Ghost
Content
'IT IS NOT JUST OSVALD WHO IS SICK, IT IS THE WHOLE SOCIETY.' DISCUSS THIS VIEW OF HENRIK IBSEN'S GHOSTS (1881) OSVALD: What you have to know is that this tiredness - this not being able even to think of work - none of that's the real illness.
MRS. ALVING: Then what is the real illness? (Act III p.102)
Disease is a prominent motif in late nineteenth century European literature. A number of critics, prominently Elaine Showalter, have interpreted characters as diverse as the protagonist of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), the troglodytic alter-ego in Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and even the vampiric victims of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) as painted in terms of syphilitic deformity and regression, often with an implied critique of the society responsible for creating such figures. Most explicitly, Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins (1893) has one of its female protagonists actively seek to kill her syphilitic son. Pre-dating all of these is Ibsen's Ghosts , published in 1881, although not performed in Norway until 1883 , largely because of the scandal created by the play's publication. Certainly Osvald's illness can be harrowingly portrayed in performance, but it is not the crux of the play and cannot alone account for the overwhelmingly adverse public reaction to the play's publication. Clement Scott's evaluation of the play in The Daily Telegraph as 'air[ing] on the stage things a blind beggar would hide under his patches' (cited in Ewbank 1999 p.165) which greeted the first mainstream London staging in 1914 was mingled with critiques such as The Gentlewoman's image of Ibsen 'groping for horrors by night' (cited in Mulrine p.xxvi) and The Star's positive review, which asked of the play's decriers 'have they no eyes for...a great spiritual drama?' (production programme material Ghosts Comedy Theatre, London 2001). What is significant is that these reviewers chose to invoke an image of blindness, itself both a potential literal effect of syphilis on the infected body, and an almost wilfully induced metaphorical condition in which one cannot - or will not - perceive the truth, a concept that links to the title of Ibsen's 1863 poem 'Lysaed', a neologism used once again in Ghosts to describe the condition of being 'desperately afraid of the light' (Act II p.55).
The central themes of Ghosts are made explicit in this speech by Mrs. Alving where she confronts Manders with the concept that
It's not just what we inherit from our mother and father that lives on in us. It's all kinds of old, dead ideas, all kinds of old, dead beliefs and suchlike. They're not actually alive in us, they're just stuck there, and we can't get rid of them... (Act II p.55)
The individuals comprising society are suffering from this suffocation by the weight of these 'dead beliefs'. The play is a critique of a stagnant society, which, though on the surface a liberal one, is in fact crushed beneath the tyranny of the ideals and mores it has engendered. Public opinion exerts a terrible toll and weight upon individuals, with the conventions of the past perpetuated into the present, appearances to be kept up and sham truths paraded. That which is threatening to the status quo of bourgeois respectability must be repressed, manipulated and almost grotesquely disguised in a 'long hateful farce' (Act I p.45). The ghosts that 'come back to haunt you' (Act II p.53) emerge, then, from a whited sepulchre, a painted patina disguising a charnel house of dead ideas within; an image that is echoed in Osvald's description of those supposedly 'exemplary husbands and fathers' (Act I p.33) secretly revelling in the 'rampant immorality' (ibid.) they so actively purport to decry. Society is pulling itself apart through the dichotomy it has created between public and private versions of lives, between the ideology it preaches, and what it actually practices. Bjorn Hemmer points out that ...
from the perspective of the bourgeois individual, the family is a micro-society which mirrors the nature of the macro-society, and which is to bear witness to its health... (cited in McFarlane 1994 p.70)
If that is the case, then the society that has produced the Alving family is in very poor health indeed.
