This paper reads The Wild Duck as a play about family and its representation. It forms part of a wider project that explores the relationship between theatrical representation and political representation, a project guided by a proposition from philosopher Alain Badiou that true theatre invariably says something about the force and contingency of the state from which it emerges.
The Wild Duck was published and first produced in in 1884, the year that Parliamentarianism was officially introduced in Norway. When he began to write the set of prose dramas that foreground domestic life, of which Duck is a singular member, Ibsen had long contended with a local literary landscape marked by cultural-nationalist politics and the politicisation of form. Ibsen’s theatrical representations of family can also be situated within the context of broader changes brought about by 18th century bourgeois revolutions, the rise of industrial capitalism and the nation-state. While the relation of family to the state’s social form was being reconfigured and rethought across Europe, it was a question germane to inchoate Norway, where Hegel-derived notions about family at the “ethical root of the state” subtended the movement for national self-expression.
The Wild Duck, whose formal novelty has been characterised as a “double rupture” with both “bourgeois and social art,” asks us to think: what is a family? We are introduced to the Ekdals, who make their home in a photography studio adjacent to a small replica forest. In this singular space, where the domestic everyday imbricates with the mechanisms of modern mimesis, Duck dramatizes the distance between a clutch of people bound together by kinship, care and necessity, and the ideological processes whose effects on the collective reality they can only ever inadequately denote are nonetheless very real. The peculiar realism of this play, which resurrected tragedy for the modern age, paved the way for the “thinking of representation” that would animate the drama of the twentieth century and beyond.
Eloïse Mignon was recently awarded a PhD in English and Theatre Studies from the University of Melbourne, where she teaches on a casual basis. She has worked as an actress in Australia and France. She played Hedvig in a production of The Wild Duck from Belvoir, Sydney, that was presented at the International Ibsen Festival in 2012.
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