Introduction

The introduction presents the pattern of children’s rooms in what I call Ibsen’s “empty nursery plays”: Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, and Little Eyolf. It also explores scholarship that wields and critiques the concept of innocence and introduces the proposed occupants that signify Ibsen’s non-procreative futurism, or his characters’ dreams of continuation beyond the deaths of children. Ibsen’s nurseries exemplify the claim, much discussed in child studies, that innocence itself is a form of emptiness and deferral. I intervene in this conversation by offering the empty bourgeois nursery as a better symbol for innocence than the child.