Little Eyolf – A Sartrean Reading*

Abstract

In “A Century of Ibsen Criticism,” Errol Durbach describes Ibsen as a precursor to the twentieth-century existentialists (Durbach 1994, 245). According to Durbach, Ibsen’s plays, which dramatize the experience of becoming oneself through action and explore the need to assume responsibility over one’s choices, express concerns that are “ultimately existential” (Durbach 1994, 245) Durbach is not alone in identifying existential currents in Ibsen’s dramatic oeuvre. In 1949, only a few years after Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential play No Exit was produced in France for the first time in 1944, Henry Nordmeyer described Ibsen’s Enemy of the People and The Lady from the Sea as plays that present an “existential situation” (Nordmeyer 1949, 592). Martin Esslin also finds expressions of the existential notions of situation and freedom in Ibsen’s work (Esslin 1980). And most recently, Kristin Gjesdal pointed to existential dimensions in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (Gjesdal 2010). Ibsen’s existentialism is often traced back to the work of Søren Kierkagaard, the most well-known Scandinavian philosopher in Ibsen’s time. Different studies explore the historic and thematic grounds for reading Ibsen in light of Kierkagaard’s philosophy (Fjelde 1968; Esslin 1980, 77; Durbach 1982, 82–86; Kittang 2006, 307; Gjesdal 2010, 12–13). In these discussions, the name of Jean-Paul Sartre, himself an existential philosopher and dramatist, is often left out or mentioned only in passing. However, Sartrean existentialism provides a rich conceptual framework for reading Ibsen’s work. In what follows, I draw on Sartrean concepts such as bad-faith and the look, as well as on Sartrean conceptions of self hood and subjectivity to provide a new context for reading Ibsen’s Little Eyolf (1894). These