All posts tagged illegitimacy

The Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen (1884)

‘Oh really! There’s no end to all these comings and goings!’
(Hjalmar Ekdal accurately summarising the busyness of an Ibsen play)

The backstory is carefully concealed and takes two acts to leak out but it is this: a generation ago Old Ekdal and Haakon Werle were in business together. Something happened whereby Old Ekdal was sent to prison, to do hard labour, and emerged a broken man, whereas Werle went on to become a business tycoon, managing a booming timber company. The play starts 20 or so years later and focuses on the sons of these two men, Hjalmar Ekdal, Old Ekdal’s son (who has become a photographer and lives in shabby poverty with his uneducated, former-serving girl wife Gina) – and rich old Werle’s son, Gregers Werle, who has grown up in a wealthy household but has a yen to improve the world. Feeling guilty for his unspecified role in Old Ekdal’s fate, Werle has given broken old Ekdel a sinecure of a job ‘copying’ papers which helps keep the Ekdal household afloat, but otherwise keeps him hidden away like a shameful secret…

Cast

  • Werle – merchant, factory owner and so on
  • Gregers Werle – his son
  • Mrs Sörby – Werle’s housekeeper who he plans to marry
  • Old Ekdal, broken, alcoholic fantasist
  • Hjalmar Ekdal – Old Ekdal’s son, a photographer
  • Gina Ekdal – Hjalmar’s wife
  • Hedvig – their daughter, 14 years old
  • Dr Relling – a doctor who lives downstairs from the Ekdals
  • Molvik – a former theology student who lives downstairs from the Ekdals
  • Graberg – book-keeper to Werle
  • Pettersen – servant to Werle
  • Jensen – hired waiter

Act 1

A grand dinner at Werle’s house which he is giving for his son, Gregers. The pair, father and son, don’t get on and only communicate via business letters. Werle is cross that Gregers invited his old schoolfriend Hjalmar because it took the number of guests to unlucky 13. We are introduced to two or three of the guests who are portrayed as fat and greedy (and named only as types – the bald guest, the fat guest, the short-sighted guest) although it is also repeated that they move in ‘Court circles’, strongly suggesting the ambience of wealth and influence which old Werle operates in.

The play starts in a studiedly indirect way: instead of going straight in with the main characters we are shown below-stairs chat between Werle’s servants, gossiping about the old man, about his reputation for being a lad when he was young and about the fate of Old Ekdal, hiw one-time business partner who ended up in prison.

The main events in Act 1 are:

1. Gregers talks to his old school-friend Hjalmar who he hasn’t seen for years and discovers that a) his training as a photographer was funded by Werle and b) Hjalmar married a former servant woman at the Werle house, Gina Hansen.

Interrupting this, Old Ekdal himself appears, he’s been working late with a colleague named Graberg the book-keeper and, the other gates being locked, the only way the pair can exit is via the living room where the grand party is happening. Old Ekdal’s appearance is like Banquo’s ghost, all the guests fall silent as he shuffles across the room and his own son, Hjalmar, turns to the fireplace in order to ignore him. Shame all round…once he’s gone conversation picks up and Mrs Sörby promises to play the piano to entertain the guests.

After interacting badly with the rich sophisticated guests (very pointedly he is made not to understand the idea that ‘vintage’ wines are older and more valued), Hjalmar makes his apologies and leaves. The other guests are being entertained by Werle’s housekeeper Mrs Sörby in the back room, which allows for:

2. A confrontation between Gregers and his father in which all kinds of things come out:

  • it was Werle who set Hjalmar up as a photographer, out of guilt at ruining his father
  • around the same time Werle fixed up for Hjalmar to marry the former maid Gina and this was because…
  • Gina was just the latest female servant Werle had been carrying on with, then tired off and so dismissed from his service, sent her home to live with her mother, but engineered her marriage to Hjalmar
  • Werle’s wife, Gregers’s mother, knew all about her husband’s infidelities and told Gregers

As to why Werle has given this whole party for his son, and invited so many outsiders, Werle says he wants to make Gregers a business opportunity, he wants to bring him into the family firm as a partner. But Gregers discerns the Machiavellian scheme beneath this – Werle is going to marry his housekeeper Mrs Sörby and so he set up this party because … he wanted to present a respectable face to the important people in his community – this is why the guests Gregers doesn’t know are at ‘his’ party, because it’s nothing to do with him, it’s to do with his father wanting to put on a show of happy father and son and, by implication, of his son happily accepting his (Werle’s) forthcoming marriage to Mrs Sörby. A tableau for public consumption.

Werle has, typically, used his son, as he always has, and as he always used and betrayed his mother. Gregers is beyond angry, he overflows with contempt for his father, who feels it.

In their final skirmishing Werle renews his offer of a partnership in the business but Gregers turns this down, revealing that he has just discovered a new purpose in life. The rest of the play reveal that this purpose is to save and redeem the much-abused Ekdel family…

Act 2

The setting switches to Hjalmar Ekdel’s photography studio, which is also the main room for Hjalmar and Gina. It’s the same evening as Werle’s dinner. Gina is sitting with their 14-year-old daughter Hedwig. Their conversation is designed to show how poor they are, not illiterate peasant poor but scrimping to make ends meet. Gina talks about the high cost of butter and both are thrilled that they’ve managed to let their spare room which will bring in a bit of extra money.

(Apparently, in the original language Gina’s speech is littered with grammar mistakes and malapropisms i.e. getting words mixed up, to indicate her lack of education, though English translations struggle to convey this.)

Old Ekdal appears with a bundle of documents to copy and shuffles across to his room. Although he tries to hide it Gina and Hedvig realise he’s got a bottle of booze. Years in prison broke him. He is an alcoholic.

Hjalmar arrives, he shows off some of the knowledge he acquired at the party (the banter about vintages) which impresses the girls but Hedvig had been telling Gina how excited she was because he promised to bring her something, but he forgot. He rummages around for the menu from the party to give her but Hedvig can’t help crying with disappointment.

Then Gregers arrives. He is rather shame-faced in front of Gina. His polite enquiries reveal that Hedvig is 14 and Gina and Hjalmar married 15 years ago. I think we are meant to deduce that Hedvig is old Werle’s child i.e. the old man got his serving maid pregnant, sent her home to her mum, who then engineered for her to be married off to the naive Hjalmar.

When she is out of the room fetching their guest a beer, Gina and Hjalmar also reveal that Hedvig has a degenerative disease of the eyes. They haven’t told her but a doctor has confirmed it. When Hjalmar says the doctor said it was hereditary Gregers starts in a way that suggests he realises it was inherited from his father. As in Ghosts, the implication seems to be that sexually transmitted infections are hereditary, which is incorrect. The symptoms of an STI such as syphilis would only be passed to Hedvig if the mother, Gina, had them but here she is apparently right as rain.

The act ends when, as part of telling them about the apartment, Gina and Hjalmar mention that there’s a spare room they want to let out. Now in fact, before the men arrived home, Gina and Hedvig had been gleefully celebrating that they’d managed to let the room and would thus be generating family income but had agreed not to tell Hjalmar till the following day. The result of this decision is that Hjalmar doesn’t know the spare room is let and when Gregers asks if he can have it, Hjalmar promptly says yes, although the girls look at each in mortification.

But the most important part of the act is when Old Man Ekdal insists on letting Gregers into their secret – this is that the entire back part of the loft, which they reveal by rolling apart two sliding doors, is a kind of menagerie: it contains hutches for rabbits and hens along with loads of pigeon roosts.

And Old Ekdal proudly displays his latest acquisition, a wild duck which was shot by Gregers’s father during a shoot, which was winged and fell into the lake and down into the water but was rescued by a plucky hunting dog. They took it back to Werle’s grand house where it didn’t thrive to Werle ordered it killed but his servant, Pettersen, who we met in Act 1, is friendly with Old Ekdal and saved it and passed it on to him. And now it’s been given pride of place in a special manger, here in the Ekdal attic.

Act 3

Same scene, the main room at Hjalmar Ekdal’s which is to be the setting of all the remaining scenes. Next morning. Hjalmar is grumpily getting on with touching up the most recent photographs. He snaps at Gina who has booked a couple to come and have their photo done. It becomes plain that he is a difficult man to live with, partly because he feels the weight of so many responsibilities.

Gregers and Hedvig: Gregers finds himself alone with Hedvig and finds out more about her, discovers that Hjalmar has stopped her going to school (because of the strain on her sight, though she doesn’t know that), promised to home school her but hasn’t found the time. Instead she helps out round the house and spends her spare time in the back room which, besides being a menageries is a lumber room full of old books which she loves to read or rather gaze at the pictures. Hjalmar realises she is a sensitive child full of untapped potential.

Gregers and Hjalmar: a lengthy exchange in which Hjalmar reveals that he doesn’t like photography and leaves most of that to Gina. His heart lies in his inventions. Some of this is tinkering, for example making not just the sliding doors which partition off the menagerie but also a kind of curtain which can be raised from the floor. He also likes stripping down, oiling and fixing his father’s antique rifle. He is, in other words, good with his hands, not with the aesthetics of photography.

