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.

Top 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).

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified 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.

• Hedda Gabler, Act Fourth

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

• The Master Builder, Act First

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.