At the time when Ghosts first appeared, it was considered extremely dangerous and indecent. The themes it contains of inherited illness (siphylis, though this is never directly stated) and hypocrisy were unacceptable to the later nineteenth century audience, even to those who considered themselves liberals and had championed Ibsen’s earlier plays.
The story of the play is that of a young man, who returns home from the bohemian life of an artist because he is suffering from a mysterious illness. He has been brought up abroad, and has always believed, as the world in general has believed, that his father was a pillar of the community. He begins to fall in love with his mother’s maid.
His mother is extremely alarmed when she realises what is happening. She is the only one who really knows what her dead husband was like, and she knows that he was in fact the father of the serving girl. There are parallels between her past history and the story of Nora in The Dollshouse; she too tried to leave her husband, though he was far more unpleasant than Nora’s. She, however, was persuaded to return by the local church minister, with whom she had sought refuge. For the sake of her son, she spent the rest of her life covering up the truth about her husband.
The story very powerfully brings out its themes, but is very much less shocking than it seemed over a hundred years ago. It is still a play which makes one think about what you really inherit from your parents, anticipating Philip Larkin’s famous poem by many years.
Ibsen’s Ghosts has been subjected to a succession of interpretations and re-interpretations. Like any great work of art, it has meant widely different things for different generations. It has been seen variously as a social drama of revolt, offering an outspoken challenge to the hypocrisy of late nineteenth-century European society, as a melodramatic pice thse focusing attention on 0svald Alving’s inherited disease and his final lapse into dementia, and, in complete contrast, as a moving tragedy showing the suffering of a mother who finds that the past cannot simply be exorcised.
Over the years critics have differed widely in their estimation of the play’s merit and in their views as to what precisely the play is about. So far, however, there has been a fairly widespread degree of unanimity in critical views as to what the play is not about. Most critics have agreed that Ghosts is not primarily, if at all, a play about interaction.
There is general acceptance of the view that Ghosts, as the title would seem to indicate, is a play about action in the past. The various characters in the play, it is argued, merely react during the course of the play to a series of events and occurrences that are rooted in the past; they do not interact significantly with each other in the present.
Ghosts can also be seen as a play about one single mind defining itself against its surroundings, its own past, concentrating on the quest of a single individual
Theme – the gradual process by which a noble woman, who imagines herself to be enlightened enough to exorcise the ghosts of past actions, comes at length to know the complete irrevocability of deeds done long ago.
Ghosts can also be seen as a play about family conflict, tracing out the interaction of parent and child, rather than a play concerned with physical inheritance: Much that Ibsen wrote about Oswald’s illness reflected the attitudes of physicians of his day. Thus he suggested that its cause lay in the degeneration – or softening – of the brain as a result of the inheritance of disease from a profligate parent, and that its course would inevitably be a progressive decline to idiocy. Yet the essence of the play lies in the dramatic representation of the conflicts in the family triangle formed by Oswald and his mother and father.
During the action of Ghosts a number of decisive events occur, engendering a crisis with a catastrophic issue. Important things are said and done which have far-reaching consequences, but the characters involved are not necessarily aware of what it is they are doing and saying. The play presents a complex tissue of on-going process in which it is difficult and, at times, almost impossible to ascertain who is doing what to whom.
If we look, for instance, at the opening scene in the play between Regine and Engstrand, we find that ostensibly it records Engstrand’s attempt to persuade his daughter Regine to return home with him and leave Mrs. Alving’s service. Engstrand has plans for opening a seamens’ hostel-cum-brothel in town and has calculated that Regine would constitute something of a star attraction in such an establishment. The scene also ostensibly records Regine’s flat refusal even to consider such a project. What is actually going on, however, as these two characters interact is something rather different and rather more complex. In terms of the actual words used, and even more in terms of intonation and gesture, both characters act out a pattern of response derived quite specifically from the family nexus in which they once lived. The scene is shaped in such a way that it revolves around a number of unresolved conflicts from this family nexus, and, as they interact, both characters activate old wounds that have never properly healed.
Decisive experiences such as these defy easy resolution in later life; in Regine’s case, the mere thought of returning home with her father is enough to make her relive, in the most terrifying fashion, some of the more degrading and humiliating scenes she endured as a child. Unable to forget what she once experienced, she can now certainly never forgive Engstrand. All she feels is the desire to wound, for it is only at this level that she can communicate with her father.
Summoning up all her resentment, she insults him under her breath so that he shall not even properly hear what she says; significantly she picks on his club foot, his noisy, grotesque, clumping foot that her mother had so disliked. (In the next act Engstrand himself points to his gammy leg as one of the factors which made Johanne originally turn down his early proposals of marriage.) Even now Regine’s rejection of her father, intended to be doubly insulting through being expressed in French, which Engstrand, as she well knows, is too vulgar and uneducated to understand, is conditioned, not so much by what is said and done in the present, but rather by the memory of what was said and done in Engstrand’s household. Regine is still her mother’s child and responds to Engstrand quite instinctively in the way she learnt at home. Here, as elsewhere in the play, praxis and process are inextricably linked.
Engstrand, for his part, is not unmoved by all this. He too still suffers from the spiritual scars left by his marriage, though he is rather better at coping with such misfortunes than his daughter. He had once been in love with Johanne and had proposed to her even before she went to Rosenvold to work for Captain Alving; but she only had ‘eyes for the good-looking ones’, and she turned him down.
When Johanne returned from Rosenvold, pregnant and in disgrace, Engstrand seized his opportunity, obtaining both her person in marriage and the money she had been given by the Alvings to remain silent. He clearly thought this was a golden opportunity for making the best of a bad situation. However, his marriage proved to be a catastrophe. Johanne was a frigid, nagging wife who was intent on making him feel socially and sexually inferior. In one of his replies to Regine, Engstrand offers a brief glimpse into the kind of humiliation to which he was subjected during his marriage, the kind of humiliation that either breaks a man’s spirit or drives him to drink – in Engstrand’s case perhaps one should say, back to drink. Fortunately Engstrand possessed both a stout liver and considerable resilience. He survived his various drinking bouts and never once cracked during all the years he lived with Johanne. Even now, when Regine imitates the way his wife used to insult him, he still preserves his cool. Engstrand knows how to survive. He is also a man of considerable stubbornness, which in turn provokes and feeds Regine’s resentment. Both of them are locked in a closed circle of misunderstanding.
In more ways than one, Regine is like her mother, and as Engstrand begins to spell out the real nature of the deal he is proposing, his thoughts automatically return to Johanne. This in turn leads him into making what is meant to be a flattering comparison between Regine and her mother, who managed to do quite well for herself, according to the tale she told him, with some rich foreigner or other before Engstrand married her. Now this is a subject that presumably has only been mentioned before during Engstrand’s drunken brawls with his wife and Regine has been taught, because of her partisan alignment with her mother, not to believe a word of it. In Regine’s eyes, therefore, what Engstrand says is an unforgivable insult.
Shocked or at least thrown by Engstrand’s sexual flattery, she tries coping with him by adopting an air of nonchalant superiority – ‘Sailors have no savoir vivre’ – but when he uses her mother as an example to suggest that she become a whore, a common doss-house tart, she is outraged to the depths of her being. As she sees it, