The Platonic Intertext in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and Little Eyolf

Abstract

If we place Hedda Gabler within a broad intertextual scope of Plato’s Symposium, as proposed by Kristin Boyce (2018) in her analysis, then Ibsen’s play Little Eyolf could be examined as a subsequent transcript of this famous philosophical dialogue on love. Little Eyolf might be viewed as an appendix or a sequel to Hedda Gabler, a piece stemming from the remains of its motif—as though it rose from the ashes in Hedda’s fireplace or sprang from the pieces of paper out of which Tesman and Thea hope to compile a new book in the final scene of the play. In Little Eyolf, the play Ibsen wrote four years after Hedda Gabler, he continues to evolve Plato’s metaphor of giving birth to a book like giving birth to a child. Little Eyolf is a play about a book that never managed to mature, about a child who never grew up, about people striving to grow fully as people. As in the play Hedda Gabler, in which missing books and unborn children forever remain shrouded by darkness—either hidden in their mother’s womb, trapped in the scholar’s head, or burnt in the black rectangle of a fireplace—in Little Eyolf the hypothesis remains unfinished and the child is lost. As noted by Ernst Robert Curtius in his study European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, “the concept of the book as a child [... ] goes back to Plato’s doctrine of Eros” (Curtius 2013, 132). In Plato’s Symposium—in the part where Socrates decides to convey what Diotima taught him about the subject of love—love is defined as “giving birth in the beautiful, in respect of body and