And it’s now that Hjalmar reveals to Gregers he’s working on a marvellous invention which will restore the good name of the Ekdel family name. It’s only commitment to this project which keeps his head up above all these ‘petty things’ i.e. the shabby life he is forced to lead. We don’t get any detail about the invention but a strong feeling that Hjalmar is bonkers.

He also has a pistol, in fact to Gregers’ alarm he fires it in the menageries then, realising Hjalmar is here, emerges to explain that he indulges his father’s whim and fantasy that he is a still a proud lieutenant in the army. He places the gun on a shelf telling Hedvig to be careful with it as it still has a round in the chamber.

You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to instantly suspect that a loaded gun, on a stage, must inevitably go off. From this point onwards the only question is who is going to get killed.

In fact talk of the gun triggers a monologue explaining how brave and proud Lieutenant Ekdel was in his prime, a hunter of bears, a commander of man but reveals that when he was sentenced there was a moment when he was alone with his pistol and put it to his head but… failed to pull the trigger. And then, even more upsettingly, tells Gregers about the time that he, Hjalmar, the son of a disgraced army officer, crushed by circumstance, also held the gun against his breast, but also bottled out – despite all his ill fate, determined to live (p.166).

Trying to make light of all this, Gregers says there’s something of the wild duck about Hjalmar, what with being shot and winged, and mauled by a hunting dog and plunged down to the depths of a lake. He continues the metaphor, telling his friend he is living in a poisoned atmosphere, a swamp (from which Gregers obviously means to save him) but Hjalmar becomes offended and asks him to stop (p.167).

Lunch. Gina has invited to the two men who live downstairs, Dr Relling, a doctor, and Molvik, formerly a student of theology. Lunch is, of course, the setting for several further revelations. Just as the two guests from downstairs are greedily tucking in, Old Ekdal emerges from the loft with a fresh rabbit skin, announcing that he’s just killed, skinned and salted a rabbit. Tender-stomached Molvik makes to vomit and rushes out the room.

But the main revelation is Dr Relling telling everyone that, when he was young, Gregers used to go among the cottages of the labourers up at his father’s works preaching about ‘the claim of the ideal’. In other words, Gregers is an inveterate idealist, preacher and saver of souls. This adds depth to his attempts to heal the Ekdel household.

Hjalmar has just offended everyone, especially Gina, by telling them he doesn’t like the poisonous atmosphere, when there’s a knock at the door. Just as in ‘An Enemy of the People’, the set is busier than Piccadilly Circus.

To everyone’s surprise it is the villain of the piece, old Håkon Werle. He asks to see his son in private so the others vacate the stage. Werle asks Gregers if there’s any chance of his returning home or accepting the partnership in the firm to which his son, inevitably, says No. What does he expect to achieve here? To open Hjalmar’s eyes to the truth. And does he expect Hjalmar to thank him for having his eyes opened?

Lastly the father asks his son if he’s going to return up to the works? No, he regards himself as having quit his employ. How is he going to live? Oh he has a few savings which will last as long as it takes. This exchange strongly confirms the sense that Gregers is going to carry out his mission then kill himself.

His father leaves, the other characters re-enter the stage and Gregers invites Hjalmar for a walk, he has a few things to tell him. Both Relling the doctor and Gina tell him not to go but Hjalmar asks what possible harm could there be?

Well, the audience realises, the vast harm of having the bottom ripped out of his world.

Act 4

Later the same day, Gina had handled the appointment with the couple who wanted to be photographed and is getting anxious about Hjalmar. He arrives home and is a changed man. Gregers has foolishly and selfishly told him everything. For a start he forgets that it’s his daughter’s 15th birthday tomorrow. When she mentions the wild duck he rashly says he wishes he could wring its neck which reduces her to tears. He hugs her and sends her off for her evening walk.

This allows Hjalmar to confront Gina with all the lies she’s told. She clarifies that she didn’t sleep with Werle when she was in her service, it was afterwards, when she’d gone back to live with her mother and her mother encouraged her to in order to make money. So Hedvig is old Werle’s child.

One last point: Gina has always done the household accounts so Hjalmar’s never realised how much money Werle contributed to them, allegedly pay for Old Ekdal’s copying work. Hjalmar thought he was supporting his family but turns out even this is a lie.

Gregers, in his idealistic stupidity, knocks and comes in expecting to find a scene of seraphic sweetness and light so is disappointed to find the couple in deep gloom. Gina curses him. Relling the doctor comes in, quickly learns the situation and warns them all that it’s the children who suffer most in broken marriage.

At which point there’s another knock on the door and it’s Mrs Sörby. She’s come to say goodbye because she’s going up to the works at Höidal because she’s getting married to old Werle. They all react surprised but Dr Relling reminisces when they knew each other when they were younger. At least Werle won’t beat her up like her first husband, now dead. Gregers toys with telling his father his new wife once had a thing for Dr Relling but Mrs Sörby says she’s told her husband-to-be everything about her past, no secrets at all.

She reveals she will be a useful housemeet to Werle considering that he’s going blind. Now we see the genetic link between Werle and Hedvig.

Hjalmar now invokes the same stupid idea Dr Relling accused Gregers of peddling to the labourers, ‘the claim of the ideal’, and in this spirit announces to Mrs Sörby that he pledges to pay off the entire ‘debt of honour’ i.e. all the money Werle has given to his household under cover of paying Old Ekdal. This is, obviously, a stupid and impractical thing to do.

Re-enter Hedvig who is girlishly excited because she met Mrs Sörby going out who gave her an advance present for her birthday, a letter. When she shows it the others realise it is addressed in Old Werle’s hand. Hjalmar opens it and it is a splendid gift from old Werle; that Old Ekdal need do no more work but will be awarded a pension of 100 crowns a month and when he dies, this sum will pass to Hedvig! Hedvig is, of course, thrilled and says she’ll give it to her mummy and daddy and asks why they aren’t happy.

Gregers asks Hjalmar what kind of man he is and, in effect, goads him until Hjalmar calmly tears the letter in two. He then asks Gina why the old man encouraged her to marry him and Gina reluctantly explains that Werle expected to be able to call by and shag her after her marriage. Hjalmar asks Gina point blank whether Hedvig is his child and she says she doesn’t know.

Hjalmar says he can’t stay in the same house a moment longer. Gregers says he must stay in order to win through to ‘that sublime mood of magnanimity and forgiveness’ which he is so obsessed with promoting, like all zealots, like all interfering busybodies.

Hedvig comes out of the kitchen as Hjalmar prepares to leave, he refuses to hug her, she clings on to him screaming, he can’t bear it, pushes her away and walks out. Gina says he’ll go fetch him back and exit.

This leaves Gregers along with Hedvig. She doesn’t understand why her Daddy has left, was it something she did? She mentions the wild duck and Gregers decoys the conversation onto that. Turns out she’s added the wild duck to her regular evening prayer for her father. Gregers makes the preposterous proposal that Hedvig should kill the wild duck as a sacrifice in order to win her father back, to show that she is ready to make the biggest sacrifice in her world for his love.

Gina comes back saying Hjalmar’s gone out with Dr Relling and Molvik on the piss, and ruing the interference of clever strangers.

Act 5

Next morning, heavy snow on the skylights. Gina discovers Hjalmar did go out with the boys the night before and spent the night at Dr Relling’s i.e. downstairs.

Dr Relling arrives and delivers a blistering reality check. he tells Gregers he has a bad case of inflamed scruples; he is addicted to finding heroes to worship who are not heroes at all, like this Hjalmar who was very plausible at college because he was handsome and could quote other people’s ideas and words but was always a hollow man.

Dr Relling goes on to deliver what may be the play’s Big Idea which is the crucial importance of the LIFE-LIE. This is the lie about ourselves which enables us to go on living. Dr Relling has invented a category, the demoniac, to describe Molvik, who wears it as a badge of pride which explains his behaviour. Old Ekdal has invented his own life-lie and treats the loft with its old Christmas trees and rabbits as if it’s a vast forest which the he-man hunter bravely treks through. And Hjamar had a life-lie of himself as Provider for his family who was on the cusp of making the Great Invention which would free his family, until Gregers came along to destroy it.

Gregers disapprovingly asks if Dr Relling equates his ‘life-lie’ with Gregers’ notion of ‘the ideal’ and Dr Relling says, Damn right he does.

Hedvig enters. When Gregers points out that she hasn’t killed the wild duck, Hedvig very sensibly says she woke up this morning and it seemed like a silly idea. Ah, says Gregers, that is because you are a mere child and haven’t learned the ‘joyous spirit of self-sacrifice’. He really is a sanctimonious wanker.

