Correspondence

94Comparative Drama Correspondence Like any author, I am of course regretful that Thomas F. Van Laan did not like our book on folklore in Ibsen's last plays. [Ibsen's Forsaken Merman: Folklore in the Late Plays, by Per Scheide Jacobsen and Barbara Fass Leavy, reviewed in Comparative Drama. 23, No. 3 (Fall 1989)]. He is, of course, entitled to his subjective response. But as a reviewer he has an intellectual and professional obligation to ground his review in a fair and objective analysis of what he has read. He especially owes this to the editors of journals, who must count on reviewers to read carefully and report accurately on the books they are evaluating. Mr. Van Laan has, I strongly urge, violated such obligations. Therefore, I hope you will print this response. Without a point by point refutation, I will cite but two telling examples of—at best—misreading. Both concern Ibsen's play, John Gabriel Borkman . Mr. Van Laan suggests that the mere mention of a "wolf" in the play was enough to cause me to argue for the werewolf as a theme in the play. What I argued for was a pattern of werewolf imagery, beginning in the play that preceded this one and more intricately developed in the next one, Ibsen's last play. Mr. Van Laan can dispute my pattern if he can or will, but to substitute a mere mention on my part for that pattern is to distort totally what I was trying to do. Second, little interests me less in literature than Ibsen's supposed starting point in John Gabriel Borkman—evil capitalists. According to Van Laan I never got beyond that starting point. But the whole thrust of my reading of the play is that Ibsen used economic metaphors in his play to depict the aesthetic and ethical plight of the nineteenth-century artist, a plight Ibsen shared with other artists. Again, Mr. Van Laan can challenge this reading; but he cannot with accuracy pretend I began and ended with some kind of diatribe against capitalism. As my co-author, Per Jacobsen, noted to me, this review was written as if we had no argument to present in the book, or prior scholarship to help support that argument. I regret very much that I could not be at the Yale conference to hear about incubi in Little Eyolf; the talk does indeed sound fascinating. Those of us who work with folklore and literature are a small group and I, for one, welcome contact with others interested in the connection. In the introduction to our book we specifically welcome those who will extend our references to folklore in these last plays. In addition, I have spent many years of research on the subject of the incubus, and a monograph I have written on the incubus and related folklore in Hawthorne will be published before the end of this year in Dickens Studies Annual. But I might also point out that those knowledgeable on the subject are aware that the incubus/succubus belongs to the same folklore family as the huldre, the troll, and the werewolf, folklore characters that we argue Ibsen employed extensively in his late plays. In the folklore of many peoples, the incubus fathers the "changeling" (I argued for Little Eyolf as a changeling). Thus a talk on Rita and the incubus in Little Eyold would seem to confirm not challenge the direction of our study. BARBARA FASS LEAVY Queens College Reviews95 I have re-read my review, my notes on The Forsaken Merman, and Professor Leavy's chapter on John Gabriel Borkman, and I must basically stand by what I wrote originally. I will, however, attempt to respond to the points that Professor Leavy has raised. My objections to The Forsaken Merman were primarily based on what I found to be its consistent reducing of what Ibsen wrote, specifically by seizing on tiny details in order to capture a play for one or another folklore pattern and for the significance Professors Jacobsen and Leavy had assigned this pattern, more generally by analyzing the plays in such a way as to suggest that they are to be understood only in...