Henrik Ibsen’s Theatrical Drama Ghosts
Stage set of a mostly dark living room with blue velvet and wooden chairs, houseplants, and lamps.
In your view does Mrs. Alving mark the emergence of the modern woman in western theatre? Assess her characterization especially in the light of her conduct with her husband in the past and her son at the end of the play.
Two men and two women, in red and blue gowns and petticoats, and two men in suits, on this stage set.
Mrs. Helen Alving is a pioneer radical progressive stalwart feminist embodied character of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts and her cowardice and/or foolery with the cloaking of darkness of past life is tainted with scandals. Mrs. Alving vouchsafes the seduction scene of her beloved son’s flirtations with Regina in the vein of her closetting Captain Alving’s promiscuity with the domestic hearth stewardess parlour maid Johanne. Mrs Alving is a hybrid and fluid rebellious spirit adhered to keeping up with appearances in the western tradition.
The impending dooming catastrophe of upholding a fictitious pair of perfect couple is a gobsmack revelation foreshadowing Oswald and Regina’s unbeknownst incestuous romance. Phantom spectral love-making of the preceding generation reincarnates into the half-siblings unrequited love as embodied by the poltergeist alter egos. However, Mrs. Alving insists Pastor Manders in refraining from intrusion into the tempestuous seduction analogizing her late husband’s surreptitious extra-marital affairs. Helen Alving is a woman of education and woman of refinement despite a microcosm of absurdity, vulgarity, coarseness, egotism and debauchery. She nonetheless harbours courtesy and dignity while adjusting towards transcendence.
Despite Eurocentric male dominated patriarchal cosmos, Mrs. Alving transcends gender barriers of race and class through salvaging familial relationships. Her resolution to preserve the sanctity of the father son relationship is a marvelous throwback to severe father son conflict in nuclear families. Mrs. Helen’s abominable husband’s crestfallen lechery should not be revealed in the microcosmic world, so she disguises a stance of absolute blissful marital alliance and deports her son Oswald with scholarship abroad. Mrs. Alving endeavours painstakingly to protecting Oswald from a poisoned home life. This joyful illusion is furthered by the authority and decree of Pastor Manders’ acquaintanceship as foreshadowed by deemphasizing of lurking hidden past ghostly events.
Investigative series of a speculative fiction and detective literature, drama of contemporary life is portrayed by Henrik Ibsen in the Ghosts’ through Mrs. Helen Alving’s excruciating quest for self-fulfillment. Mrs. Alving’s heroic endeavour to establish orphanage in the legacy of her late husband is lost in the flames and burnt down to cinders, alluding to the literal and figurative bursting of spilled beans. Helen Alving’s abolishment of her abhorrent husband’s scandals through redemptive establishment thus becomes awry. Her family heirloom is relinquished of the life giving force because of the hereditary sexually transmitted diseases morbidity. Corruption and pollution afterall haunts as a cascade of infernal torment for all that eventually compels Mrs. Helen Alving with a sadomasochistic dilemma in administering overdose of morphines to end Oswald’s intolerable nightmarish macabre. The poltergeist soul of Captain Alving resurrects with a vengeance to haunt Mrs. Helen Alving in the alter ego Oswald she reckons, has vouchsafed from the truth.
“Ibsen’s Ghosts shares a problem with many contemporary naturalistic plays; it has some, but very little relevance in our world today.” Do you agree? Support your answer with an analysis of the treatment of any two issues in the play.
Or
(Middle aged couple and a younger man in a suit on stage)
“All your life you’ve been governed by an incorrigible spirit of wilfulness. Instinctively you’ve been drawn to all that’s undisciplined and lawless.” Critically explain the commentary of the speaker.
Henrik Ibsen’s modern European realistic problem play drama Gengangere or The Revenants (The Ones Who Return) is a satirical tragedy of contemporary nineteenth century Denmark and Norway’s “events that repeats themselves” concerning religion and morality, adultery and profligacy, incest and euthanasia and venereal epidemiological ramifications. The Ghosts is a firestorm of public outcry because of a controversial forbidden storyline of venereal diseases and syphilis infestation associated with unbridled lovemaking in debauchery and promiscuity.
