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Empty Nurseries, Queer Occupants - Reproduction and the Future in Ibsen's Late Plays (Paperback)
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Empty Nurseries, Queer Occupants - Reproduction and the Future in Ibsen's Late Plays (Paperback)
Series: Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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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.
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