New Literary History

This article contends that it is necessary to go beyond the reductionism of certain investments in Ibsen criticism—either feminism or theater history?to perceive that in The Wild Duck it is through his treatment of the animal that Ibsen is able to address, with elegant economy, both an ethics of alterity and aesthetic concerns with theatricality and mediation. Ibsen achieves this through an exploration of the ways that different forms of mediation?theatrical, technological, intersubjective, and occult—all pivot about the same aesthetic questions that plague discussions of animality. In so doing, The Wild Duck also critiques period notions of "the human."