Summary
Act 2 opens at the apartment of the Ekdals, a decent-sized room with plain but comfortable furnishings that doubles as a photography studio. Hialmar's wife Gina is busy with sewing, and his daughter Hedvig is busy reading (as she does so, she covers both her eyes and her ears). The two discuss how much the family has spent on butter recently, and then talk about how nice the party at Werle's house must be (and what an honor it was for Hialmar to be invited). Old Ekdal then enters, checks briefly on something in a back room, and goes into his own room to get drunk. Gina then tells Hedvig that she wishes they had been able to sublet the empty room in their apartment, but Hedvig tells her that it is better to have good news saved for a day when it is really needed.
Hialmar returns home, and Gina and Hedvig ask him a great deal of questions about the fancy dinner he just attended. Hialmar then tells them about his rejection of the chamberlains' request to declaim, and he tells them about the way in which Mrs. Sörby teased the chamberlains with her comparison of the chamberlains to wine (requiring "sunshine" or court favor). The family, and in particular, Ekdal, enjoy his regaling. It is clear that, though the Ekdals do well enough to support themselves, they are generally without luxuries: Hialmar's evening coat was borrowed, only bread and butter is available in the house, and Hialmar has brought the menu of the dinner as a gift for Hedvig, so that she can experience the luxuries of the dishes vicariously through its descriptions. Old Ekdal, meanwhile, comments on a yet unknown project with Hialmar taking place in the garret of their apartment (i.e., the back room he checked on), saying that something has "gone into the basket" (23). He then retreats into his room to drink.
Gina and Hialmar then start to talk about the family photography business. Though they advertise their business as much as they can afford, they still cannot get much business. This leads to a conversation in which Hialmar acts like a martyr, refusing all food and beer to save money for his family. Eventually, however, Hedvig and Gina calm Hialmar down, and Hialmar agrees to play some flute music.
Just then, however, someone arrives at the door—Gregers Werle. Gregers says that he has left his father's home and is staying in a hotel. Hialmar acquaints Gregers with his family, introducing him to Hedvig and indicating that, like Werle himself, Hedvig suffers from a hereditary disease that causes encroaching blindness. Old Ekdal then comes out drunk, dressed in his former military cap, discusses hunting with Gregers, and reminisces with Gregers about his time at the Höidal works.
When Gregers implies that there is not much opportunity for Ekdal to hunt anymore, Ekdal rebuts him by showing him exactly what is in the garret: a full hunting ground, complete with a variety of animals. Prized most among them is a wild duck, gifted to then by Werle after he injured it on a hunting trip. When his shot failed to kill the duck, it attempted to dive to the bottom of the lake and die, but Werle's hunting dog saved it. This story has a profound effect on Gregers: we eventually learn that he sees the wild duck as a symbolic parallel to the story of how his father bother ruined and saved the Ekdal family.
After seeing the wild duck, Gregers asks if he can rent a room from the Ekdal family. Gina resists his entreaty, but Hialmar enthusiastically agrees to rent him the room, telling him also of his downstairs neighbors Relling (a fiendish doctor) and Molvik (a drunken tutor). Gregers resolves to move in the following day, and in his final lines of dialogue with the family, it becomes clear what Greger's aforementioned mission is: he wants to open Hialmar's eyes to the quagmire of lies into which he has been plunged by Werle.
As the act ends, Gina then voices her hesitation to Hialmar about renting the room to Gregers and angering Werle, to which Hialmar responds that they are not dependent on Werle and have to start working towards financial independence for their family.
Analysis
Act 2 picks up where Act 1 left off, taking the already established issues from the prior act and situating them firmly within the milieu of the Ekdal household, which will be our focus for the rest of the drama. More than this, however, it importantly foreshadows and echoes elements from the later and earlier acts of the play, respectively. Impressively, this is clear even from the stage directions that set up the tableau, before any words are spoken by either Gina or Hedvig. For one, as the small miscellany of the Ekdal studio/apartment come into focus, we see that it is, more than anything else, a precarious or transitory place to live. The family occupies the same space as their business, a material testimony to the fact that the Ekdal's family life is inseparable from their financial concerns. The small details that are presented in this tableau—such as the "camel's-hair pencils" and "bottles of chemicals"—also situate the drama to come firmly within the realm of the realistic and the everyday (17). As discussed elsewhere in this Note, such elements allow the tragicomedy of the larger play to be crystallized as they accrue.
