Empty Nurseries, Queer Occupants

Reproduction and the Future in Ibsen's Late Plays

Olivia Gunn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000764635
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Who is the proper occupant of the nursery? The obvious answer is the child, and not an archive, a seductive troll-princess, or poor fosterlings. Nevertheless, characters in Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, and Little Eyolf intend to host these improper occupants in their children's rooms. Dr. Gunn calls these dramas 'the empty nursery plays' because they all describe rooms intended for offspring, as well as characters' plans for refilling that space. One might expect nurseries to provide an ideal setting for a realist playwright to dramatize contemporary problems. Rather than mattering to Ibsen in terms of naturalist detail or explicit social critique, however, they are reserved for the maintenance of characters' fears and expectations concerning the future. Empty Nurseries, Queer Occupants intervenes in scholarly debates in child studies by arguing that the empty bourgeois nursery is a better symbol for innocence than the child. Here, 'emptiness' refers to the common construction of the child as blank and latent. In Ibsen, the child is also doomed or deceased, and thus essentially absent, but nurseries persist as spaces of memorialization and potential alike. Nurseries also gesture toward the domains of childhood and women's labor, from birth to domestic service. 'Bourgeois nursery' points to the classed construction of innocence and to the more materialist aspects of this book, which inform our understanding of domesticity and family in the West and uncover a set of reproductive connotations broader than 'the innocent child' can convey.

1 Endless Aunts, Endless Books

The Future According to Hedda Gabler

In the empty nursery plays, babies are dead or doomed, projects remain undone, and children’s rooms are not occupied by offspring. Nevertheless, Hedda Gabler (1890) remains invested in reproduction, and not only in the sense that Ibsen uses reproductive figures and ersatz parentage to align mothers and fathers with creators, and offspring with projects. This chapter considers the significance of the forms that reproduction takes in this deeply pessimistic drama, asking, What future does Hedda Gabler ask us to imagine?

Each of the empty nursery plays also involves a proposal to refill empty children’s space with improper occupants, objects, or creatures that are not the offspring of the family. In Hedda Gabler, these occupants consist of an endless collection of texts that will form a boring archive, to be compiled by Hedda’s husband, Jørgen Tesman. Tesman is a “specialist,” a collector and organizer of other peoples’ papers—a talent that runs in the Tesman family (HG 12). Uninterested in the mode of archival preservation that animates her husband, Hedda burns an allegedly visionary manuscript about the “future history of civilization” written by Tesman’s rival and Hedda’s former comrade, Ejlert Løvborg (Durbach 52).¹ In Act Two, when Løvborg believes he has lost his manuscript, he tells his new comrade, Thea Elvsted, that he destroyed it.² Thea, the manuscript’s transcriber and potential muse, insists that it is as if Løvborg had “killed a little child,” and Løvborg agrees, seeming to confirm his role as both father and killer (HG 85). Hedda takes on their reproductive metaphor as the play comes to its climax in Act Three: “Now I’m burning,—now I’m burning the child” (HG 88). This drama of “child” burning represents the height of an apparent opposition in Hedda Gabler between vital creativity and secondhand collecting and copying.

The double meaning of apparent is crucial here: the difference between Løvborg’s creativity and Tesman’s specialization is evident, but it could also be misleading. My first argument in this chapter is that there are no examples of reproduction in Hedda Gabler that have a clear and uncertain relationship to vision and originality, or that are Fathered with a capital F. Løvborg’s manuscript about the future is more creative than Tesman’s projects, but it is not for that reason undomesticated, irreplaceable, or uncopiable. During the course of the play, Hedda learns that she cannot put a stop to her husband’s domesticated and domesticating archival collection, even by burning the supposedly inspired manuscript about the future, because Tesman and Thea will make an attempt to rewrite Løvborg’s book, and perhaps this copy will be housed in the empty nurseries of Hedda Gabler.

Hedda Gabler is in many ways a drama obsessed with the Father and the past. It has sometimes been read as a story of decline, wherein the end of the family line is confirmed and settled by the hand of an improperly gendered (masculinized) baby-killer, who kills the future when she kills herself. Toward the end of Act Four, Hedda commits suicide while pregnant, which appears to invite a reading along the very familiar lines of reproductive futurism: no baby = no future. As Lee Edelman spells it out, “If […] there is no baby and, in consequence, no future, then the blame must fall on the fatal lure of sterile, narcissistic enjoyments understood as inherently destructive of meaning” (No Future 13). One way to understand Hedda and her fate is to assume that she is condemned for failing to acquiesce to her reproductive role, for refusing to allow rooms and wombs to serve their proper function, and for refusing to become a carrier for the Tesman line. In an early essay, “The Irony of Decadence” (1953), Herbert Blau argues that Hedda embodies a dead end in the patriarchal line because she refuses to serve and assist procreativity or creativity.³ She will not serve the family like Tesman’s aunt, Miss Juliane Tesman. She will not assist in creative projects like transcriber Thea. She will not become a mother to her husband’s children. Fixated on her father and his supposedly heroic world, she already “antedates” the material bourgeois world in which we find her, and thus cannot speak to the longings and needs of the present moment (in Blau’s essay, the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century) (116). Because Hedda does not change and remains General Gabler’s daughter, Blau defines “one of her most affective characteristics” as “a disturbing sterility that approaches the masculine” (113). Hedda’s “essential sterility” emerges from her female masculinity, normatively defined, and from her difference from women characters who represent feminine service to the future through “sacrifice, charity, or love” (Blau 113).⁴ Blau insists that Ibsen’s drama contains no clear, internal principle from which to judge Hedda’s character, making it profoundly anti-redemptive, a work of nihilism and decadent irony with nothing to say to the future.⁵

