All the Vulnerable Boys: Child-Saving Conjured in Henrik Ibsen’s Little Eyolf and Hiro Kanagawa’s Indian Arm

This article compares Henrik Ibsen’s 1894 drama Little Eyolf with Indian Arm, an adaptation of Ibsen’s play by Hiro Kanagawa, published in 2016. By focusing on each play’s evocations of fostering, adoption, and other means of “rescuing” children, I argue that they evoke the liberal project of child-saving. Especially when read together, Little Eyolf and Indian Arm call forth the ongoing history of attempting to render children and youth skikkelige [“cultured”] through assimilation into more dominant sectors of society. Kanagawa has recognized that Ibsen’s conclusion might be read as anticipating the Indian Residential School project in the twentieth century, a future that sets the scene for the past that haunts Indian Arm. I also show how Kanagawa uses the spectre of this history of taking children to dramatize his own critique of the settler subject.