This society exerts pressure to conform to its values, established and enshrined in the past. As John Northam notes, the 'social self', developed for acceptance or for protection, and conforming to the demands of the family and society at large, has eclipsed the 'essential self', the true self of an individual's desires and emotions. Self-fulfilment and freedom are entwined, and the stifling social milieu of Ghosts permits neither. The power of this moribund and proscriptive society is such that all of this can be inferred. The play features only five onstage characters (although the 'ghosts' of Johanna and Captain Alving loom large), and the oppressive weight of 'popular opinion' (Act I p.39) in 'pass[ing] judgement' (ibid.) is conveyed, appropriately, through hearsay. Manders is almost a walking symptom of societal sickness with his constant mantra of 'a daughter's duty' (Act I p.14), 'your duty as a wife...as a mother' (Act I p.37), 'bounden duty' (Act II p.52) and so on. He accepts and capitulates to the ideologies of bourgeois society, but has an utter unawareness of the cost in human terms of his actions. He is at once the most respected within the community, with all the 'committees and boards I have to sit on' (Act I p.16), and the least free. For him, and for Mrs. Alving, the lie sanctioned by society has become an acceptable basis for a life and conscience ceased to be a moral guide, more a tool of that authoritarian society.
The world of Ghosts is a hopeless one in which even the most fixed of symbols and tropes are perverted. As Leah Hadomi points out the trope of the secret revealed in Ghosts neither redeems nor saves; there
is the irony of Mrs Alving as a nurturing mother who is also at least partly responsible for Osvald's condition , and the ironic doubling of 'the Prodigal Son' (Act I p.26) theme, with Osvald's homecoming actually a 'going to your ruin' (Act III p.98) and Regine - to whom Mrs Alving actually addresses those words - having her true identity acknowledged, only to leave for a new home every bit a sham as the Alving house. Barbara Leavy suggests that the root of the Norwegian word 'elf' implicit in the name 'Alving' points to an alternative sphere to that of the social restriction and convention the family is trapped by, but there is little evidence of this alternate world in the play, aside from Osvald's account of the 'artistic circles' (Act I p..31) and 'free marriages' (Act I p.32) of Paris.
Ghosts has been perceived, especially by some feminist critics, as the flip-side to A Doll's House (1879); the earlier play makes much of the problematical position of woman in society, itself seen as a symptom of a wider social malaise, but - even though the conflict between Nora and Torvald is unresolved - the play, in its original form at least, provides an escape of sorts for Nora. Mrs Alving, forced by social pressures into a game of deception akin to Nora's pretence that 'our life together could be a real marriage' (A Doll's House Act III p.232), is permitted no such lasting escape. She has effected an escape of sorts earlier in her life, only to have the strictures of society - in the shape of Manders, the man she loves - force her back to her 'duty'. Once again, the essential self is stifled by the social self, and individuals are controlled by the imposed restrictions of an unfeeling social milieu. Her attempts to replace the destroyed false idol of the paragon father with a genuine act of self-sacrifice - 'I've nothing to live for, except you' (Act III p.101) - are doomed, since she is trapped in a society that trades on illusions, her own illusions of motherhood and duty dissolve in the sunlight at the close of the curtain.
Robin Young also points out the web of references to stunted childhood in the play: Regine given to Engstrand to avoid scandal befalling the Alving family, the orphanage dedicated to a false icon, Osvald sent away from the family home; all indicative of a society that manipulates and ultimately destroys children. The motion of the entire play is almost unnaturally retrograde, with Osvald regressing to a lost and damaged childhood state flanked by images of all-consuming flame ('it'll all burn' (Act III p.92)) and ice ('the glacier' (Act III p.106 stage direction)), symbolic of the union of his passionate father and frigid mother, a socially sanctioned marriage that could ultimately create nothing.
