Comments

To Jarrad:
Good diary entry. I would agree with Kellsie, that the first half of this is definitely good. However, I'm not entirely sure Hjalmar really knew the truth and was concealing it on purpose. Is there evidence for this? The part about "ignorance is bliss" is true, though, and I believe that Hjalmar stayed ignorant despite some serious evidence that Hedvig wasn't his child.
To Isobel:
I would agree to some extent. The plot of Oedipus could be changed slightly (and the greeks often did this) but some of the major events had important messages to them. Without the whole business of being his mother's son and husband, the play would not have been so much about family, but instead about some other crime. I feel like this would be a big change.
To Eddie:
Good job. I especially like your analysis of the water, which has interested me throughout both Oedipus and the Wild Duck. The water does seem to represent some sort of moving on, or of freedom, and I think it is a critical motif in both plays.

Blood Wedding #1

To what extent would you agree that plot should be valued more highly than style in the work. In you answer you should refer to two or three works you have studied.

I am not sure that I agree entirely with this statement. For the play Oedipus the King, I would agree more fully, but with the Wild Duck, I feel that the metaphors, symbols, foreshadowing, and imagery add so much that they could not be withdrawn and still have the play remain nearly as good.The final play, Blood Wedding, uses both techniques to truly achieve its purpose. Without the symbols and metaphors embedded into the story of Blood Wedding, I feel that the main idea would be lost, and the feel of the play would be very different.

In Oedipus, the focus is mainly plot driven. We see Oedipus as he searches for the truth about his fate and about his birth, but many of the intricacies of literary elements are lost because the story has so much going on. There are some clues, aided by foreshadowing, which enable the audience to predict the outcome of the play and some of the effects of the ending. When Tiresias says “You mock my blindness? Let me tell you this. You with your precious eyes, you’re blind to the corruption of your life” he is trying to both foreshadow Oedipus blinding himself, and also of Oedipus finding out about his true relationship to his wife and mother, and also that he killed his father. This foreshadowing is helpful and intriguing, but in my opinion, it would not devastate the play if it were to be left out.  (Sophocles 183). Also, the symbolism, metaphors, and imagery are present, but do not “make or break” the play.

In The Wild Duck, however, the style is much more important, and without it the play would surely have lost much of its importance and significance. Simply the foreshadowing and clues that Ibsen leave throughout the play makes the reader feel like he has gained insight into the different characters. When Hedvig is talking to Gregers about the books she reads and how she looks at the pictures, she mentions a book with “a picture of Death with an hourglass and a girl. I think that’s horrible” (Ibsen 163). This excellent use of foreshadowing, with death capitalized and the hourglass signifying a short amount of time remaining (Hedvig later goes on to shoot herself with her father’s pistol) Ibsen is allowing the audience to get a sense of impending doom, which would surely have been lost without it. I personally felt like this was one of the most interesting things about reading the play, simply catching the foreshadowing and other literary elements that Ibsen used when writing.
Blood Wedding is another example of a weaving of the two elements. In Act two, the literary element that stands out most in my mind is the repetition of phrases, and how they are used to portray a greater message in the story. Various characters, sometimes designated as a young man, other times simply called "voices" repeat the line that "The bride is awakening!" (Lorca 50). This use of repetition shows how the people are anxious to see the bride come out into the real world, to stop living in her fantasy world of dreams, and become someone's wife. It is possible that Lorca is intending this to be a critique of marriage, or perhaps he is just using it to show that everyone grows up eventually, and must stop living in the fantasy world of their childhood.

Wild Duck #3

Stylistic techniques (imagery, figurative language, sensory detail)

HEDVIG. No, I won’t. It’s something so stupid.

GREGERS. It couldn’t be. Now tell me why you smiled.

HEDVIG. That was because always, when all of a sudden—in a flash—I happen to think of that in there, it always seems to me that the whole room and everything in it is called “the depths of the sea”! But that’s all so stupid. (Ibsen 164)

The passage above is one of the most interesting, in my opinion, in the entire play. Gregers is talking to Hedvig about the attic full of wild birds they have in their attic, and Hedvig says she thinks of the attic as the depths of the sea. However, she also says that that is a stupid thought, and should not be divulged. The repetitions of the word “stupid” makes Hedvig appear very childlike, and it also shows how the attic, which she and her family view as their hope and freedom, should not be taken lightly. We see other times when water comes into play throughout the novel, like when the Wild Duck dives down into the depths to escape the hunter, or when Gregers says earlier about the wild duck “Just don’t let her ever catch sight of the sea”(Ibsen 153). This passage shows how Gregers understands that the wild duck will never want to remain in confinement once she has seen the beauty of the outdoors, and especially, the sea. The sea offers hope, it is freedom, the ultimate dream of the duck and of the family. This imagery which shows up throughout the novel illustrates how the family is trying to have hope by keeping the animals in the attic, for that is their sea.

We also see this image of the sea when Hjalmar says about his father: “I am going to rescue that shipwrecked man. That’s just what he suffered—shipwreck—when the storm broke over him” (Ibsen168). By this passage, it seems that hope and dreams and freedom also have the ability to bring ruin down on a man’s head. By using the image of a shipwrecked man tortured by a storm, Hjalmar could be saying that his father was wrecked while hoping for something else, or in fact that the hope actually did it to him. Either way, things got nasty for Ekdal when he was younger and full of hope. Therefore, the sea is a double-edged sword that should not be taken lightly.