Gregers leaves and Old Ekdal enters from the loft. Hedvig gets him to describe how he would go about hunting and shooting a wild duck – in the chest, that’s the place, he explains. After he’s pottered out Hedvig goes over to the shelf where Hjalmar left the pistol with one bullet in it and is touching it when Gina enters and she quickly turns away.

Hjalmar knocks and enters. Hedvig runs crying over to him but he cruelly pushes her away. He’s only come for his scientific books. (It’s a telling detail that Gina tells him these books a) lack spines i.e. they’re knackered and old but at the same time b) haven’t had the pages cut i.e. he’s never read them. The entire inventor thing is a palpable life-lie.)

When Hjalmar goes to go into a bedroom to look for his autobiography and other papers he sees Hedvig again. She comes out and tries to cling to her but he pushes her away. It’s then that she starts to think about the wild duck, about Gregers’s suggestion to sacrifice it. She goes to the shelf, takes down the pistol, hides it and sneaks backstage into the loft without her parents noticing, as they fuss and fret about which suitcase Hjalmar can use to take his stuff etc.

Gina asks if he wants to take his flute but he says no, just the pistol. They both look for it but can’t find it and assume the old man’s gone off with it.

Gina is admirably restrained. With the common sense of the uneducated she doesn’t make a scene or listen to any of Hjalmar’s fluff about the ideal and instead makes him a hot breakfast and cup of coffee. Erst fressen, den der Moral. Even as he craps on with his typically male grandiloquence and self-flattering visions of going from door to door in the snow asking someone to give him shelter, Gina tops up his coffee, brings him butter and feeds the animal, and the animal softens and asks, well, would it be possible for him to maybe bunk down in the living room for a few days. A process of healing the mind through the body.

In a similar spirit he comes across the letter from old Werle which he tore up yesterday, fingers it a bit, then asks Gina to bring some glue and more paper, and pastes it back together. After all, what right does he have to deprive someone else (his father) of their property.

Unfortunately the meddling imbecile Gregers arrives but Hjalmar is tired of his guff. When Gregers tells him he has his invention to live for, Hjalmar pooh-poohs that there’ll ever be an invention; anything good has already been invented. He reveals it was Dr Relling who gave him the idea of making a Great Invention in Photography, at which Gregers and we the audience go, aha – so this was the life-lie Dr Relling gave him – and that it made Hjalmar intensely happy to have one.

Now his life is in ruins. Above all he wonders whether Hedvig has ever loved him or whether she’s overheard Mrs Sörby and the other women talking, has realised she isn’t Hjalmar’s child, and has played him for a fool, just waiting for the opportunity to get money from her real grandfather and leave. What if Werle and Mrs Sörby come along and entice her away with a better life. Now his love for his daughter has been crushed.

It’s at this point that the gunshot we’ve been waiting for ever since we saw the pistol rings out. Gregers explains that Hedvig got her grandfather to shoot the thing that means most to her, the wild duck, in order to prove her love for her father. Hjalmar takes this at face value and is transformed, saying everything’s going to be alright now.

Unfortunately Old Ekdal comes out his bedroom door wondering what the shot was about. Gregers is even more impressed, that Hedvig has shot the wild duck by herself, but when they throw open the door to the animal loft they, of course, see her lying on the floor.

They carry her out and lay her on the table while Gina shouts down the stairs for Dr Relling who comes running and, after an examination, declares her dead, shot in the heart.

Hjalmar is thrown into an absolute delirium of anguish, if only he could call her back just for a minute, just long enough to tell her how much he infinitely loves her, oh God God, why won’t you allow me to tell her etc.

They carry her body into her bedroom for privacy and Gina tells Hjalmar that now they are the child’s parents, united in sorrow.

Dr Relling tells Gregers it was suicide. The powder burn on the dress indicates it was pressed right up against her chest. Gregers tries to salvage something by saying at least the child’s death will have an ennobling effect on the parents. Dr Relling witheringly replies, Give it nine months. Hjalmar is no poet or hero. He will spend the rest of his life wallowing in sentimentality and self pity. And Dr Relling sums up, maybe, the moral of the story:

RELLING: Life wouldn’t be too bad if only these blessed people who come canvassing their ideals round everyone’s door would leave us poor souls in peace.

Comments

Secrets and lies in marriage (yawn), combined with two of the half dozen oldest stories in the world – the rich and powerful man who has adulterous affairs and children with his servants and the innocent man who is palmed off with someone else’s child.

As the play went on, the simple-minded religiose language of Gregers, who insists his friend is undergoing a great spiritual revival, began to really irritate me. He’s an interfering twat.

Similarly, I got tired of his repeated use of the key phrase ‘claim of the ideal’. a) It’s such a stupid phrase in itself, but b) Ibsen has Gregers repeat it in a totally unrealistic way, more like a parrot than a man. This obtrusive repetition of the play’s catchphrase reminded me of the over-use of the phrase ‘enemy of the people’ which dominates the second half of the play of the same name.

According to the introduction, many critics consider ‘The Wild Duck’ Ibsen’s greatest play and, certainly, all the backstories and information are released in instalments with great cunning and artistry. But, in my opinion, all this artistry is in support of a dull premise. A poor man discovers his child may not be his after all and that his family is secretly supported by wealthy man who’s probably the child’s real father…

The symbolism of the wild duck hung very heavy round the neck of the narrative from its first mention – is it a poor, delicate, wounded and vulnerable creature like the girl who adopts it? Yes.

On top of this is the sheer dumb obviousness of the loaded gun. Everyone knows if you bring a loaded gun onstage in a play it is sooner or later going to be fired, from the moment it appeared the only question was who was going to snuff it and Ibsen plays with this by having Hjalmar tell Gregers about both his and his father’s suicide attempts. But these turn out to be not-so-clever decoys from the true victim.

And I was very upset by the suicide which ends the play but not in the way Ibsen intended: rather than bursting into tears at the sacrifice of this sweet innocent I was upset by how flagrantly manipulative it was.

A digression about opera: in my late 20s and 30s I went to lots of operas, at the Royal Opera House and the English National Opera, at festivals and experimental theatres. All in all I went to about 100 operas. Eventually I started to get a bit fed up with several things about seeing opera, like how long they are and how hot it gets up in the gods at opera houses. But it was something very specific which made me stop buying tickets. I happened to see a run of four or five nineteenth-century operas in a row and in every single one the female lead died. Carmen, Tosca, Madame Butterfly, La Traviata, suddenly I had a kind of revelation. I looked around me and saw hundreds of people all being entertained by the spectacle of women being tortured, blackmailed, threatened, dying of disease or tormented into killing themselves and suddenly, in a flash, it disgusted me. The whole notion of women being subjected to grotesque suffering for my entertainment sickened me. I stopped and I’ve never been back.

So that is the mood in which I read the description of poor sweet Hedvig’s suicide and I felt that same revulsion all over again, that I was being emotionally manipulated and that a 14-year-old girl was the tool of my manipulation. Yuk!

In the same scene Hjalmar’s thrashing around begging for God to give him just one more minute so he could tell his daughter how much he loved her etc… I’d had enough.

It’s extremely well constructed, deeply pondered, the work of a master, but I didn’t like it at all.

Repelled by the exploitative melodrama of the climax, I realised I most enjoyed the opening scenes at old Werle’s party. I liked the banter between the servants Pettersen and Jensen. I liked the simple honest excess of the fat man and the bald man boasting about how much they could eat at a sitting. Gross but in a straightforward way which does nobody any harm except themselves.

A bit more subtly I liked the way Gina, with the wisdom of the uneducated, knew she didn’t have to engage in all this man talk about ideals and life-lies but simply had to lay on coffee and toast to begin to win her man back. I liked the subtlety of that scene and I think Gina emerges as the most sympathetic character, with almost all the men behaving like idiots.

But the constantly reappearing figure of Gregers, whose idiotic ‘idealism’ ruined every life he touched and killed a lovely little girl, left a very bad taste in my mouth.

James McFarlane’s introduction

In 1881 Ibsen began to draught an autobiography. He didn’t get further than his boyhood but that was enough to revive memories of: his sister, who was called Hedvig (!); his father who was bankrupted, suffering social ostracism and reducing the family to penury; the cramped attic where the Ibsen family was forced to live; the mess of furniture, old books and junk left by the previous occupants. In other words, there’s a surprising amount of autobiography in ‘The Wild Duck’.

McFarlane brings out how the world of the Ekdal household, although built on ‘a lie’ is a lovely fantasy. Hedvig lives a child’s fantasy of her father. Old Ekdal is away in his fantasies of hunting in the great pine forests. Hjalmar lives for his fantasy of becoming the Great Inventor, despite the complete lack of evidence for this. Only the down-to-earth Gina doesn’t live in a fantasy which is ironic because she is the one at the heart of the ‘lie’ i.e. the knowledge of how the entire fantasy world is sustained by Old Werle who used her as his mistress.

Like many of Ibsen’s plays ‘The Wild Duck’ comes ready-made for critical analysis. It is perfectly designed to be converted into a Sparks Notes summary of characters and themes. It is prime A-level material. ‘Discuss the role of truth and deception in…’ etc.

