The Wild Duck (Vildanden in Norwegian) is a play by the Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen. Written in 1884 while he was living abroad in Italy, the process of writing the play initially did not go smoothly for Ibsen, largely due to the political turmoil that defined Norwegian politics in the 1880s. At the time, the Norwegian-Swedish union was divided over parliamentarianism, with the Swedish government being more conservative (leaning towards an autocratic monarchy under their shared king) and the Norwegian government being more liberal and parliamentarian (with the king's power essentially all but eliminated). Ibsen worried that, with all of the feverish debate about the nation's future, an intimate, symbolic, and psychological drama like The Wild Duck would not be received very well. After a visit in the spring from Christopher de Paus (one of his relatives), however, Ibsen was able to receive the news he needed from his family in Skien and found motivation to complete the play, which he did in the summer of that year.
The play is written in 5 acts and largely follows the interplay of two, generational stories. The first story, which has already come to pass long before the narrative present of the play, is that of Old Ekdal and Håkon Werle. Ekdal and Werle used to work in the lumber business together at a plant known as the Höidal works, but things eventually soured when the duo started to fell illegal timber on government-owned land. Though Werle was the real mastermind of the scheme, he framed Ekdal, got Ekdal thrown in prison, and had Ekdal stripped of his military honors. Meanwhile, Werle moved on and became a very wealthy merchant, supporting Ekdal's family behind the scenes out of grief. The second story, then picks up in the wake of these actions with the play's first act, set at a dinner at Werle's estate. Werle's son, Gregers, is angry with his father's past treatment of his mother, and has returned to town at his father's request for an unknown purpose. When the elder Werle tells Gergers of his intent to marry his housemaid—as well as how he has helped set up Ekdal with work and how he set Ekdal's son (Hialmar) up with both a job and former mistress of his—Gregers sets out to ingratiate himself with the Ekdal family and inform them of the true reason they are living the lives that they are. He claims that he wants to help Hialmar realize the deceit underlying his marriage and work, but what Gregers does not know is just how hard the consequences of his idealist philosophy will hit the Ekdals, as well as the tenants who live beneath them. All in all, the play is thus an indictment of naive idealism, as well as a psychological exploration of late 19th-century Norwegian life.
The title of the play makes reference to the most important symbolic element within the drama—a wild duck, gifted from the elder Werle to the Ekdal family, that lives in a garret in the Ekdal's home. Regarding the image of the duck, Henrik Ibsen seems to be drawing inspiration from a poem written by another Scandinavian writer, the famed Norwegian poet Johan Sebastian Welhaven. In Welhaven's poem "Søfuglen" ("The Seabird"; 1836), a story is told of a wild duck that is shot by a hunter and that, in order to avoid capture, dives down into the water to die. Much like the hunter injured the duck in Welhaven's poem, the Ekdal family was injured by the actions of the elder Werle, who had Old Ekdal framed and arrested. This is the basis for one of the play's key conceits or extended metaphors: unlike the duck in Welhaven's poem, however, the Ekdals were not allowed to sink to the bottom of the sea with dignity; rather, they were artificially propped up by Werle himself, and, though the Ekdals themselves do not believe so at the beginning of they play, Gregers Werle believes that this makes the lives they lead a lie. Truth and the lies we necessarily construct to occlude the truth thus become very important aspects of the play's central treatment of idealism, cemented through the metaphor of the central, symbolic duck.
The play is also remarkably important when situated within Ibsen's wider oeuvre. As mentioned, the play represents a departure in Ibsen's style from the work seen in A Doll's House, Ghosts, and An Enemy of the People. Rather than lay out a realistic plot that focuses on the pressure of a specific social issue, here Ibsen focuses on painting a complex and tragicomic portrait of human psychology, centering not only the voice of Gregers, but also those of Hialmar and Hedvig (Hialmar's young daughter with his wife, Gina). Many details that would earlier have been central to establish the consequence and gravity of the drama's actions are here left indeterminate (e.g., the origins of Hedvig's blindness, Hedvig's ultimate fate, and even Gregers' ultimate fate), and symbolism predominates as the main dramatic device. Moreover, one can see from the play's details that there is an intense personal importance for Ibsen in The Wild Duck. For example, one of the central characters of the play, Hedvig, is named for Ibsen's own younger sister, to whom he was close. Many scholars see the plays conciliatory and tender treatment of Old Ekdal as a portrait of Ibsen's own father Knud. Moreover, the location of the Höidal (Høydal) works in the play seems to be a clear reference to Høydalsmo, a territory in Upper Telemark where Ibsen's ancestors lived. Finally, letters from Ibsen to his son Sigurd indicate that the model for Hedvig's appearance was a girl Ibsen himself had met in Gossensaß in 1884—specifically, the 13-year-old Martha Kopf, daughter of the expatriate sculptor Joseph von Kopf.
Upon sending the play to his publisher, Ibsen remarked that he thought the play to be quite different from his previous plays, and critics agreed. Critics consider The Wild Duck, along with Rosmersholm, to be Ibsen's masterpieces, and along with Peer Gynt, Hedda Gabbler, and A Doll's House, it remains one of his most frequently performed works for the stage. It has been adapted into many languages and across various media, including film and television.
