Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder and The Wild Duck

Summary

These three late prose plays, written between 1884 and 1892, show Henrik Ibsen turning the realist drawing-room into a place where buried guilt, borrowed ideals and private fantasies come to light. Each is set in a Norwegian middle-class home, and in each a visitor arrives who breaks an arrangement the household has learned to live with. In The Wild Duck (1884) Gregers Werle, the estranged son of a wealthy merchant, discovers that his old schoolfellow Hjalmar Ekdal, a photographer who dreams of a great invention, married Gina, a former servant whom Gregers's father had seduced, and that the elder Werle has quietly supported the family ever since. Persuaded that a marriage must rest on truth, Gregers tells Hjalmar. Hjalmar turns against Gina and against Hedvig, the fourteen-year-old girl he now suspects is not his daughter. Gregers urges the child to prove her love by sacrificing the wounded wild duck she keeps in the attic; instead she shoots herself. The cynical Dr Relling, who has kept Hjalmar going on what he calls his life-lie, has the last word against the idealist. Hedda Gabler (1890) opens on the return of Hedda, a general's daughter, from her wedding journey with George Tesman, a pedantic scholar hoping for a professorship. Bored, proud and afraid of scandal, she watches Eilert Lovborg, a reformed drunkard and Tesman's academic rival, come back to town with a brilliant manuscript written with the help of Thea Elvsted. Hedda goads him into drinking, burns the lost manuscript as if it were Thea's child, and gives him a pistol, asking him to die beautifully. His squalid death and Judge Brack's threat of blackmail leave her trapped, and she shoots herself. The Master Builder (1892) follows Halvard Solness, an ageing builder who rose by the burning of his wife's family house, an event that cost them their twin sons and that he half believes he willed. He fears the younger generation, keeps his assistant Ragnar Brovik down, and wonders whether he is mad. Hilda Wangel, a young woman who saw him crown a church tower ten years before, arrives to claim the kingdom he once promised her. Under her urging he climbs the tower of his new house to hang the wreath, and falls. Read together, the plays ask what truth, freedom and vocation require, and what happens when a person pursues an ideal without love or humility. They suit mature high school seniors; two end in suicide and one in a fatal fall, and those endings should be discussed rather than passed over. The library attaches the public-domain Gosse and Archer translations of Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder and Eleanor Marx-Aveling's translation of The Wild Duck.

Plot or Argument

• Hedda Gabler, Act First: the returned honeymooners

  Aunt Juliana visits the Tesmans' expensive new villa. Hedda snubs her over a hat, learns from Thea Elvsted that Eilert Lovborg has sobered up and published a successful book, and hears from Judge Brack that Lovborg may compete with Tesman for the professorship on which their finances depend.

• Hedda Gabler, Acts Second and Third: the manuscript

  Hedda and Brack trade veiled talk of a 'triangular friendship'. Lovborg, refusing drink, is provoked by Hedda into joining Brack's bachelor party. Overnight he loses the manuscript of his new book, which Tesman picks up in the street; Hedda keeps it, tells Lovborg nothing, hands him one of her father's pistols, and burns the pages in the stove.

• Hedda Gabler, Act Fourth: the pistol traced

  News comes that Lovborg has died of a wound received not in the temple but in a brothel brawl. Tesman and Thea set out to reconstruct the book from her notes. Brack lets Hedda know that he recognises the pistol and can hold the threat of scandal over her. She plays a wild dance on the piano offstage and shoots herself.

• The Master Builder, Act First: the fear of youth

  In his office Solness keeps the old architect Knut Brovik and his son Ragnar in his service, exploiting Kaia Fosli's infatuation to hold Ragnar. He tells Dr Herdal that his wife Aline believes him mad. Hilda Wangel arrives, reminds him of the day ten years earlier when he climbed the church tower at Lysanger and promised her a kingdom, and says she has come to collect it.