The central conceptual clash, I suppose, is between Dr Relling’s notion of the life-lie, the self-deceptions necessary to make the harsh realities of life bearable, to give life a meaning – and Gregers’ insistence on the claim of the wretched ‘ideal’, namely remorseless truth-telling at any cost. There’s enough there for a good essay. What McFarlane’s introduction made me realise was there’s a third big philosophy of life, which isn’t given a big name and is hiding in plain sight, and this is the worldly wisdom of Old Werle.

Werle makes no great speeches, wields no big ideas, but he represents the triumph of savoir faire, how to get on in the world, how to run a successful business for decades, how to arrange and manipulate everyone around you to suit your needs. As the play proceeds, what we see and sympathise with is the systematic destruction of all Hjalmar’s delusions: he thought he was happily married, he thought his wife was faithful, he thought he had fathered a beautiful little girl, he thought he was the provider and keeper of his little family – and he is wrong on every single on of those counts. Werle is presented as his nemesis, as the evil wizard behind all his woes. What’s not so obvious is to see it from the other end of the telescope, as a play about Werle’s triumph. This is what worldly wisdom looks like.

Apparently, we have Ibsen’s drafts of many of his plays and McFarlane explains what the drafts of ‘The Wild Duck’ tell us. This is that all the characters existed in early drafts but then he moved them around, gave them names or removed names, to create a sense of foreground and background characters. And the same with issues or events. McFarlane points out how the precise details of Old Ekdal’s crime, the murky references to Old Werle mistreating his wife, and above all the exact status of Hedvig’s paternity, these are all important but left deliberately vague and blurred, like the background in a painting.

Lastly, McFarlane devotes a page to the symbol of the wild duck itself which I found boring. He says it fulfils two functions: it means something but something different to every individual in the play; and it binds together the many strands of the play. Although it is never seen and not mentioned for long periods, in some sense it binds together not only the characters but the many themes of the play.

I can see how this is true and I can appreciate the extraordinary skill of the play’s construction. But it’s an entertainment based on the killing of a 14-year-old girl and I couldn’t overcome my simple revulsion at that fact.

Credit

I read ‘The Wild Duck’ in the 1960 translation by James McFarlane which was packaged up, along with his translations of ‘An Enemy of the People’ and ‘Rosmersholm’ into a World’s Classics paperback in 1988. I read the 2009 reprint.

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by Simon on October 4, 2024  •  Permalink
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Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen (1881)

‘Here I go battling on with ghosts, both within and without…’
(Old Mrs Alving lamenting her lot in Ghosts, page 126)

A drama about not only the sexual and religious hypocrisies of late-nineteenth century bourgeois society but of the multiple levels of deceit and, more profoundly than that, the dead hand of old ways of thinking, which lie like ghosts upon the lives of the living.

Act 1

Pastor Manders arrives at the estate of widowed old Mrs Alving, situated near a fjord. The next day he is due to deliver a speech at the opening of a new orphanage named in honour of her dead husband, the Captain Alving memorial Home (p.103)

Mrs A is attended on by a young buxom serving girl, Regine. Regine’s crippled, often drunk carpenter father, Jacob Engstrand, has been over on the estate helping to build the new orphanage. He shambolically tries to persuade Regine to accompany him on a ferry back to his house in town but she refuses. Engstrand has a plan to set up a refuge for merchant seamen. He wants Regine to help out but this quickly degenerates into a vision of her dancing and entertaining the sailors in the evenings, and the suggestion that if she plays her cards right she’ll wangle herself a ship’s officer or even captain. And she wouldn’t have to marry them, just extract money in return for…At which point a furious Regine threatens him and forces him to back out through the French windows.

After some time away in Paris, her artistic son Oswald has returned for a visit.

There’s a long conversation between Manders and Mrs Alving which reveals a whole load of scandalous family secrets. Manders triggers it all by accusing Mrs A of being a bad wife for running away from her husband after just a year of marriage and seeking refuge with him, the pastor.

Nettled, Mrs Alving decides to reveal the truth. During that miserable first year of marriage she had discovered that Alving was a womaniser and a philanderer and how wretched it made her feel. Manders dismisses this by pontificating about the duties of a wife and mother:

MANDERS: All this demanding to be happy in life, it’s all part of this same wanton idea. What right have people to happiness? No, we have our duty to do, Mrs Alving! And your duty was to stand by the man you had chosen and to whom you were bound by sacred ties.

And:

MANDERS: It is not a wife’s place to sit in judgement on her husband. Your duty should have been to bear with humility the cross which a higher power had judged proper for you.

As if accusing her of being a bad wife isn’t enough, Manders then goes on to accuse her of being a bad mother, in that she sent her son away when he was only seven to be raised in a different household.

‘Slowly and with control’ Mrs Alving then unleashes the truth. Her husband never reformed, her husband carried on being a corrupt womaniser till the day he died. He forced her to sit with him getting drunk on wine and listening to his stupid stories before she had to roll him into bed. For nineteen long years of married purgatory she had to put up with his dire behaviour.

And he had an affair with their maid. She overheard them in the conservatory, her husband making a move, the maid (Johanna) trying to push him away. He got the maid pregnant. The whole thing was only hushed up by giving her a big cash sum ($300) and packing her back to the arms of her boyfriend, the very same ramshackle old Jacob Engstrand we saw at the start. So Regine is the illegitimate daughter of her ex-husband. Engstrand was flattered by her returning to him and then, she came with a tidy sum of cash and a story about some passing some rich foreigner who’d taken advantage of her, so shamefacedly went to Pastor Manders to get them married in a hurry (p.122).

It was because, aged seven, Oswald was getting old enough to ask questions that she sent him away. Not because she was a bad mother, because she was a good mother who didn’t want him raised in a household full of corruption and lies (p.118).

This is why she has devoted a lot of money to building the orphanage in her husband’s name, to try and prevent any whiff of scandal. But there’s another, buried motive. The orphanage cost exactly as much as her bride price. She wanted to get rid of it because ‘I don’t want any of that money to pass to Oswald. Anything my son gets is to come from me.’

When, on the morrow, the orphanage is opened, Mrs Alving will feel it like an exorcism. At long last the ghost will be laid and ‘this long, ghastly farce will be over’ (p.120).

But then something strange happens. In a way which breaches realism but is packed with symbolic meaning, both the pastor and Mrs A hear a scuffled coming from the dining room and then Regine’s voice urgently whispering: ‘Oswald! Are you made? let me go!’

The heavily moralising or symbolic point is that – the young generation are repeating the sins of their parents. Or, as Mrs Alving puts it:

MRS ALVING: ‘Ghosts! Those two in the conservatory…come back to haunt us.’ (p.120)

Act 2

Act 2 picks up in the same drawing room immediately after dinner i.e. an hour later, and shows Mrs Alving still reeling from the revelation that his son is trying it on with her maid and Manders reeling from the way everyone involved lied to him. Manders reassures himself that the marriages were all carried out according to law and order but Mrs Alving blasphemously wonders whether it’s the law and order which cause all the trouble and delivers a Nora Helming outburst:

MRS ALVING: I’m not putting up with it any longer, all these ties and restrictions. I can’t stand it! I must work myself free! (p.124)

This leads into a classic ‘moral’ quandary, namely should Mrs Alving tell her son the truth about his father. Pastor Manders, as representative of social morality, finds himself arguing no, that she shouldn’t burst his illusions and ideals. But Mrs Alving now feels that observing the proprieties i.e. lying, for all those years, and continuing to lie to her son, just indicts her as a coward.

She starts out saying she needs to get Regine out of her house as soon as possible, to send her back to her father. But then, pondering her reluctance to go home, she voices another scenario: maybe she should encourage Oswald and Regine, if not to marry, then at least to commit to live together, unconventionally but honestly.

Manders is horrified because…it would be incest – they both share the same father, they are half-brother and sister. To which Mrs Alving delivers the devastating response:

MRS ALVING: Do you think there aren’t plenty of couples all over the country who are every bit as closely related? (p.125)

So now we can see how incest brought about by male philandering is the core of the plotline. But Mrs Alving goes on to deliver a little speech which rises above this ‘issue’ to address a more imaginative or symbolic level:

MRS ALVING: Ghosts! When I heard Regina and Oswald in there, it was just like seeing ghosts. But then I’m inclined to think that we are all ghosts, Pastor Manders, every one of us. It’s not just what we inherit from our mothers and fathers that haunts us. It’s all kinds of old defunct theories, all sorts of old defunct beliefs, and things like that. It’s not that they actually live on in us; they are simply lodged there, and we cannot get rid of them. I’ve only to pick up a newspaper and I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. Over the whole country there must be ghosts, as numerous as the sands of the sea. And here we are, all of us, abysmally afraid of the light. (p.126)

Impressive speech and compelling vision, especially to someone like me with my view of the unchangeability of human nature which condemns each new generation to repeat the behaviours of the previous ones.