If this society is a sick and haunted one, it is also as blind as those reviewers censured by The Star. It is duped into believing in 'beautiful illusion' (Act III p.53) and mere 'facade' (Act I p.40), and its blinkered and judgemental stare simply ignores the complexities of reality. Manders is all too ready to condemn Johanna as the stock fallen woman, but cannot even begin to comprehend the concept of the 'fallen man' (Act II p.50). In a society crippled by hypocrisy, he is unable to recognise his own blatant hypocrisy, let alone that of Engstrand. If illusions are to take the place of real things, then words too in this society are apt to confusing nuances of meaning, to the extent that the opposite intent is expressed to that which the speaker wished. A case in point is Engstrand's parting shot, concerning his seamen's hostel: 'If
I'm allowed to run it the way I have in mind,...it'll be a credit to the Captain's memory' (Act III p.91); on one level a seemingly blunt piece of manipulative hypocrisy, on another the absolute truth: that the professed paragon Captain's memory is more accurately served by a debauched tavern than an orphanage. This type of society allows opportunists such as Engstrand to thrive: he is able very easily to dupe the almost impossibly credulous and short-sighted Manders, guilt-ridden because of the way he imagines society will hold him to blame for the fire, into investing in an establishment that will in fact go against the grain of all the pious pastor stands for. And yet, should judgement of Engstrand not be mitigated by his obviously difficult life with Johanna, bringing up the child of another man? And if Manders is pompous and credulous, does he not at least live largely unflinchingly by his religious principles? Mrs. Alving is both perceptive and shallow, often in quick succession, both compassionate and uncaring, both a victim of a sickly society, and responsible for perpetuating that sickness to the point that it is suggested that she may have driven the Captain to infidelity by her frigidity. All are complex characters denied any right to complexity by a society bent on judging and ascribing labels of reputation based on outward deportment, which 'shrivel the beguiling complexities and ambiguities' (Eyre 2005 p.18) of the individual. This society has lost its way, is struggling to breathe under the strictures of filial and uxorial piety enshrined in the past. If 'all truly noble morality grows out of triumphant self-affirmation' (McFarlane 1994 p.134), this society has nothing in it either true or noble, since the true self has been utterly stifled by a set of social codes:
MRS ALVING: What about the truth?
MANDERS: What about his ideals? (Act II p.52)
A society in which a character can declare 'what right have we human beings...to happiness?...we have our duty to do' (Act I p.36) without any hint of irony, in which 'mercenary marriage' (Ewbank et al. 1999 p.161) is commonplace, and in which incest is countenanced and can almost seem acceptable, is shown to be at the least unwholesome.
MRS. ALVING: Then what is the real illness? (Act III p.102)
Disease is a prominent motif in late nineteenth century European literature. A number of critics, prominently Elaine Showalter, have interpreted characters as diverse as the protagonist of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), the troglodytic alter-ego in Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and even the vampiric victims of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) as painted in terms of syphilitic deformity and regression, often with an implied critique of the society responsible for creating such figures. Most explicitly, Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins (1893) has one of its female protagonists actively seek to kill her syphilitic son. Pre-dating all of these is Ibsen's Ghosts , published in 1881, although not performed in Norway until 1883 , largely because of the scandal created by the play's publication. Certainly Osvald's illness can be harrowingly portrayed in performance, but it is not the crux of the play and cannot alone account for the overwhelmingly adverse public reaction to the play's publication. Clement Scott's evaluation of the play in The Daily Telegraph as 'air[ing] on the stage things a blind beggar would hide under his patches' (cited in Ewbank 1999 p.165) which greeted the first mainstream London staging in 1914 was mingled with critiques such as The Gentlewoman's image of Ibsen 'groping for horrors by night' (cited in Mulrine p.xxvi) and The Star's positive review, which asked of the play's decriers 'have they no eyes for...a great spiritual drama?' (production programme material Ghosts Comedy Theatre, London 2001). What is significant is that these reviewers chose to invoke an image of blindness, itself both a potential literal effect of syphilis on the infected body, and an almost wilfully induced metaphorical condition in which one cannot - or will not - perceive the truth, a concept that links to the title of Ibsen's 1863 poem 'Lysaed', a neologism used once again in Ghosts to describe the condition of being 'desperately afraid of the light' (Act II p.55).
