A Psychoanalytical Reading of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck

Abstract

Ibsen, as a playwright, as Thomas F. Van Lann comments, has been accused of deceiving his audience regarding the matters of his play- both its central business and its manner; particularly in his style and mode. While reviewing Ibsen through a Lacanian lens, critics such as Oliver W. Gerland III, argue that reading Ibsen is a task of revising interpretative paradigms and that Ibsen’s protagonist revises strategies for enacting the “self”. The Wild Duck (1884), has been critiqued as a poignant drama of illusions, where an idealistic outsider’s gratuitous truth-telling destroys a family. This paper argues that Ibsen’s texts stage the Oedipal crisis in a revised form by taking recourse to Lacan’s re-reading of Freud, where he suggests a paradigmatic triad as a representation of the displaced form of familar Oedipal structure. For Lacan, the Oedipal structure is not a simple love for the mother and hatred for the father, rather it places the child in the realm of the Symbolic, i.e its linguistic association with the father. He argues that the self is rooted in the mirror stage and the infant’s identification with images of coherence and stability- e.g its own reflected image. This paper argues that Ibsen locates his drama in the simples of the Oedipal complex, but revises it. Hjalmar Ekdal’s Imaginary web is disrupted when the idealist Gregers Werle breaks down the Imaginary, invokes the Symbolic authoritarian “no”, and substitutes it with the retelling of Hakon Werle. This paper seeks to accentuate Gregers’ idealism as what Lacan termed as obsessional neurosis and a display of his own lacking in preserving his Imaginary i.e playing a father to his friend and maintaining Hjalmar’s heroic image in his mind, finally resulting in little Hedvig’s suicide.