Wild Duck #2

“Visual action can be as important on the stage as speech.” How far do you agree with this claim? In you answer you should refer to two or three plays you have studied.

I would agree with this claim only to some extent. In Oedipus the King, for instance, the stage directions are so sparse that they do not really provide any information about the different attitudes and feelings of the characters. They are more just for scenery, or very broad notes about who or what the speaker is talking about. Oedipus relies heavily on the speech of the characters, and this might be a cultural factor, because the ancient Greek actors always wore masks onstage, and thus were not able to convey many emotions to the audience. This created a need to make the dialogue as descriptive as possible, in order to make the audience understand. On page 194 Oedipus says, “When my enemy moves against e quickly, plots in secret, I move quickly too, I must, I plot and pay him back. Relax my guard a moment, waiting his next move—he wins his objective, I lose mine” (Sophocles 194). This quote is fairly lengthy, and Oedipus is only trying to say something very simple. Yet he uses many words, makes the meaning absolutely clear, because he cannot leave the audience in any doubt as to his meaning. If he relies on any emotions conveyed by the face, he will not be understood.

Stage directions play a much larger part in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. Each Act opens with a lengthy description of the setting, and also of the feelings of some of the characters. Also, throughout the play there are many descriptions of the feelings of the characters while they say their lines. On page 142, we see just one example of this when Hjalmar says “I don’t see why not. (Casually.) Later we had a little quibble about Tokay” (Ibsen 142). By explaining to the audience and to the reader that Hjalmar is being casual, we are able to better understand whether or not his line was of much importance to him. With another descriptor, Hjalmar might have been humiliated, aggressive, or disgusted. It all depends on the way he says it.

Wild Duck #1

“What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out?” To what extent do you find this statement applicable in at least two plays you have studied?

Both Oedipus and Wild Duck use conflicts, and rumors, within the first few lines of the plays. However, Ibsen also includes a party scene, in which guests are seen making idle chit-chat and questioning their host about such trivial matters as the rules against smoking in the house. Sophocles, on the other hand, does not waste any idle words and almost every scene in the play is building up to the climax.

Sophocles, who uses the chorus as a way to draw the audience even closer to the action in the play, says on page 198, “Never—no, by the blazing Sun, first god of the heavens! Stripped of the gods, stripped of loved ones, let me die by inches if that ever crossed my mind. But the heart inside me sickens, dies as the land dies” (Sophocles 198). Even the chorus, who should have no familial or even communal ties to the actors in the play, show how they are enormously interested and grieved at the turn of events. They show how they truly care, and also help maintain the pace of the careening play, which never seems to slow down in its emotional intensity. We see Oedipus try to save his land, interrogate witnesses to old events, and eventually find out the truth about his lineage and his fate, and throughout it all Sophocles keeps the intensity at the maximum.

In Wild Duck, however, we see a definite contrast of styles. Ibsen introduces some dramatic elements when he opens the play with a rumor about the supposed relationship between the master of the house and the housekeeper, but then he shifts over to a party scene in which the guests are fairly relaxed and unconcerned with more emotional events. One guest, who Ibsen describes simply with the title “the fat guest” says, “But really, is it true you’ve abolished our precious smoking privilege?” to which Mrs. Sorby responds, “Yes. Here in Mr. Werle’s sanctum, it’s forbidden” (Ibsen 126). This takes on a very different approach to the dramatic events than Oedipus, and it allows us to see and connect with the people as real, somewhat lazy people. This contrast between the two plays could be a cultural thing, or perhaps even a question of time period. While the ancient Greeks were dealing with wars and with famine and the destruction of their land by armies and by famine, the Norsemen in Wild Duck seem to have little of these same fears.

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.

Oedipus #2

Diary entries from any of the characters

The Diary of Oedipus

The First Day of My Quest to Find the Killers of Laius

I must find the bandits who killed the king of this land, so that Apollo will free us from the harsh drought and famine that holds our land hostage. According to Creon, this must be done, and so I will most certainly accomplish my goal, regardless of who or what comes in my way. And when I find the killers of Laius, they will be killed, or at least banished for the remainder of their lives. This I am sure of.

That dreadful prophet Tiresias came by today at the request of Creon. His blindness surely impedes his ability to truly see the future, and I cannot trust anything he says. The man is a beggar, starved for attention, and I must pay his words no heed. He tells me to lay off my search? I say nay nay. I will find the killers and free my land from the grips of the famine, and my people will love me, because I am Oedipus. I freed the city of Thebes once from the ferocious terror of the sphinx, and I can do it again. Do not pray to the Gods, do not run in fear. I will find the killers and free my city.

Some of Tiresias' words frightened me more than others today. He mentioned how I must kill my father and marry my mother, and this disturbs me. My lineage is extremely important, and this turn of events would devastate me. Plus, how could I kill my father? He is in the far away city of Corinth, separated by hills and mountains, and as for marrying my mother, she is there as well. This future will never come to pass, and Tiresias will be proven wrong by my efforts. I will change my fate, and no God or man will hold me captive to a fate I do not desire. For that is the nature of men, the ability to change what they want and to make a difference in how events turn out.