In addition, just as the play here turns towards an intimate yet tragicomic portrait of the Ekdal family, we see each of Hialmar's housemates—his wife and daughter—in clearer focus. Hedvig, for her part, is reading but covering her eyes and ears, a symbolic evocation of her isolation, naiveté, and deafness to the conditions around her (and also, unmistakably, a foreshadowing of her encroaching blindness). Gina, on the other hand, is occupying herself with sewing (emblematic of the domestic realm), and when she speaks, she reveals her humble social origins and coarseness through her poor grammar and heavy lapses into malapropism (e.g., "he never reads hissself in the evening") (17).
After these elements are established in the initial setting of the second act, we then see some magnification of the importance of class and finances to the Ekdal family. For example, Gina and Hedvig calculate the money they have spent on butter; upon his return, Hialmar first mentions the way he stuck it to the chamberlains by refusing to perform for them; Hialmar's coat itself was borrowed from one of his downstairs tenants; and finally, when Gina discusses the dire state of their business, Hialmar becomes despondent, refusing food and drink until Hedvig is able to coax him into enjoying himself briefly. Such discussion here in the second act reinforces the idea that the Ekdal family lives on the edge of poverty (established by the precariousness of their lodging and the destitution of Old Ekdal's appearance), but it also provides early evidence that perhaps Gregers' vision of Hialmar is not entirely true. Gregers, after all, believes that Hialmar has been rescued by his father's "charity" to live in a false domesticity, but what kind of domesticity is truly had by the Ekdals? Moreover, Gregers sees Hialmar as an upright and fundamentally honest person, but we see here inklings of his poor work ethic and tendency to get upset quickly with those who are close to him. His sadness and sentimentality are also reinforced by the "plaintive" song he plays on his flute for Hedvig just before Gregers arrives (25).
When Gregers shows up, then, the tempo of the drama accelerates as the issue of class is passed up in favor of a larger focus on the play's central, specific issues (i.e., Werle's deception, Gina's past). When Gregers asks about Hedvig, we get the first explicit confirmation that Hedvig is going blind—though she does not yet know it. This not only becomes a major plot point later in the drama, but it also echoes the way in which Gina and Hedvig had earlier discussed selectively telling the truth to Hialmar (i.e., regarding the renting of their extra room). Hialmar's comparison of Hedvig to "a little bird" (26) also foregrounds the symbol of the wild duck, which is just about to be introduced. When Ekdal enters the room just after, the issues of the past and Old Ekdal's connection to nature are brought up. Of course, the past and its weight in the present is a central feature of the play, and the issue of nature is also significant insofar as it provides a window into the ways in which the Ekdal's current life might be seen as artificial or "unnatural."
The appearance of the wild duck itself is a turning point in its own right. Though Gregers has by this point already resolved to tell Hialmar the truth about his family history, we see in his dissection of the wild duck's import even more motivation for him to uncover what he sees as treachery on Werle's part. This also establishes the wild duck itself as the central image in the play, with strong symbolic parallels to each central member of the Ekdal family. As Gregers sees it, the wild duck's injury by his father corresponds to his father's framing of Old Ekdal. Afterwards, the duck's choice to dive down to the bottom of the lake/sea and die an honorable death was denied by Werle's hunting dog, a move that Gregers sees as parallel to Werle's later charity to the very people whose lives he has ruined. Based on Gregers' perception, then, Hialmar could be a clear parallel for the wild duck (unknowingly supported and living in a false captivity after the fatal shot of his father's infamy), but so could Old Ekdal (himself injured by Werle, then supported by him with copy work). Even so, Gregers' assertion that he should like to be a "clever dog" himself implies that he believes the Ekdals to still metaphorically be trapped at the waters' bottom, in need of saving (33). Perhaps because he wants to situate himself as the savior dog, Gregers denies the salvation that his father has evidently provided to the Ekdals, casting their situation as desperate when they may very well be living contentedly. This is a very important dynamic to understand in the play, since it fundamentally calls into question the tension between blissful ignorance/deception and painful truth that drives Gregers as a person. One final note is that, in the following act, Gregers' conversations with Hedvig reveal that she is also an apt symbolic parallel to the wild duck, a theme that is thoroughly developed in the last two acts.