• The Master Builder, Act Second: the burned house

  Solness confides how the fire that destroyed Aline's family home made his fortune, how Aline's fever after the fire led to the twins' deaths, and how he suspects that 'helpers and servers' answer his secret wishes. Hilda calls this the troll in him and urges him to want boldly. He signs Ragnar's drawings to please her.

• The Master Builder, Act Third: castles in the air

  Aline grieves more for her lost dolls and family portraits than she can say for her sons. Solness and Hilda plan castles in the air. Against Aline's and the doctor's fears he climbs the new tower to hang the wreath, seems to wrestle with someone at the top, and falls to his death while Hilda cries out in triumph.

• The Wild Duck, Acts I and II: the dinner and the attic

  At the elder Werle's dinner Gregers learns enough to suspect his father's arrangement with Gina. In the Ekdal flat we see old Lieutenant Ekdal, disgraced in a timber fraud for which Werle escaped blame, and the attic where he, Hjalmar and Hedvig keep rabbits, hens and a wild duck winged by Werle's gun. Gregers takes a room in the house.

• The Wild Duck, Acts III and IV: the claim of the ideal

  Gregers presents his 'claim of the ideal' and tells Hjalmar the truth. Werle's engagement to Mrs Sorby and his failing eyesight, set beside Hedvig's threatened blindness, imply that Hedvig is Werle's child. Hjalmar rejects her and prepares to leave home.

• The Wild Duck, Act V: the shot in the loft

  Relling explains his life-lie therapy to Gregers. Hjalmar dithers, staying for breakfast. Hedvig, told by Gregers to sacrifice the duck, takes the pistol into the loft; a shot is heard, and she is found dead. Relling predicts that Hjalmar's grief will soon become declamation; Gregers says his destiny is to be the thirteenth at table.

Characters

• Hedda Tesman (born Gabler), protagonist of Hedda Gabler

  Daughter of the late General Gabler, newly married to Tesman. Fastidious, bored and terrified of scandal, she wants to shape another person's fate and ends by destroying Lovborg's work and herself.

• George Tesman, scholar

  Hedda's husband, a kindly, fussy historian of medieval domestic crafts, devoted to his aunts and blind to his wife's contempt.

• Eilert Lovborg, Tesman's rival

  A gifted writer who had given up drink with Thea's help; Hedda's 'vine-leaves' image of him collapses when he relapses and dies.

• Thea Elvsted, Hedda's former schoolfellow

  A timid woman who left her husband to follow Lovborg, the co-author of his manuscript and the person who survives to rebuild it.

• Judge Brack, family friend

  A worldly man who seeks a 'triangular' place in the Tesman household and closes the trap on Hedda in the last act.

• Halvard Solness, the master builder

  Self-taught, successful and guilt-ridden, he fears the younger generation, believes his wishes can harm others, and dreads that he is going mad.

• Hilda Wangel, visitor

  A district doctor's daughter from Lysanger who returns after ten years to claim a promised kingdom; she inspires Solness and urges him to his fatal climb.

• Aline Solness, Solness's wife

  Dutiful and joyless since the fire and the loss of her children; she nursed the twins while fevered, 'because it was her duty'.

• Gregers Werle, idealist

  The merchant's son who returns from years at the family works determined to free the Ekdals from falsehood, and whose zeal leads to Hedvig's death.

• Hjalmar Ekdal, photographer

  Gregers's schoolfriend, a self-dramatising man who lives on praise and the dream of an invention that never begins.

• Gina Ekdal, Hjalmar's wife

  Practical, unlettered and loyal, she actually runs the studio and the household; her past with the elder Werle is the secret Gregers exposes.

• Hedvig Ekdal, daughter

  Fourteen years old, losing her sight, devoted to her father and to the wild duck in the loft.

• Dr Relling, lodger and physician

  A drinking doctor who sustains his patients' illusions and opposes Gregers's 'claims of the ideal'.

