James Leigh’s excellent, perceptive essay on The Lady from the Sea (18) is not easy to summarize.  He uses Luce Irigaray’s theoretical work, Judith Fetterley’s analysis of Hawthorne’s short story “The Birthmark,” and his own careful close reading to examine “the linguistic and cultural systems” in which “the choices available to a nineteenth-century Norwegian housewife” are formulated.  He shows that these choices are already implicit in the Norwegian title, since frue, the word translated as “Lady” in the English title, is essentially a form of address that suppresses the addressee’s name while identifying her as a married woman, thereby “inexorably” situating her “in a political, economic and social hierarchy, in a position of inequality and subordination.”  In dealing with the text itself, Leigh discusses the choices as they are reflected in the Bolette subplot, and, far more important, traces Wangel’s treatment of Ellida: his speaking to her as if to a child, his constant “prescribing” to her in the sense of informing her what to do in various circumstances, his never asking her opinion and not listening to her when she offers one, his manipulating her in various ways in connection with the Stranger’s impending return.  Out of her most forceful objection to this treatment—“You understand me so little”—Leigh develops an intricate argument that none of the characters understand her, though most of them think they do, and that she does not understand herself, since she lacks a discourse that would make doing so possible:  “One could say that even though she is aware of—or at least in contact with—the elements in play, she does not have at her disposal a method by which she can combine them so as to produce meaningful discourse.  If we take the expression in both the transitive and intransitive forms, we could say that she does not/cannot ‘make sense’: she does not make sense, so no one understands her; and she cannot make sense of what goes on around her.”  What she lacks, he adds, “is a syntax, a properly feminine syntax,” and, using Irigaray, he then discusses this concept.
           Håvard Skaar’s concern is the proper relationship between a final text and the notes and versions that led up to it (19, in Norwegian).  He rejects the traditional procedure of using the notes and earlier versions as a means of better understanding and better appreciating the final text in favor of the view of the new textual genetics that every stage of composition of a work is an independent text and that the final text should be read in relation to its preceding material only in an intertextual way.  He provides such a reading of Hedda Gabler, contrasting its final text with Ibsen’s notes for the play, with the intention of showing that the “intertextual dynamic” makes it difficult to consider the final text as an expression of either of the two major critical positions about the play, one being that the play in an idealistic tragedy, the other that it is an example of disillusioned modernism.  The focus of his reading is Løvborg’s manuscript, and he contrasts its history within the final text with the history of its evolution through the notes into the final text, discovering that the two routes go

in opposite directions. I must say that the new textual genetics strikes me as a way to provide the stake to be driven into the corpse produced by the death of the author, and I can’t see how its application can be anything other than a meaningless game.
             The remaining essays all  appeared in the third number of the 1998 volume of the Norwegian journal Ordet, which was a special Ibsen number, and all are in Norwegian.
             Finn-Erik Vinje (20) notes that Ibsen was central to the creation of a literary version of the Dano-Norwegian actually spoken by the people in the milieus his dramas of contemporary life depict, but Vinje’s basic focus is a particular aspect of this accomplishment.  Ibsen claimed that no two people expressed themselves in the same way and that he carefully differentiated the speech of his characters accordingly.  Vinje provides numerous illustrations of this differentiating while commenting on the speech patterns of several characters in these plays, showing how they are placed socially, culturally, by personality type, and according to age.  He also points out shifts in speech patterns caused by changes in a character’s situation and uses odd spellings of words to indicate mispronunciations on the part of some characters.  His final paragraphs focus on the changes in Ibsen’s time—and thus in his plays—in the way spouses address one another, with interesting results for The Lady from the Sea, where Ellida’s always calling Wangel by his surname—indeed, he has no other name in the play—suggests how much older than her he is, and for Hedda Gabler, in which, according to Vinje, the only times Hedda calls her husband by his first name are when she refers to her pistols at the end of Act One and in Act Four when she exclaims “I’ll die of all this!”  Actually she uses his first name on other occasions in Act Four, but Vinje’s point, which is that her uses of his first name signify a removal, in whole or in part, of the mask that she normally presents to Tesman, remains valid.  Vinje’s focus in this essay is on usage, not style.  His contributions are valuable, but we also need work on how Ibsen differentiates his characters in terms of speech styles.
             Liv Bliksrud’s survey of Sigrid Undset’sviews on Ibsen and his work (21) discusses her remarks and the implications of the echoes of Ibsen in her writings.  Undset, Bliksrud writes, “objected that Ibsen did not adequately distance himself from himself and his own idiosyncrasies.  She was especially irritated by Ibsen’s view of modern women, whom she suspected he idealized too much and mystified.  Ibsen was certainly an old wise man, she wrote, but ‘like most men he never got so old and so wise as to be able to look at women without bias.  His bias was very charming—he took them too seriously.”  Undset also wrote of Ibsen that his “world was his own interior, his own fate, his own uncertainties, so that his dramas are certainly not pictures of Norwegian life except insofar as Henrik Ibsen was Norwegian through and through, but, of course, an exceptional Norwegian.”  Undset  had  a  lot  to say  about