Oedipus #3

Readers are attracted to moments of intensity in a writer’s work. By what means and with what effect have writers in your study offered heightened emotional moments designed to arrest the reader’s attention?

There are many ways that both Oedipus the King and The Wild Duck use heightened emotional moments, and sometimes even overreactions, to add to the dramatic intensity of the play. In the beginning of Oedipus, Creon opens the play with words of old murder, revenge, and even the will of the Gods. He tells Oedipus to “Banish the man, or pay back blood with blood. Murder sets the plague-storm on the city” (Sophocles 164). By opening his play in this fashion, Sophocles leads almost directly into the major conflict during the play. He wastes no time, likely knowing that his audience already would have known the major events in the play, and instead brings the conflict into the light within the first few minutes. This shows how dramatists often will use situations that seem almost unbelievable, where the conflict is large and the results could be devastating. Audiences cannot draw away after a hook like that, and they are forced, simply by the intensity of the opening of the play, into watching the entire play.

We also see this to some extent in Wild Duck, by Ibsen, who uses a somewhat similar tactic to get the audience’s attention. When Gregers talks to his father during the first act, he accuses him of betraying  his old friend and the man’s family, the Ekdals. Gregers says,” How could anyone her let that family decay so pitifully?” and Werle, his father, responds, “You’re referring to the Ekdals, no doubt” (Ibsen 130). Ibsen uses tactics much closer to intrigue, rather than straight up murder and famine, to get the audience to become engrossed in the event of the novel. The son, who we know is a decent man, is questioning his wealthy father, and yet the father seems to almost feign ignorance about what his son is talking about. (It should be noted that Ekdal was an old friend of Werle, and thus very unlikely that Werle could forget it.) By opening in this fashion, with the mistrust within the family, Ibsen manages to generate a large amount of interest in the crowd because in any society, family is supposed to be trustworthy to at least each other.

Ibsen also includes an opening that includes another rumor about Werle, and his relationship with the housekeeper, Mrs. Sorby. Petterson, the servant, says “Ah, you hear that, Jenson. Now the old boy’s up on his feet, proposing a long toast to Mrs. Sorby” and Jenson responds, “Is it really true what people say, that there’s something between them?” (Ibsen 119). By including the rumor about the relationship in the house, Ibsen manages to connect with the audience by using a very relatable dramatic event, dissimilar to the way Sophocles opens Oedipus. Ibsen waits for a while before bringing in the larger dramatic events into the story.