Henrik Ibsen vindicates the crusade for unravelling a swashbuckler within the frontiers of modern western dramaturgical tradition and thus Ibsenites preoccupy themselves in battling hackneyed ideologies of the malevolent taboos propagated by orthodoxical society. None of the transformative radical policies of modern healthcare and medicine of the then controversially stigmatized sexually transmitted diseases were prevailingly conferred upon the vulnerable including Captain Alving and Oswald Alving. As a consequence, continental citizenry of the civilized world considered kindling fires on the syphilis affected patients even from their funeral pyres. Harrowing and heart wrenching sadomasochism trembles the innocent characters Mrs. Helen Alving and Pastor Manders analogous of Shakespeare’s shuddering in Macbeth and in Lady Macbeth’s taint of scandal.
Mrs. Helen Alving’s upbraiding for unfulfillment of cuckolding with Pastor Manders; her upbraiding of mismarriage adjustment with the dissolute husband Captain Alving; her upbraiding of the incestuous sibling lust bonding brimming between Oswald and Regina are realistically depicted as dysfunctional family relationships in contemporary patriarchal and misogynistic cultural Eurocentric ideology. “The sins of the fathers are visited on his children” extrapolates the trajectory of hereditary sexually transmitted diseases passed down from ancestral generation to the descendant generation as ushered in the polemic statement by Oswald. Captain Alving bequeathed the legacy of debauchery and dissolution to his heir, Oswald. Oswald’s frozen heart and stricken soul cannot idolize spatiotemporality of phenomenal mirocosmic boudoir offered at the expense of “my mind has broken down—-gone to pieces—-I shall never be able to work anymore!” Dreaded malady of the twilight of the brain is envisioned by such suicidal rhetorics of the son under the mother’s upbringing as expostulated in the remarks: “I, who gave you life” … “A nice kind of life it was that you gave me, and now you shall have it back again.” 
(Young man in slacks and a jacket speaks with an older man in a suit on stage. Woman is seated in a red dress).
Further Reading, References and Endnotes
Henrik Ibsen, W. D. Howells, The North American Review, Jul. 1906, Volume 183, No. 596 (Jul. 1906), pp. 1-14, The University of Northern Iowa
Stripped Cover Lit Youtube Vlog Review Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen: Summary, Interpretation and Analysis
40 MRS H.F.LORD on the phases of the soul in Ghosts 1890 149
44 An anonymous comment on the depravity of Ibsen, Edward, Aveling and Ghosts, Saturday Review 1891 157
Ghosts (Royalty 1891)
60 GEORGE MOORE sees Ghosts in Paris 1891 182
61 Unsigned notice by CLEMENT SCOTT, Daily Telegraph 1891 187
62 Editorial, Daily Telegraph 1891 189
63 Unsigned notice, Daily News 1891 193
64 Unsigned notice, Daily Chronicle 1891 195
65 Unsigned notice, Evening News and Post 1891 196
66 Anonymous satirical poem, Evening News and Post 1891 200
67 Ibsen and real life: report of a murder trial, Evening Standard
1891 201
68 Unsigned notice, Sunday Times 1891 201
69 Unsigned notice, Licensed Victuallers’ Mirror 1891 202
70 Unsigned notice, Hawk 1891 204
71 ‘How We Found Gibsen’, anonymous satirical story, Hawk
1891 205
72 WILLIAM ARCHER: ‘Ghosts and Gibberings’, Pall Mall
Gazette 1891 209
73 Ibsen speaks out: an interview, Era 1891 214
74 HENRY JAMES on Ibsen’s grey mediocrity 1891 216
Suggested Reading
Continental Philosophy Camus——-Absurdity and Suicide From the Routledge Online Encyclopedia https://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~degray/CP05/camus-1.html
https://bigthink.com/personal-growth/the-meaning-of-life-albert-camus-on-faith-suicide-and-absurdity
Spark Notes The Myth of Sisyphus An Absurd Reasoning: Absurdity and Suicide
Michael Egan’s Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, Critical Heritage, Routledge Publication, pp. 182-214
Young woman in a blue dress and petticoat talks with a young Black man.