My aim is to pay attention to gendered patterns of association that exceed the story of the Father and the question of the freedom of the individual, which is arguably the leading question in approaches to gender and sex in Ibsen studies.⁶ Rather than focusing on the contested relationship between universal personhood, femininity, and sex, I choose to dwell in aspects of Ibsen’s drama that constitute a pessimistic and anti-redemptive critique of the patriarchal family. While Blau diagnoses a female-masculine sterility in Hedda’s character, I emphasize the fact that Ibsen depicts a whole world in which reproductivity approaches the feminine. Hedda Gabler’s horizons of possibility consist of domestic-patriarchal endlessness, a world full of specialists, a family unit whose members will never lose their taste for engaging in secondhand projects, collecting new copies (whether babies or books), and transcribing and organizing the work of others. My second and primary argument is that the future is coming in Hedda Gabler, and that this future will be fully Tesmanized. The fulcrum of this argument is the maiden aunt, a non-procreative figure that nonetheless supports the family, guaranteeing its survival through secondhand mothering. To be Tesmanized, it turns out, is also to be tantified, or made auntly.

When Aunt Julie begins to expect Hedda’s pregnancy in earnest in Act One, she announces that she will be visiting her nephew and his new wife every day. The aunt’s visits, caresses, and expressions of concern exasperate Hedda, who loses patience in Act Two, uttering under her breath, “Oh, these eternal aunts!” (HG 44). Hedda’s utterance combines a specific and ostensibly harmless figure with an adjective—evig (eternal or endless) in Norwegian—denoting ceaseless number and duration. It is an idiomatic, exaggerative expression of frustration, the way one talks about things that drive one to distraction. But it is also more than this, given that subtle ties between reproduction and auntliness can be found throughout Ibsen’s drama. Taken together, these ties tell us, first, that the Tesmans are a family of domesticated, secondhand (re)producers, and, second, that the whole world of Hedda Gabler consists of tantified specialists. Hedda refuses to live in the Tesman family and in this world of aunts, which means that she is, after all, an anti-futural figure—just not in the simplistic baby-killing way that reproductive futurists might imagine. Hedda cannot kill the future because a future is coming, and it is this future that kills, its horizons of possibility driving her to commit suicide.

Forgetting the Father

Three main theoretical moves inspire my claim that Hedda Gabler is invested in feminizing forms of reproductivity: Edelman’s polemical assessment of reproductive futurism, introduced above, Jacques Derrida’s insistence that the archive marks both longing for, and impossibility of access to, the Father, to which I will return in the conclusion of this chapter, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s advice in “Tales of the Avunculate”: “Forget the Name of the Father. Think about your uncles and your aunts” (59).⁷ Although Sedgwick’s interests are aunts and uncles, she opens “Tales of the Avunculate” with a sociable command: “Let’s begin—but only because everyone else does—with the Name of the Father” (52). Before naming the difference that thinking about aunts might make in the case of Hedda Gabler, I will also begin—“just like everyone else”—by thinking about the name Gabler.