Lessons

• Truth told without love

  Gregers believes that exposing the past will let the Ekdals build 'a true marriage'. He never asks whether Hjalmar can bear it, what it will cost Gina, or what it will do to a child. Ibsen does not make Relling's alternative attractive either: the life-lie keeps Hjalmar and Molvik comfortable but small. The play sets two errors side by side, an idealism without charity and a pragmatism without hope, and lets students look for a third way in which truth is told for the good of the hearer (Ephesians 4:15).

  • List the reasons Gregers gives for telling Hjalmar. Which of them concern Hjalmar's good and which concern Gregers's own conscience?
  • Relling says ideals and lies are akin 'much as typhus and putrescent fever are'. Is he right about Hjalmar? Is he right in general?
  • What, if anything, should Gregers have done with what he learned?

• Hedda's boredom and the wish to rule a life

  Hedda tells Brack she is 'boring myself to death', and later says she wants for once 'to have power to mould a human destiny'. Her pride will not let her love Tesman, admire Thea or endure the ordinary duties of a household and a coming child. The burning of the manuscript, which she calls Thea's and Lovborg's child, is the darkest image of that will. Ibsen gives no moral lecture, but the play shows how a life ordered only to avoiding ridicule ends in emptiness.

  • What does Hedda fear most: scandal, dullness, or being ruled by someone else? Find a scene for each.
  • Why does Ibsen have Thea, whom Hedda despises, be the one who carries Lovborg's work forward?
  • Brack's last line is that people don't do such things. What does the line reveal about the society Hedda feared?

• Solness's guilt and the 'helpers and servers'

  Solness half believes that his secret wish for the old house to burn brought about the fire, the twins' deaths and his own success. His guilt is real but confused: he will not confess to Aline or make amends to the Broviks, yet he cannot forget. Hilda offers him not repentance but a 'robust conscience' and a bold climb. The play invites a sober question about guilt that is felt but never brought to confession and forgiveness.

  • What exactly does Solness believe he is guilty of? Is any of it true?
  • Compare Hilda's 'robust conscience' with the Christian account of a cleansed conscience (Hebrews 9:14). How do they differ?
  • Is Solness's last climb an act of courage, of pride, or both?

• Symbols that grow out of the household

  Ibsen's symbols are things in the room: a wild duck in a loft full of withered Christmas trees, a pair of General Gabler's pistols, a manuscript, a church tower and a wreath. Each begins as an ordinary object and gathers meaning as characters project their hopes onto it. Learning to trace a symbol through its stage appearances is a good exercise in close reading of drama.

  • Trace the wild duck through the play. Whom does it stand for at different moments: Hedvig, Hjalmar, Old Ekdal, or Gregers himself?
  • Why do the pistols belong to Hedda's father, not her husband?
  • How does a symbol on stage differ from one in a poem or novel?

Context

Ibsen wrote all three plays while living abroad or newly home: The Wild Duck in Rome and Gossensass in 1884, Hedda Gabler in Munich in 1890, and The Master Builder in Christiania (Oslo) after his return to Norway in 1891. They follow the social plays of the late 1870s and early 1880s (A Doll's House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People) and move from public questions toward inner life, guilt and symbol. The world they show is the Norwegian professional and commercial middle class, with its anxieties about appointments, debts, respectability and the new generation.

Composition

The Wild Duck was published by Gyldendal in Copenhagen in November 1884 and first staged in Bergen in January 1885. Hedda Gabler was published in December 1890 and premiered in Munich in January 1891. The Master Builder was published in December 1892 and first performed in 1893. William Archer's introduction in the attached text quotes Ibsen's letters on the composition of Hedda Gabler. Critics have linked Hilda Wangel to Ibsen's friendship with the young Emilie Bardach at Gossensass in 1889; that connection is a biographical reading, not something the play states.

Reception

The plays were translated quickly into English and German. Archer and Gosse's versions helped bring Ibsen to the London stage in the early 1890s, where Hedda Gabler (1891) provoked sharp attacks and equally sharp defences, notably from George Bernard Shaw in The Quintessence of Ibsenism. The Wild Duck puzzled early audiences who had taken Ibsen for a straightforward champion of truth-telling, since here the truth-teller does the damage. All three have remained central to the modern repertory and to the study of realist and symbolist drama.