Because now there’s another revelation (Ibsen’s plays seem to proceed from one devastating revelation to another) which is that back then, nineteen years ago, when Mrs Alving ran away from her unfaithful husband, she ran to Pastor Manders because she was in love with him and she knew he was in love with her. In the pastor’s mind, the greatest achievement of his life was overcoming his own personal wishes, putting duty and responsibility first and telling Mrs Alving to return to her husband. Now her revelations that this led to 19 years of purgatory throw into doubt the meaning of that great ‘victory’. He calls it a victory over himself but Mrs Alving calls it ‘a crime against both of us’.

What’s more it led her to rethink the entire notion of religious faith, honour, duty and so on, and the harder she thought about them the more they fell to pieces in her hands:

MRS ALVING: Yes, when you forced me to submit to what you called my duty and obligations. When you praised as right and proper what my whole mind revolted against, as against some loathsome thing. It was then I began to examine the fabric of your teachings. I began picking at one of the knots but as soon as I’d got that undone, the whole thing came apart at the seams. It was then I realised it was just tacked together.

So she’s quite the speech maker and quite the social radical.

Scene: Engstrand plays the pastor

Then enters Engstrand. He puts on a big performance for the pastor, claiming that now the orphanage is finished he and the lads would like the pastor to mark it with a little service. Manders hits him between the eyes with everything Mrs Alving’s told him, that Engstrand only took Johanna back for the money and lied and lied to him (Manders) about getting her pregnant etc etc. But Engstrand (who needs, I imagine, to be played by a slyly comic actor) comes over all working class piety, clutching his hat in his hand and yes my lord no my lord-ing Manders. He spins events to place himself in the light of a pious hard-working soul who saw it as his duty to rescue this poor sinner woman (Johanna) etc. When directly accused of only marrying her for her money (the $300) Engstrand loftily insists he never touched a cent of it but used it all to educate his (legal) daughter, Regine.

Manders is completely taken in and enchanted. When Engstrand exits to go and prepare the building for a little service Manders turns triumphantly to Mrs Alving and says ‘Well?’ but she (presumably like the audience) has completely seen through Engstrand and finds Manders’ naivety touching: ‘I say you are a great big baby and always will be’ and goes as if to hug him till the pastor flinches back in naive horror. He exits to go carry out the promised service.

Scene: Oswald’s illness

In the silence that follows Mrs Alving hears the tink of glass from the dining room and is disconcerted to realise Oswald is still in the dining room. She thought he’s gone for a walk. She calls him in to the living room (the main set) worried he might have overheard some of their talk. But this is quickly eclipsed by Oswald making a revelation to her (another of Ibsen’s revelations) that he is ill, very ill, so ill that he thinks he’ll never be able to work again.

In Paris, he’s been having more and more severe headaches and he went to see a specialist who confirmed that he has some kind of inherited sexual disease, or, as the doctor put it, ‘The sins of the father are visited upon the children.’ But Oswald shows the doc all the letters from his mother (Mrs A) praising her husband, Oswald’s father, to the skies (lying, as required by social convention), and so proved it couldn’t have been an inherited STI.

At which point Oswald blames himself for leading an indulgent bohemian lifestyle. He reiterates that it’s all his own fault and he can’t live with the guilt of wrecking his own life. If only he had someone else to blame it on…

Well, there’s a ton of dramatic irony here because half an hour earlier we learned that it almost certainly was inherited from his dissolute father (though the genetics and/or disease theory of all this is pretty ropey: he could, in fact, only have been infected via his mother i.e. the captain gave Mrs A syphilis or some such which she transmitted to Oswald at birth. The Wikipedia entry has a footnote dealing with the science).

Anyway, obviously Mrs Alving paces up and down in anguish, knowing that with a few sentences she could release her son from his crushing guilt but only at the cost of destroying his illusions about his father. I know it’s meant to be heart-wrenching scene of a poor mother torn between etc etc, but the patness of it, the cunning artifice of it, is quite funny.

But Mrs Alving doesn’t get to tell the truth because first he a) desperately asks for something to drink to wash away his headful of anguish and then b) makes his mother sit with him while he drinks champagne and…asks her opinion about Regine: ‘Isn’t she marvellous looking, Mother?’

He is, in other words, unconsciously copying his father, drinking far too much, forcing her to listen to him burble on, and fancying the maid. But then he goes further (as I say, Ibsen’s plays seem to consists of a succession of revelations).

He tells his mum that last time he was home he was waxing lyrical about the joys of life in gay Paris when one thing led to another and he playfully said: ‘You must come with me there’. Now, on his return, he’s discovered that Regine remembered that remark and took him literally. (This is why she’s been learning French and explains why Regine’s character keeps popping little French tags into her conversation). Anyway, she asked him: ‘What about my trip to Paris?’ and it suddenly made sense to him – that Regine, so full of life and certainty, can be the cure for the dread and anxiety he feels.

During the scene Mrs Alving had asked Regine to fetch a half bottle of champagne. Now Mrs Oswald tells her to bring another, whole, bottle and Oswald adds, ‘as a glass for yourself.’ As Regine returns with the bottle and the third glass and, very nervously accepts a drink, Oswald tells his mother his mind is made up. He’s returning to Paris and taking Regine with him.

This finally stings Mrs Alving into action and she stands and announces she has something to tell them (obviously a) his father’s immorality and b) their incestuous consanguinity). But at that moment, probably meant to be dramatic but also has a comic impact, the parson enters, as in a Whitehall farce.

He is surprised to see Regine sitting with the other two and holding a glass of champagne as if she is their social equal but flabbergasted when Oswald announces that she (Regine) is leaving with him for Paris as his wife! For the second time Mrs Alving stands and says now she is going to speak plainly but, for a second time is interrupted. For this time they hear shouting in the distance, throw open the windows and see that the brand-new orphanage, which was due to be opened the next day, is on fire!

Act 3

Scene 1

They’re all back in the main house later the same night, with the embers of the ruined orphanage glowing in the distance. It burned to the ground. Nothing was saved.

Remember how I described the scene where Engstrand posed as the embodiment of aggrieved piety, insisting that he married Joahnna out of Christian charity rather than for her little nest egg, in order to wrap the pastor round his little finger? Well, that scene has its sequel here. For we find Engstrand with mock reluctance persuading the pastor that it was him (Pastor Manders) who started the fire, it was he who they left to put out the candles, who they all saw pinch one out with his fingers and chuck the stub away, unfortunately into a pile of shavings.

Manders doesn’t remember any of this and insists that he never puts candles out that way, but Engstrand’s mock-apologetic insistence wins him round. The con man (for that is what he is) insists that he’ll stand by Manders at the public hearing, which there’ll have to be, and will do his best to deflect the anger of the townspeople at the loss of the orphanage which was going to be benefit everyone (by taking parentless children off the rates).

And one last thing: the money to find the maintenance and expenses of the orphanage was to come from the interest from her bride price which Mrs Alving had invested. Now that money needs a purpose at which point Engstrand usefully pipes up to remind the pastor about his plan for a Seaman’s Home.

Just in case there was any doubt whatsoever that Engstrand invited the pastor down to the orphanage to carry out a ‘service’ precisely in order to burn it down and blame him, and thus secure the funding and support for his own project, Ibsen gives Engstrand an ‘aside’ to his daughter in which he says: ‘Now we’ve got him nicely, my girl.’ Ibsen is routinely described as a giant of modern theatre but moments like this are as subtle as a stage villain twirling the ends of his black moustache and cackling, ‘My evil plan is working!’

There’s a final joke so broad surely the audience was meant to laugh. Engstrand helps Manders on with his coat and makes a parting promise:

ENGSTRAND: And this place for seafaring men, it’s going to be called the ‘Captain Alving Home’, and if I can run it my way, I think I can promise it’ll be a place worthy of the Captain’s memory. (p.152)

Well, as we learned earlier, the captain turned out to have been a world class philanderer, adulterer and womaniser, and this confirms the passage of the opening scene where Engstrand was trying to encourage his own daughter to come back to the city with him so as to provide ‘entertainment’ for the sailors, in the form of singing, dancing and sexual favours. I was surprised to find Ibsen doing such broad comedy.

Scene 2

So the comedy duo of Manders and Engstrand exit, leaving the tragic trio of Mrs Alving, Oswald and Regine. Oswald has only just staggered in from the scene of the fire in a semi-catatonic state. He sits stiffly while his mother cleans his face and then calls for all the doors to be closed to try and shut out his terrible feeling of dread. He starts to talk wildly, almost cackling. Basically, the actor has to give the impression of someone who’s mind is genuinely going.

Mrs Alving hurries to comfort him but poor Regine is, understandably, bewildered. Nobody told her her posh knight in shining armour was going mad.

So Mrs Alving proceeds to tell her son that his father was just like him, full of joy and energy but, finding himself trapped in a provincial town with a wife confined by her sense of duty, he felt trapped and took it out in womanising and getting drunk. And then, elliptically, refers to the fact that Regine is his father’s daughter i.e his half-sister. That makes them both sit up!

