Hedwig. ... It always seems to me that the whole room and everything in it should be called the depths of the sea. But that’s so stupid.... Because it’s only a garret [the place where the wild duck lives, the old Christmas-trees are put, where old Ekdal chases the rabbit, etc.].
Hedwig is a highly excitable child at the age of puberty (Ibsen thinks it necessary expressly to affirm that her voice is changing, and that she willingly plays with fire); hence it is natural that she should be thrilled with presentiments, dreams, and obscure instincts, and invest poetical expressions denoting something far away and wild, such as ‘in the depths of the sea,’ with the secret significance of all the mysterious and marvellous surging in her. But when expressions of this sort are used, not by little growing girls, but by full-grown persons depicted as rational beings, it is no longer a question of dreaming explicable on pathological grounds, but of diseased cerebral centres.
These words often assume the nature of an obsession. Ibsen obstinately repeats them, at the same time imparting to them a mysterious significance. It is thus, for example, that the words ‘joy of life’ appear in Ghosts (p. 176):
Oswald. ... She was full of the joy of life (p. 177).
Mrs. Alving. What were you saying about the joy of life?
Oswald. Have you noticed that everything I have painted has turned upon the joy of life?—always, always upon the joy of life? (p. 187).
Mrs. Alving. You spoke of the joy of life; and at that word a new light burst for me over my life and all it has contained.... You ought to have known your father.... He was brimming over with the joy of life.
In Hedda Gabler the word ‘beauty’ plays a similar part (p. 190):
Hedda (to Lövborg). You use it [the pistol] now.... And do it beautifully (p. 214).
Hedda. I say that there is something beautiful in this [Lövborg’s suicide] (p. 219).