Comparisons

• A Doll's House and Other Plays

  In A Doll's House (1879) Nora leaves a marriage built on pretence and the play seems to endorse her; in The Wild Duck five years later, the man who forces a family to face its pretence causes a child's death. Reading the two together tests the common view that Ibsen simply champions truth against convention. Hedda, like Nora, is a wife who feels caged, but she lacks Nora's capacity for growth.

• Uncle Vanya

  Chekhov's country house, like the Ekdal flat, holds people sustained by illusions, and Astrov, like Relling, is a tired doctor who drinks and sees through everyone. But Chekhov ends with Sonya's patient hope of rest, where Ibsen ends with a gunshot; the comparison shows two answers to disappointed lives, endurance and catastrophe.

Quotes

Medical Lens

Two doctors stand at the edge of these plays. Dr Relling in The Wild Duck treats his neighbours' self-contempt with sustaining illusions, a 'life-lie' he describes in medical language, and Dr Herdal in The Master Builder is the family physician whom Solness suspects of judging him mad. Solness's fear of insanity, his belief that his wishes act at a distance, and Hilda's talk of trolls are dramatic material, not a case history; any label for his state is a reading. Lovborg's relapse into drink, Aline's fever after the fire and its effect on her nursing, and Hedvig's hereditary eye disease all carry plot weight. Two of the plays end in suicide, and Hedvig's death in particular is presented as a child's response to adult cruelty; teachers should handle it with care.

• Hedda Gabler, Acts Second and Third

  Lovborg, who has given up drink, is goaded by Hedda into taking punch and attending Brack's party; Tesman reports the night of drinking that followed.

  Alcohol
• Hedda Gabler, Act Fourth

  Hedda's suicide offstage and Brack's closing line.

  Suicide
• The Master Builder, Act First

  Solness tells Dr Herdal that Aline believes him mad and that the doctor has been set to watch him.

  Madness Psychosis Physicians Doctors
• The Master Builder, Act Second

  Solness tells Hilda that after the fire Aline fell into a fever that affected her milk, and that the twin boys she insisted on nursing did not survive.

  Childbirth Maternal Fever Infection Grief
• The Wild Duck, Act II

  Hjalmar tells Gregers that Hedvig is in danger of losing her sight and that the condition is probably hereditary, a detail that later points to Werle's paternity.

  Heredity Degeneration Disability Deformity
• The Wild Duck, Act V

  Relling describes himself as 'a sort of a kind of doctor', explains his life-lie remedy for Hjalmar and for Molvik's 'dæmonic' fantasy, and examines Hedvig's wound.

  Physicians Doctors Philosophy AS Therapy Suicide

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write the conversation between Gina and Hjalmar a year after Hedvig's death. Decide whether Relling's prediction has come true.

• Essay

  Gregers and Relling each claim to be healing the Ekdals. Write an essay judging both 'cures' and proposing what an honest and charitable friend would have done.

• Classroom

  Stage the last two minutes of The Master Builder with three students: Hilda, Ragnar and Aline. Discuss afterwards what each character sees at the top of the tower.

• Fiction

  Write Thea Elvsted's preface to the reconstructed book she and Tesman publish after Lovborg's death.

Further Reading

• A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen

  The 1879 play whose apparent praise of truth-telling The Wild Duck complicates.

• Ghosts, Henrik Ibsen

  The 1881 play on inherited disease and hidden family sins, a natural companion to Hedvig's inherited blindness.

• The Quintessence of Ibsenism, George Bernard Shaw

  Shaw's 1891 polemic, the most influential early English reading of Ibsen as a critic of ideals.

• Henrik Ibsen, Michael Meyer

  Standard English-language biography, with detailed accounts of the composition and first performances of each play.