And Regine announces she will leave at once. She was having second thoughts about mad Oswald and this thunderbolt clinches it:

REGINE: No, you won’t catch me staying out in the country, working myself to death looking after invalids. (p.156)

So she wraps her shawl around her and announces she’ll hurry off to try and catch the same ferry as the pastor and her ‘father’ or ‘that rotten old carpenter’ as he calls him. Angry at being lied to, and being brought up as a servant instead of on equal terms to Oswald, she storms out, leaving the sad mother and mad son.

Scene 3

The thrust of the scene is that Oswald doesn’t feel anything for his dead father. He barely knew him and has one and only one memory of him, as a boy, making him smoke a cigar till he was sick. When Mrs Alving gives way to convention (contradicting her speeches earlier in the play) and says surely a son ought to have a duty to love a father, Oswald replies that’s just one of those old superstitions, just a relic lying around, to which Mrs Alving replies, ‘Ghosts’, and the audience go, ‘Yes, the title, the theme, we get it.’

But Oswald reveals a dismayingly instrumental view of Mrs Alving, he likes her and she will do to look after him in his illness. But then he makes her pull up a chair and reveals (remember how Ibsen plays consist of a carefully paced series of revelations?) that his illness is not physical, it’s in his head. He had an attack in Paris which rendered him helpless as a baby.

Mrs Alving is horrified but promises to be a mother to him when these attacks happen. But Oswald explains that the next attack might be permanent, infantilise him forever, and he’d be a bed-bound baby until he was old and grey. This is the course of his dread.

Which is why he shows her the small box he keeps in his breast pocket. In it are 12 shots of morphine. When he has his next attack he wants her to administer them and kill him. She screams and says, ‘What? Me who gave you life?’ to which Oswald makes the slightly teenage reply:

OSWALD: I never asked you for life. And what sort of life is this you’ve given me. I don’t want it! Take it back!

So from having been about incest this has become a play about euthanasia. Packs in the topical issues, doesn’t he, Ibsen? Mrs Alving promises she will, if he has an attack, administer the poison. Oswals calms down. She pulls up her chair and promises to look after him like a mother looks after a child. Dawn breaks over the mountains and the fjord.

And it’s at this moment that Oswald has an attack, saying, ‘Mother give me the sun,’ then shrinking in his chair, going flaccid, losing his mind, repeating flatly ‘the sun, the sun’. Mrs Alving leaps to her feet and screams, struggles to find the box Oswald just gave her, says yes, yes, then no, no, and stands staring at him in horror as the curtain falls.

Comment

I thought it was going to be a predictable number about Victorian sexual hypocrisy and double standards but the central plot of Regine and Oswald being half-siblings by the same father and the threatened risk of their incest takes things to a higher, more dangerous level.

But then, in the last few pages, the entirely new topic of a mother faced with the euthanasia of her stricken son has a blistering intensity which blots out everything which came before it.

A searing, intense, deeply disturbing experience.

The title

According to Wikipedia:

Ibsen disliked the English translator William Archer’s use of the word ‘Ghosts’ as the play’s title, the Danish or Norwegian Gengangere would be more accurately translated as ‘The Revenants’ which literally means ‘The Ones Who Return’…It has a double meaning of both ‘ghosts’ and ‘events that repeat themselves’ which the English title ‘Ghosts’ fails to capture.

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by Simon on September 30, 2024  •  Permalink
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A Woman of No Importance by Oscar Wilde (1893)

LORD ILLINGWORTH: [Sees Mrs. Arbuthnot’s letter on table, and takes it up and looks at envelope.] What a curious handwriting! It reminds me of the handwriting of a woman I used to know years ago.
MRS ALLONBY: Who?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Oh! no one. No one in particular. A woman of no importance.

(The exchange at the end of Act 1, when Lord Illingworth recognises the handwriting of the woman he separated from 20 years earlier, and which gives the play its title)

‘A Woman of No Importance’ is commonly thought the least successful of Oscar Wilde’s four social comedies, certainly the least performed or revived. This is probably because it combines the worst of both worlds: there are long passages of non-stop, clever one-liners which after a while glut the imagination; and then, in the last act, the already earnest and melodramatic situation topples over into  a world of Victorian pieties and platitudes. So at the same time it contains the most Wilde quotes and is the least performed of his plays. It turns out that ‘Nothing succeeds like excess’ is the opposite of the truth.

‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’, the first of Oscar Wilde’s four great social comedies is set firmly in the upper-class London of Mayfair. Maybe as a deliberate contrast, Wilde set this, the second one, in the country – obviously not the country of Thomas Hardy and rural yeoman, but at Hunstanton Chase, the grand country house of an aristocrat, Lady (Jane) Hunstanton, who has invited a number of similarly aristocratic friends and acquaintances (an MP, a friend’s young son who works in a bank) for a country house party.

Thus the first act opens with characters sitting under a large yew tree on the lawn in front of the terrace at Hunstanton, her stately home, a scene which could come from an Ivory-Merchant movie depicting the aristocracy in stately rural relaxation. Wilde’s milieu is the upperest of the upper classes.

Once again the play rotates around a woman ‘with a past’, as ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’ did. In this case one of the late-arriving guests, Mrs Arbuthnot, who only appears in Act 2, turns out to be the estranged wife of another guest, Lord Illingworth, the typical Wilde lead with, as the more conventional characters out it, such a wicked reputation.

Her appearance is all the more piquant because in Act 1 Lord Illingworth has just appointed young Gerald Arbuthnot, currently working in a bank, to be his private secretary. It is only with the arrival of Mrs Arbuthnot in Act 2, that Lord Illingworth realises that young Gerald Arbuthnot is his own son for they separated soon after he got her pregnant.

This central revelation plays out amid several other storylines. The main one is Lord Illingworth’s bantering flirtations with another guest, Mrs Allonby, his equivalent and equal in making witty paradoxical remarks (‘She lets her clever tongue run away with her sometimes.’). Their exchanges include loads of set pieces designed to display Wilde’s ironic and paradoxical wit at its shiniest. As Lord Illingworth remarks at the end of their sustained repartee which closes Act 1, ‘You fence divinely.’

Another plotline is the presence of a young, 18-year-old visitor from America, Miss Hester Worsley, the orphan daughter of an American millionaire. Her presence allows countless jokes at America’s expense but also some sharp comments from her about British society.

Lord Illingworth and his witty sparring partner have a cynical bet that he will be able to seduce this stern young American within the week, and this turns out to play a pivotal role in the plot.

Brits satirising Americans

LADY HUNSTANTON: He [Gerald] has just gone for a walk with our pretty American. She is very pretty, is she not?
LADY CAROLINE: Far too pretty. These American girls carry off all the good matches. Why can’t they stay in their own country? They are always telling us it is the Paradise of women.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: It is, Lady Caroline. That is why, like Eve, they are so extremely anxious to get out of it.

LADY CAROLINE: Who are Miss Worsley’s parents?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: American women are wonderfully clever in concealing their parents.

LADY UNSTANTON: She dresses exceedingly well. All Americans do dress well. They get their clothes in Paris.
MRS ALLONBY: They say, Lady Hunstanton, that when good Americans die they go to Paris.
LADY HUNSTANTON: Indeed? And when bad Americans die, where do they go to?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Oh, they go to America.

Note how all the jokes are set up by the other characters for Lord Illingworth to deliver the witty punchlines.

Hester Worsley’s big anti-British speech

HESTER: We [Americans] are trying to build up life, Lady Hunstanton, on a better, truer, purer basis than life rests on here. This sounds strange to you all, no doubt. How could it sound other than strange? You rich people in England, you don’t know how you are living. How could you know? You shut out from your society the gentle and the good. You laugh at the simple and the pure. Living, as you all do, on others and by them, you sneer at self-sacrifice, and if you throw bread to the poor, it is merely to keep them quiet for a season. With all your pomp and wealth and art you don’t know how to live – you don’t even know that. You love the beauty that you can see and touch and handle, the beauty that you can destroy, and do destroy, but of the unseen beauty of life, of the unseen beauty of a higher life, you know nothing. You have lost life’s secret. Oh, your English society seems to me shallow, selfish, foolish. It has blinded its eyes, and stopped its ears. It lies like a leper in purple. It sits like a dead thing smeared with gold. It is all wrong, all wrong.

She is similar to Lady Windermere in that she starts the play young and pitiless in her Puritan moralising. Later this is made unambiguously clear:

HESTER: A woman who has sinned should be punished, shouldn’t she?… She shouldn’t be allowed to come into the society of good men and women… And the man should be punished in the same way… It is right that the sins of the parents should be visited on the children. It is a just law. It is God’s law.

Old Testament fundamentalism.

The tragic woman

As in ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’, at the centre of the play is an ‘anomalous woman’, a woman standing outside society’s values, and also unexpected scenes of real emotional anguish.