The central themes of Ghosts are made explicit in this speech by Mrs. Alving where she confronts Manders with the concept that
It's not just what we inherit from our mother and father that lives on in us. It's all kinds of old, dead ideas, all kinds of old, dead beliefs and suchlike. They're not actually alive in us, they're just stuck there, and we can't get rid of them... (Act II p.55)
The individuals comprising society are suffering from this suffocation by the weight of these 'dead beliefs'. The play is a critique of a stagnant society, which, though on the surface a liberal one, is in fact crushed beneath the tyranny of the ideals and mores it has engendered. Public opinion exerts a terrible toll and weight upon individuals, with the conventions of the past perpetuated into the present, appearances to be kept up and sham truths paraded. That which is threatening to the status quo of bourgeois respectability must be repressed, manipulated and almost grotesquely disguised in a 'long hateful farce' (Act I p.45). The ghosts that 'come back to haunt you' (Act II p.53) emerge, then, from a whited sepulchre, a painted patina disguising a charnel house of dead ideas within; an image that is echoed in Osvald's description of those supposedly 'exemplary husbands and fathers' (Act I p.33) secretly revelling in the 'rampant immorality' (ibid.) they so actively purport to decry. Society is pulling itself apart through the dichotomy it has created between public and private versions of lives, between the ideology it preaches, and what it actually practices. Bjorn Hemmer points out that ...
from the perspective of the bourgeois individual, the family is a micro-society which mirrors the nature of the macro-society, and which is to bear witness to its health... (cited in McFarlane 1994 p.70)
If that is the case, then the society that has produced the Alving family is in very poor health indeed.
This society exerts pressure to conform to its values, established and enshrined in the past. As John Northam notes, the 'social self', developed for acceptance or for protection, and conforming to the demands of the family and society at large, has eclipsed the 'essential self', the true self of an individual's desires and emotions. Self-fulfilment and freedom are entwined, and the stifling social milieu of Ghosts permits neither. The power of this moribund and proscriptive society is such that all of this can be inferred. The play features only five onstage characters (although the 'ghosts' of Johanna and Captain Alving loom large), and the oppressive weight of 'popular opinion' (Act I p.39) in 'pass[ing] judgement' (ibid.) is conveyed, appropriately, through hearsay. Manders is almost a walking symptom of societal sickness with his constant mantra of 'a daughter's duty' (Act I p.14), 'your duty as a wife...as a mother' (Act I p.37), 'bounden duty' (Act II p.52) and so on. He accepts and capitulates to the ideologies of bourgeois society, but has an utter unawareness of the cost in human terms of his actions. He is at once the most respected within the community, with all the 'committees and boards I have to sit on' (Act I p.16), and the least free. For him, and for Mrs. Alving, the lie sanctioned by society has become an acceptable basis for a life and conscience ceased to be a moral guide, more a tool of that authoritarian society.
The world of Ghosts is a hopeless one in which even the most fixed of symbols and tropes are perverted. As Leah Hadomi points out the trope of the secret revealed in Ghosts neither redeems nor saves; there
is the irony of Mrs Alving as a nurturing mother who is also at least partly responsible for Osvald's condition , and the ironic doubling of 'the Prodigal Son' (Act I p.26) theme, with Osvald's homecoming actually a 'going to your ruin' (Act III p.98) and Regine - to whom Mrs Alving actually addresses those words - having her true identity acknowledged, only to leave for a new home every bit a sham as the Alving house. Barbara Leavy suggests that the root of the Norwegian word 'elf' implicit in the name 'Alving' points to an alternative sphere to that of the social restriction and convention the family is trapped by, but there is little evidence of this alternate world in the play, aside from Osvald's account of the 'artistic circles' (Act I p..31) and 'free marriages' (Act I p.32) of Paris.
