Peer Gynt and Suzannah: Revealing Representations of Age

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1 Marc E. Agronin outlines the evolution of thinking about age in “From Cicero to Cohen: Developmental Theories of Aging, From Antiquity to the Present” (2014).

2 See Gene Cohen in The Creative Age: Awakening Human Potential in the Second Half of Life (2000) and “New Theories and Research Findings on the Positive Influence of Music and Art on Health with Ageing” in Arts & Health (2009), and Stephen Katz and Erin Campbell in Cultural Aging (2005).

3 The Master Builder (1892), John Gabriel Borkman (1896), and When We Dead Awaken (1899).

4 See Astrid Saether's account of the historical Suzannah Ibsen's life in Suzannah: Fru Ibsen (2008), which enables me able to differentiate between the historical Suzannah and Fosse's fictionalized version.

5 Kyle Korynta, in “Altering Henrik Ibsen's Aura: Jon Fosse's Suzannah” (2016), highlights the fragmentation of one Suzannah into three characters as well as the fragmentation of the monologues.

6 Paul Johnson writes in Old Age from Antiquity to Post-Modernity, “Increasingly historians have challenged many of the assumptions in social and biomedical theories of ageing, and have shown that contemporary beliefs in some former ‘golden age’ of old age – in which older people were venerated in their community and cared for by their family – are largely untrue” (Johnson 1998, 1). However, even within that framework, Tim G. Parkin elaborates a great deal of variation in attitudes about aging in the ancient world in Ageing in Antiquity (1998). In Declining to Decline, Margaret Morganroth Gullette cautions that we have been “crippled by decline thinking” (Gullette 1997, 8), and she aims to present “evidence against the mainstream connotations of ‘aging’ as a natural, biological, prenarrativized ahistorical, universal decline” (Gullette 1997, 14).

7 Which oddly do share one notable similarity, i.e. the absence of an antagonist.

8 Translations of Peer Gynt are taken from Geoffrey Hill, 2016. All translations of Fosse's Suzannah are my own.

9 Gendered differences continue in old age. Gunhild O. Hagestad and Pearl A. Dykstra point out that despite the principle of intersectionality being well-articulated, “little progress has been made in understanding age and gender as intertwined systems” (Hagestad and Dykstra 2016, 135).

10 Although Nordic Orientalism is beyond the scope of this article, I agree with Frode Helland's point that the many demeaning clichés deployed by Ibsen cannot be ignored even when interpreted as satire, because even so-called positive stereotypes offensively characterize Anitra as being “cunning, untrustworthy thieves and bandits” (Helland 2009, 139).

11 Kari Jegerstedt's article, “Anitras etterliv: ‘Ibsens kvinner’ i en postkolonial kontekst” [Anitra's afterlife: “Ibsen's women” in a postcolonial context] highlights how the fourth act interjection of middle-aged but fair, lovely and loyal Solveig highlights “the imperialistic construction of gender and femininity” and “contributes to how Solveig's appearance in the fourth act sticks out as uncomfortably problematic in relation to what Skorgen and Oxfeldt assert is Ibsen's anti-orientalistic intention in the Anitra scenes” (Jegerstedt 2007, 64; my translation).

12 Which is sometimes defied with comic effect in contemporary film and theater, for example in Benidorm Bastards, a Belgian Candid Camera-like television series. Elderly actors very deliberately do not act their age, thereby disrupting stereotypes of old-age performative norms such as refraining from overtly sexual behavior and hiding the “grotesque aging body” (Swinnen and Stotesbury 2012, 11).

13 Skjeldal further explains the use of the Latin omni- as it is used of God, as being all-powerful, that is, omnipotent.

14 À la Meister Eckhart and other Christian mystics, that is, describing a numinous experience in terms of what it is not, since trying to approach the infinite with words only brings one further from it.

15 For an example from Norwegian theater, please refer to Rikke Gürgens Gjaerum's 2013 articles (Gjaerum 2013a, 2013b): Article 1: “Recalling Memories through Reminiscence Theatre” and Article 2: “Art, Age & Health: A Research Journey about Developing Reminiscence Theatre in an Age-Exchange Project.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Connie Amundson

CONNIE AMUNDSON is a Graduate Student at the Department of Scandinavian Studies, University of Washington. Amundson’s academic interests combine her lifelong passion for health as well as drama and theater. Her doctoral dissertation takes a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of aging in two Norwegian dramas, Peer Gynt and Suzannah, and performances thereof. In addition to her dissertation work, she has recently received a graduate certificate in Medical Humanities from the University of Maine. Email: [email protected]