Review

Abstract

The main theme of Olivia Noble Gunn’s study is well summarized in its title: Empty Nurseries, Queer Occupants: Reproduction and the Future in Ibsen’s Late Plays. The empty nurseries that Gunn has found to occupy a conspicuous place in Hedda Gabler (1890), The Master Builder (1892), and Little Eyolf (1894) are not filled with the parents’ children but with what she calls “improper occupants,” i.e., with “inhabitants that are not the children of the family” (16), and she sets out to demonstrate what this recurrent pattern may mean. As a starting point, her observation seems both refreshingly concrete and full of promise. Still, one wonders, at the outset, whether the nursery theme will yield enough material to fill an entire book, not least because, as Gunn herself points out, these empty rooms do not get much attention in the texts: “In a certain sense, Ibsen’s nurseries are little more than traces” (12), they are offstage, and they are “more or less peripheral to the action” (11). However, she maintains that it is precisely these “trace-like qualities” that make the rooms significant; the empty spaces are spaces of possibility and hence of the future (12). A study of this motif may therefore be able to put us on the trail of Ibsen’s thinking about “reproduction in its broad sense” (3). In addition, Gunn maintains that her examination will put her in dialogue with “some major claims from queer and critical child studies” (2). Unfortunately, it is not entirely clear what these claims imply. From the very start, the reader encounters the difficulty of not knowing exactly for whom the study is written. Its style is often