In the earlier play it was Mrs Erlynne, who had broken convention by running off and abandoning her husband and child. The genuine anguish was experienced by Lady Windermere who experiences the anguish of believing her husband is unfaithful to her, compounded by the agonising decision she makes to run away with the man who would be her lover, the charismatic Lord Darlington.

In this play it is Mrs Arbuthnot. In the recognition scene between her and Lord Illingworth we learn they have both changed their identities. When they first met they were both 21 and he was the brilliant young man about town George Harford with not a penny to his name and she was named Rachel (I don’t think we learn her surname). As the last pages of Act 2 reveal, the pair had an affair and she got pregnant. She accuses him of rejecting her and her baby but he argues that he was penniless and could have done nothing for them. He reminds her that his mother offered to settle £600 a year on her, which she scornfully refused. She reminds him that his father insist that he do the decent thing and marry the woman, which Lord Illingworth rejects with a joke but which was, as far as I can see, the decent thing to do.

The crux of the thing now, in this play, is that Illingworth has offered her/their son, Gerald, an offer of a leg up in the world, and now he knows he is his son is all the keener to do it, while she fiercely refuses the offer, at first on principle (she wants nothing to do with the man who abandoned her) but then, more pitifully, because Gerald is all she has. When they put the choice to Gerald (completely innocent of the real situation) he of course chooses the job offer and he and Lord Illingworth exit, leaving Mrs Arbuthnot a solitary figure on the stage, ‘immobile with a look of unutterable sorrow on her face.’

These plays have moments of surprisingly piercing emotional anguish.

Act 3

Act 3 is set the same evening after dinner and opens with a barrage of witticisms and paradoxes from Lord Illingworth, delivered to the adoring audience of dowdy old ladies who barely understand what he’s on about (Lady Hunstanton, Lady Caroline, Lady Stutfield) and so are very passive comic foils.

LADY HUNSTANTON: I am so glad I don’t know what you mean, dear. I am afraid you mean something wrong.

After all this fol-de-rol is the central event of the act which is that Mrs Arbuthnot tells her son why Lord Illingworth is so wicked, giving a lot more detail about how he seduced a poor, naive 18-year-old (herself), got her pregnant, promised to marry her, then abandoned her.

MRS ARBUTHNOT: She suffered terribly — she suffers now. She will always suffer. For her there is no joy, no peace, no atonement. She is a woman who drags a chain like a guilty thing. She is a woman who wears a mask, like a thing that is a leper.

But Gerald horrifies her by saying (in his innocence) that he can’t feel sorry for the woman in the story because obviously no nice girl would leave her family, abandon herself to such a waster, and live with him out of wedlock. Crushed by the realisation of how he would think of her, Mrs Arbuthnot withdraws her objections to her son going abroad with Lord Illingworth, and Gerald gushes that he is so happy, Lord Illingworth is such a model, he can do no wrong.

Which makes it all the more melodramatic and comic when the fierce young American lady comes running in from the terrace where she claims Lord Illingworth has just ‘insulted’ her by trying to kiss her. Young Gerald leaps to his feet because, I haven’t had time to explain that in the middle of his interview with his mother, he mentioned that he is deeply in love with Miss Worsley.

Now Miss Worsley runs to the protection of his arms as Gerald leaps to his feet and threatens to kill Lord Illingworth, really meaning it, ready to rush across the stage and strike him. At which crucial moment Mrs Arbuthnot tells him that…Lord Illingworth is his father and falls to the floor. Staggered, Gerald loses all his anger, helps his mother to her feet and then offstage. Curtain down on this melodramatic moment!

Act 4

Act 4 switches location and scene altogether, switching from the grand house at Hunstanton Chase to the much more modest sitting-room of Mrs Arbuthnot’s house in the nondescript Midlands town of Wrockley.

Gerald is writing a letter asking his father to marry Mrs Arbuthnot. Lady Hunstanton and Mrs Allonby arrive on a visit to Mrs Arbuthnot, commenting on the good taste of her drawing room but leaving when the maid tells them that Mrs Arbuthnot has a headache and won’t be able to see anyone.

When Mrs Arbuthnot enters the drawing room, Gerald tells her that he intends to give up being Lord Illingworth’s secretary and has asked him (Illingworth) to come to their house and ask for her hand in marriage.

As you might expect, the pair then argue about this, Gerald claiming that the marriage is her duty while Mrs Arbuthnot insists that she won’t make a mockery of the marriage vows by marrying a man she despises. She describes how she devoted her life to being a single mum and raising Gerald and is too proud to accept Illingworth.

Now, as in the way of stage comedies (or farces) Hester had arrived outside the door and heard this entire exchange. She now runs over to Mrs Arbuthnot, says how moved she was by her story, and offers to use the wealth she’s about to inherit to take care of 1) the man she loves (Gerald) and 2) the mother she never had. After this flurry of excitement, Gerald and Hester go out into the garden, conveniently leaving Mrs A alone.

At which point the maid announces the arrival of Lord Illingworth who, despite Mrs A’s forbidding, forces his way into the drawing room. Here he tells Mrs Arbuthnot that he has decided he ought to provide financial security for Gerald and has decided to assign him some of his (Illingworth’s) several properties.

Mrs Arbuthnot shows him Gerald and Hester in the garden and tells Lord Illingworth that she no longer needs help from anyone but her son and his fiancée.

But…Illingworth then sees the letter Gerald was drafting at the start of the act and reads it, the one in which Gerald insisted Lord I marry his mother. Lord Illingworth tells Mrs Arbuthnot he is prepared to marry her in order to be with his son.

But Mrs Arbuthnot not only refuses to marry him and but tells him that she outright hates him, throwing in for good measure the idea that her hate for Illingworth and her love for Gerald sharpen each other. And that it was Hester, in the exchange we’ve just witnessed, that decisively turned Gerald against his father.

Defeated on every front and nettled by Mrs A’s unremitting hostility, Lord Illingworth lets his mask slip. He states that Mrs Arbuthnot was only ever a plaything in their affair and calls her his ‘mistress’. He is going on to call Gerald his ‘bastard’ but Mrs Arbuthnot slaps him with his own glove before he can get the word out.

Dazed, insulted, realising all is up, Lord Illingworth takes a final look at his son through the window, then stalks out. As women do in such melodramas, Mrs Arbuthnot then falls onto the sofa sobbing. Prompt as clockwork Gerald and Hester re-enter from the garden. Gerald runs over to comfort his crying mother who asks Hester if she really would be prepared to have this weeping failure of a woman as a mother. When Hester assures her that she would the circle of forgiveness and new life is complete.

And then the punchline. Gerald notices his father’s glove on the floor and, when he asks his mother who’s been visiting, Mrs Arbuthnot delivers the play’s withering final line, a clever inversion of Lord Illingworth’s dismissal at its start – she says, ‘A man of no importance.’

Thus is the biter bit. Thus are the roles reversed. Thus the central female figure goes from powerless victim to empowered victor.

Themes

Critics always have to be po-faced about any work of literature, obliterating the light and entertaining with commentaries which pull out dire and earnest ‘themes’. And it’s true that words have meanings and if you’re setting out to create three hours of people talking you have to give them something to talk about. But it’s obvious that many of these ‘themes’ only really exist to provide talking points between the characters (to fill the time) which, in Wilde’s hands, mainly exist as scaffolding for his brilliant jokes and one-liners.

Thus the plays is packed with characters delivering jokes and witticisms and one-liners and clever paradoxes about: America; the current state of politics, the Houses of Commons and Lords; the condition of England; middle class concern for the poor and many more, but their primary purpose to provide the butt of gags is plain to see:

KELVIL: May I ask, Lord Illingworth, if you regard the House of Lords as a better institution than the House of Commons?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: A much better institution, of course. We in the House of Lords are never in touch with public opinion. That makes us a civilised body.

Men and women

GERALD: Well, men are different from women, mother. It is natural that they should have different views.

LORD ILLINGWORTH: I was very young at the time. We men know life too early.
MRS ARBUTHNOT: And we women know life too late. That is the difference between men and women.

I would say there is a central theme which is so large it is more like a premise of the play, which is the enormous chasm between men and women, in particular husbands and wives, which the characters bring out at almost every turn. In mixed company the characters make sweeping generalisations about each other’s gender and the whole opening scene of Act 2 is devoted to the women guests sitting by themselves making numerous generalisations about their menfolk and men in general.

MRS ALLONBY: The Ideal Man! Oh, the Ideal Man should talk to us as if we were goddesses, and treat us as if we were children. He should refuse all our serious requests, and gratify every one of our whims. He should encourage us to have caprices, and forbid us to have missions. He should always say much more than he means, and always mean much more than he says.

As I remarked of ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’, this doesn’t necessarily reflect any ‘reality’. These plays were designed to be entertainments, to be theatrical successes, to make money for Wilde who had, up till this point, not been particularly successful in financial terms. And what comic topic is more guaranteed to raise a laugh in all times and places than women characters moaning about men and male characters moaning about women, husbands complaining about wives and wives complaining about husbands?

