Abstract
This paper argues that Ibsen’s representation of Eyolf Allmers, Hedvig Ekdal, and Hedda Tesman demonstrates resistance to disability narratives that set out to “cure” or “prostheticize” disability. Ibsen resists these disability plots by establishing a distance between the disabled character and their generic expectations, as well as letting the plots fail to fully sublimate a disabled character so that the plays end in uncertain ambiguity rather than resolution. Little Eyolf revolves around competing narratives about the nature, meaning, and resolution of Eyolf’s orthopedic impairment while Eyolf attempts to establish and maintain a distinct narrative identity. In The Wild Duck, Hedvig’s nascent blindness introduces blindness as an identity marker without yet being blind. The instability of disability as an identity confounds any attempt to resolve the “problem” of Hedvig’s eventual blindness. Hedda Gabler explores how behaviors that deviate from the norm become regulated as mental disabilities in a fictional text. Hedda is an idealist heroine, while the hegemonic social forces surrounding her treat the world as a bourgeois realist drama. While these three characters die, I argue that Ibsen’s use of ambiguity allows the deaths to become indeterminate and not necessarily directly imposed by their disabled identity. In contrast, the normative response to these ambiguous resolution-defying deaths reveals a deterministic tendency in that they cannot entirely discard the disability plots they developed, even as they fail to prostheticize recalcitrant disabled characters. The hegemonic normate’s incomplete sublimation of disabled characters results in the fracturing of realist generic conventions and undermining its claim to a totalizing representation of reality.