Ghosts has been perceived, especially by some feminist critics, as the flip-side to A Doll's House (1879); the earlier play makes much of the problematical position of woman in society, itself seen as a symptom of a wider social malaise, but - even though the conflict between Nora and Torvald is unresolved - the play, in its original form at least, provides an escape of sorts for Nora. Mrs Alving, forced by social pressures into a game of deception akin to Nora's pretence that 'our life together could be a real marriage' (A Doll's House Act III p.232), is permitted no such lasting escape. She has effected an escape of sorts earlier in her life, only to have the strictures of society - in the shape of Manders, the man she loves - force her back to her 'duty'. Once again, the essential self is stifled by the social self, and individuals are controlled by the imposed restrictions of an unfeeling social milieu. Her attempts to replace the destroyed false idol of the paragon father with a genuine act of self-sacrifice - 'I've nothing to live for, except you' (Act III p.101) - are doomed, since she is trapped in a society that trades on illusions, her own illusions of motherhood and duty dissolve in the sunlight at the close of the curtain.
Robin Young also points out the web of references to stunted childhood in the play: Regine given to Engstrand to avoid scandal befalling the Alving family, the orphanage dedicated to a false icon, Osvald sent away from the family home; all indicative of a society that manipulates and ultimately destroys children. The motion of the entire play is almost unnaturally retrograde, with Osvald regressing to a lost and damaged childhood state flanked by images of all-consuming flame ('it'll all burn' (Act III p.92)) and ice ('the glacier' (Act III p.106 stage direction)), symbolic of the union of his passionate father and frigid mother, a socially sanctioned marriage that could ultimately create nothing.
If this society is a sick and haunted one, it is also as blind as those reviewers censured by The Star. It is duped into believing in 'beautiful illusion' (Act III p.53) and mere 'facade' (Act I p.40), and its blinkered and judgemental stare simply ignores the complexities of reality. Manders is all too ready to condemn Johanna as the stock fallen woman, but cannot even begin to comprehend the concept of the 'fallen man' (Act II p.50). In a society crippled by hypocrisy, he is unable to recognise his own blatant hypocrisy, let alone that of Engstrand. If illusions are to take the place of real things, then words too in this society are apt to confusing nuances of meaning, to the extent that the opposite intent is expressed to that which the speaker wished. A case in point is Engstrand's parting shot, concerning his seamen's hostel: 'If
I'm allowed to run it the way I have in mind,...it'll be a credit to the Captain's memory' (Act III p.91); on one level a seemingly blunt piece of manipulative hypocrisy, on another the absolute truth: that the professed paragon Captain's memory is more accurately served by a debauched tavern than an orphanage. This type of society allows opportunists such as Engstrand to thrive: he is able very easily to dupe the almost impossibly credulous and short-sighted Manders, guilt-ridden because of the way he imagines society will hold him to blame for the fire, into investing in an establishment that will in fact go against the grain of all the pious pastor stands for. And yet, should judgement of Engstrand not be mitigated by his obviously difficult life with Johanna, bringing up the child of another man? And if Manders is pompous and credulous, does he not at least live largely unflinchingly by his religious principles? Mrs. Alving is both perceptive and shallow, often in quick succession, both compassionate and uncaring, both a victim of a sickly society, and responsible for perpetuating that sickness to the point that it is suggested that she may have driven the Captain to infidelity by her frigidity. All are complex characters denied any right to complexity by a society bent on judging and ascribing labels of reputation based on outward deportment, which 'shrivel the beguiling complexities and ambiguities' (Eyre 2005 p.18) of the individual. This society has lost its way, is struggling to breathe under the strictures of filial and uxorial piety enshrined in the past. If 'all truly noble morality grows out of triumphant self-affirmation' (McFarlane 1994 p.134), this society has nothing in it either true or noble, since the true self has been utterly stifled by a set of social codes:
MRS ALVING: What about the truth?
MANDERS: What about his ideals? (Act II p.52)
A society in which a character can declare 'what right have we human beings...to happiness?...we have our duty to do' (Act I p.36) without any hint of irony, in which 'mercenary marriage' (Ewbank et al. 1999 p.161) is commonplace, and in which incest is countenanced and can almost seem acceptable, is shown to be at the least unwholesome.