GERALD: But women are awfully clever, aren’t they?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: One should always tell them so. But, to the philosopher, my dear Gerald, women represent the triumph of matter over mind — just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.

LORD ILLINGWORTH: The history of women is the history of the worst form of tyranny the world has ever known. The tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts.

LORD ILLINGWORTH: Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.

Or, on the more serious note struck by Mrs Arbuthnot:

You talk of atonement for a wrong done. What atonement can be made to me? There is no atonement possible. I am disgraced: he is not. That is all. It is the usual history of a man and a woman as it usually happens, as it always happens. And the ending is the ordinary ending. The woman suffers. The man goes free.

In this respect Wilde’s comedies are not very different from the fundamental premise of thousands of sitcoms and stand-up routines. ‘Men this…women that…my husband this…my wife that…’ – rock solid crowd-pleasers which never go out of fashion, as guaranteed to raise a laugh in 2024 as in 1894, as central to the banter in the Restoration comedies of 1694 as it is to the gender comedy in the comic Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence in 194 or 94 BC.

GERALD: It is very difficult to understand women, is it not?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: You should never try to understand them. Women are pictures. Men are problems. If you want to know what a woman really means – which, by the way, is always a dangerous thing to do – look at her, don’t listen to her.

Which doesn’t mean that any of it is true, should be taken at face value or used as historical or sociological evidence for anything. All it’s proof of is the kind of tropes and jokes which made for success in the theatre, in front of an audience who want easily understood, easily recognisable, easily entertaining clichés and platitudes. Rather as attacks on the death star make for exciting climaxes to Star Wars movies. The appearance of a death star in several movies, or aliens in half a dozen Aliens movies, doesn’t mean there is a death star or aliens. These are the just tropes and conventions appropriate to their genres, space opera and sci fi horror, respectively. In the same way the endless generalisations about men and women and husbands and wives spouted in these social comedies represent no truth about society or people, but are the witty variations on the conventional tropes appropriate to this genre.

In this respect, individual lines of Wilde may play with convention – by describing the leading man as frightfully wicked or having him banter about how hard he’s worked to acquire a bad reputation – but everyone knows this is just banter.

LORD ILLINGWORTH: To win back my youth, Gerald, there is nothing I wouldn’t do – except take exercise, get up early, or be a useful member of the community.

Or when he says things like:

A man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world. The future belongs to the dandy. It is the exquisites who are going to rule.

The audience enjoys being scandalised but nobody believes this, mainly because it’s so obviously twaddle. Wilde leaves the fundamental tropes of this kind of comedy (the men/women, husbands/wives binaries) untouched.

And, despite the bombardment of superficial cynicism in the form of Lord Illingworth’s endless apothegms, in his structural use of the ideas of marital fidelity, social disgrace and ostracism, and even deeper, the notion of redemption, Wilde wholeheartedly complies with the social values of his time.

MRS ALLONBY: Then you should certainly know Ernest, Lady Stutfield. It is only fair to tell you beforehand he has got no conversation at all.
LADY STUTFIELD: I adore silent men.
MRS ALLONBY: Oh, Ernest isn’t silent. He talks the whole time. But he has got no conversation. What he talks about I don’t know. I haven’t listened to him for years.

Boom boom! Change the social stratum and the accent and it could be Les Dawson.

It is a paradox that Wilde, because he happened to be gay or bisexual, has been held up as an icon by LGBTQ+ activists and yet, when you actually read his actual works, he is intensely, intensely heteronormative: his plays depend entirely for their effects on the most conventional possible gender stereotypes:

LORD ILLINGWORTH: You women live by your emotions and for them. You have no philosophy of life.
MRS ARBUTHNOT: You are right. We women live by our emotions and for them. By our passions, and for them, if you will.

Similarly in his social satire. The entire setting of the plays among the idle English aristocracy, and the characterisation of pretty much all the characters, amounts to fairly harsh satire of an entire class. Critics at the time and literary critics since, tend to pick up on the cynicism and paradoxical remarks of the Wilde figures (Lord Illingworth in this play) who are given line after line designed to invert conventional ‘values’, make light of conventional morality and so on.

But to anyone outside the charmed circle of theatre goers, many of whom presumably included the kind of idle aristocrats he mocks, surely they all look the same. Surely the Lord Illinghams and Lord Darlingtons are the logical evolution if an aristocratic class which justified its immense privilege and amazing lifestyles by claiming they provided some kind of service to the nation and empire.

But from the perspective of real social critics like William Morris or Keir Hardie, the Fabians, the Socialists, the communists, the entire class was damned and the kind of ‘critique’ which critics like to find all through Wilde’s writings, are just the bickerings of a condemned family.

I would argue that not very far beneath the shiny veneer and the oh-so-risque attitudinising of his plays (and novel and stories) Wilde was, in fact, a deeply conservative writer. This explains why, when truly radical art came along in decade after his death, Wilde was dropped and forgotten as irrelevant and out of date, a man more associated with the aestheticism of the 1880s which went completely out of fashion in the decade of the Fauves and German Expressionists and the first stirrings of literary Modernism.

Comic dialogue

LADY CAROLINE: Have you any country? What we should call country?
HESTER: [Smiling.] We have the largest country in the world, Lady Caroline. They used to tell us at school that some of our states are as big as France and England put together.
LADY CAROLINE: Ah! you must find it very draughty,

LADY CAROLINE: He must be quite respectable. One has never heard his name before in the whole course of one’s life, which speaks volumes for a man, nowadays.

LADY HUNSTANTON: Lord Illingworth may marry any day. I was in hopes he would have married lady Kelso. But I believe he said her family was too large. Or was it her feet? I forget which.

LORD ILLINGWORTH: It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about, nowadays, saying things against one behind one’s back that are absolutely and entirely true.

LADY HUNSTANTON: I am sure, Lord Illingworth, you don’t think that uneducated people should be allowed to have votes?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: I think they are the only people who should.

LORD ILLINGWORTH: Silliest word in our language, and one knows so well the popular idea of health. The English country gentleman galloping after a fox—the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.

LORD ILLINGWORTH: Vulgar habit that is people have nowadays of asking one, after one has given them an idea, whether one is serious or not. Nothing is serious except passion. The intellect is not a serious thing, and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all.

KELVIL: Do you take no side then in modern politics, Lord Illingworth?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: One should never take sides in anything, Mr. Kelvil. Taking sides is the beginning of sincerity, and earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore.

LADY STUTFIELD: It must be terribly, terribly distressing to be in debt.
LORD ALFRED: One must have some occupation nowadays. If I hadn’t my debts I shouldn’t have anything to think about.

LORD ILLINGWORTH: One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that, would tell one anything.

MRS ALLONBY: Lord Illingworth, there is one thing I shall always like you for.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Only one thing? And I have so many bad qualities.
MRS ALLONBY: Ah, don’t be too conceited about them. You may lose them as you grow old.

MRS ALLONBY: Do you like such simple pleasures?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.

LORD ILLINGWORTH: The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden.
MRS ALLONBY: It ends with Revelations.

LORD ILLINGWORTH: When one is in love one begins by deceiving oneself. And one ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

LORD ILLINGWORTH: The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

LORD ILLINGWORTH: Yes; I am always astonishing myself. It is the only thing that makes life worth living.
LADY STUTFIELD: And what have you been doing lately that astonishes you?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: I have been discovering all kinds of beautiful qualities in my own nature.
MRS ALLONBY: Ah! don’t become quite perfect all at once. Do it gradually!
LORD ILLINGWORTH: I don’t intend to grow perfect at all. At least, I hope I shan’t. It would be most inconvenient. Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.

LORD ILLINGWORTH: There is no secret of life. Life’s aim, if it has one, is simply to be always looking for temptations. There are not nearly enough. I sometimes pass a whole day without coming across a single one. It is quite dreadful.

LADY HUNSTANTON: I don’t believe in women thinking too much. Women should think in moderation, as they should do all things in moderation.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Moderation is a fatal thing, Lady Hunstanton. Nothing succeeds like excess.

MRS ALLONBY: I delight in men over seventy. They always offer one the devotion of a lifetime. I think seventy an ideal age for a man.

A woman’s lot

HESTER: [Waving him back.] Don’t, don’t! You cannot love me at all, unless you love her also. You cannot honour me, unless she’s holier to you. In her all womanhood is martyred. Not she alone, but all of us are stricken in her house.
MRS ARBUTHNOT: But we are disgraced. We rank among the outcasts. Gerald is nameless. The sins of the parents should be visited on the children. It is God’s law.
Hester. I was wrong. God’s law is only Love.

This, the ‘moral’ message of the play, could come from a sermon by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

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by Simon on August 12, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Comedy, English literature, Play, Theatre
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Posted by Simon on August 12, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/08/12/a-woman-of-no-importance-oscar-wilde/