as a
kind of elaborate joke, a "subtly compounded sauce imparting to
the whole dish an exotic flavor of particular delight to the aesthe-
tic gourmand."
But is this a solution we can accept? In a play dominated by its
central figure to the extent that The Wild Duck is dominated by
Hialmar we would certainly be predisposed to look for some in-
timate connection between the leading symbol and the leading
character. If the relevance of the wild duck to Hialmar's person-
ality remains merely oblique is that not a serious artistic miscal-
culation on Ibsen's part?
Weigand's mistake seems to have been in regarding the quali-
ties associated with the duck as fixed in some concrete reality out-
side of the drama rather than as subjective creations in the minds
of the characters. The duck is not really wild and free, or rather
the reality of its wildness and its freedom is not at issue; what is
important is that Gregers has projected these qualities upon it.
They represent the very qualities of abstract moral purity he him-
self lusts after. The phrase "a wild goose chase" would communi-
cate the idea of his quest in idiomatic English, with the same con-
notation of the poetic, the illusory, and the absurd.3 To say, more-
over, that the image of the wild duck as Gregers conceives it is
"grotesquely inept" when related to Hialmar is to miss the potent
irony in the fact that it is just this incongruity that is significant.
Given Hialmar's nature, we might expect that any image of him-
self he entertains would be "grotesquely inept" in some fundamen-
tal fashion.
If we approach the play without any preconception as to the
ideal nature of the wild duck we find that its relation to Hialmar
is remarkably direct, for all its subtlety. The duck is, for one
thing, an amusing image of his contented domesticity. There is a
comic moment in act one in which Gregers remarks on Hialmar's
changed appearance: he has grown appreciably "stouter." Hialmar
delicately rejects the epithet and replaces it by a phrase more in
keeping with his image of himself-"more manly." Hedwig's al-
LOUIS CROMPTON 103
most maternal solicitude for Hialmar's comfort is paralleled by
her concern for the duck, and we are later told that the bird, as a
result of this pampering, has become "quite fat."
This analogy serves to point up the unflattering reality of Hial-
mar's life as a domestic parasite at the same time that the quality
of moral aspiration Gregers associates with the duck underlines
the mistake he has made in estimating Hialmar. The Norwegian
word vild has all the complex suggestiveness of its English cognate:
it suggests "uncivilized" in the sense of uncontaminated (as in
Rousseau's image of the noble savage); it suggests desperation and
dissipation, and the further notion of the fantastic, extravagant,
and illusory. Semantically the chord is rich and dissonant. But if
the term vildand is not without a comic overtone in suggesting a
waddling fowl transformed into a symbol of heroic nobility, the
tension between the ambiguous adjective and the modest sub-
stantive becomes even greater, and the comic irony that much
more powerful if we catch in vild the note of demonic protest and
recollect that the play is about a "duck" driven to the point of
histrionic madness.
The real bird, significantly, remains invisible and remote
throughout the play, like some precious household totem. "Not a
hair of its head shall be injured," Hialmar reassures Hedwig
ludicrously enough, at the end of the second act. We hear it only
once, at the height of Hialmar's frenzy in the final scene. "It is the
wild duck quacking," he stops to tell us, and thus adds the last
touch to the grim humor of the occasion. Despite the poignancy of
the drama enacted around it the wild duck remains at the end of
the play unscathed. Ibsen seems to be saying that man's illusions
are invulnerable, no matter how roundly shaken.

NOTES
1 This is Wagner's version of the story. In his opera the hero is a
Norwegian.
2 The Modern Ibsen
(New York: Henry Holt, 1925), p. 163.
3The Norwegian word and ("duck") has a secondary meaning of
"mare's nest" or "illusory discovery."