But before I can do this, I must admit that thinking about aunts in the case of Hedda Gabler does not enable me to make claims for forms of desire and creativity that take place between women, as others have done before me.⁸ Sedgwick focuses on some of the ways in which aunts and uncles can offer queerer forms of kinship. In Ibsen’s drama, the aunt is a figure that reinforces heteronormative-reproductive futures. As Joan Templeton writes, Aunt Julie is both “a paragon, approaching parody, of a familiar nineteenth-century type of self-sacrificing womanhood, the good spinster who devotes her life to a male relation” and the “mater familias” of Hedda Gabler (211, 213). The tangled webs of gender under patriarchy indicate that Ibsen’s play is both feminist, that is, a drama that takes an interest in critiquing sexed forms of entrapment (marriage, sexual extortion, etc.), and sexist, that is, founded on a familiar understanding of the feminine as a secondary and corrupting force.⁹ While Hedda is masculine-female—figuratively sterile, “[misidentified and maladjusted],” composed of “the rejected scraps of dominant masculinity” (Halberstam 9 and 1)—and the patriarchy is feminized (via Tesman), the feminine (Aunt Julie) becomes the passive-aggressive guarantor of the patriarchal family. Hedda Gabler remains caught up in an ambiguous mix of condemnation and commendation of its heroine, not only because Hedda Gabler must become Hedda Tesman or die but also because its commendation relies, in part, on effeminophobia, defined here as an aversion to emasculation and/as devitalization. Non-procreative aunts and the reproductive family go together because Pandora’s lateness—the notion that that which is feminine is also dangerously secondary and corrupting (figured in the jar that figures a womb and brings ruin)—lingers in Hedda Gabler’s prescient suggestions.¹⁰ The Gabler line is of the past, but it persists as an idealized and impossible fantasy. Any creature or product that might carry the Father into the future or lead to an alternative future remains latent, is subject to uncertainty, or is destroyed. Thus, thinking about aunts in the case of Hedda Gabler leads me back to Tesman, the name of the (lower case) father, a husband who represents the domesticated patriarchy, which is at once emasculated and persistent.

Many prominent aspects of Hedda Gabler suggest that Ibsen was more focused on the end of the Gabler line than on the future, more interested in the (ghost of the) Father than in the future of his daughter. Ibsen begins (titles his play) with the name of the father’s daughter. In a letter to his French translator, Russian diplomat Count Moritz Prozor, he wrote, “My intention in giving [the play the name Hedda Gabler] was to indicate that Hedda as a personality is to be regarded rather as her father’s daughter than as her husband’s wife” (Ibsen, Speeches and Letters 297, trans. Sprinchorn). This description of titular intention suggests that Hedda is to be understood through association with the General, a man of higher social rank than Tesman (and, in the past, of greater wealth). It also suggests that she is future-less, tied to the past and caught in an impasse between two forms of patriarchal possession.

There are, as noted, two family names in Hedda Gabler: Gabler and Tesman. Addressing the equal significance of the Tesman name, Elin Diamond writes,

In the play’s fiction, Hedda Gabler is erased by Hedda Tesman […] With her overdetermined connection to the father, Hedda Gabler troubles the representation of the wife. But Hedda Gabler cannot be viewed as ‘freer’ than Hedda Tesman; in effect it is the patriarchal ‘Gabler’ of her identity that causes her to become the ‘Tesman’ […] Hedda is caught between her swelling (mother’s) womb and her father’s pistols and identifies with neither. (27)

Characters, critics, and audiences continue to obsess over the motivations and desires (or lack thereof) of the personality known by the name Hedda Gabler. No such person exists in the play, however, either legally or in the present moment of action. Both Gabler and Tesman, it turns out, represent the family and its temporality: the seemingly eternal patriarchy, whether in idealized or degraded form, with no foreseeable alternative future for its daughters in either case. Although critics and characters (especially Løvborg) refuse to stop saying Hedda Gabler, Ibsen has already set the record straight before the action even begins. The first name on the character list is “GEORGE TESMAN, research fellow in cultural history,” followed by “HEDDA TESMAN, his wife” (HG 4, my emphasis).¹¹ Ibsen knows that his drama is about a personality that cannot carry its own name, technically speaking, and so he leaves us to shuttle back and forth between Gabler and Tesman. I am arguing that focusing on the Tesmanized future allowed by Ibsen’s drama, rather on the disallowed future of Hedda alone, will enable us to understand the full story that Hedda Gabler tells about gender and reproduction.

Like Ibsen, Aunt Julie knows what it means for Hedda Gabler to become Hedda Tesman: she must become a carrier for the Tesman name (HG 47).¹² Several characters in the play use the title Mrs. Tesman to refer to Hedda, but there are only two instances of the full name Hedda Tesman, both spoken by Aunt Julie. This name and the way in which Aunt Julie uses it—always with pregnancy in mind—make it apparent that her interest in Hedda is part and parcel of her interest in the expansion of the family. In Act One, after Hedda has insulted Aunt Julie’s new hat, Tesman distracts his aunt by drawing her attention to Hedda’s altered appearance. Hedda insists that she looks the same as she did before the honeymoon, but Tesman asks his aunt to notice how “plump and buxom” she has become, how “much weight she has put on d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Abbreviations
• Prologue: A Nursery at the Museum
• Introduction: Ibsen’s Empty Nurseries
• 1 Endless Aunts, Endless Books: The Future According to Hedda Gabler
• 2 Age Is Just a Number: Strange Calculations in The Master Builder
• 3 A Dead Child Cannot Look Back: Lost Boys in Little Eyolf
• 4 Unfaithful Authenticity: Going Backstage in the Bourgeois Home
• Epilogue: Survivors
• Works Cited
• Index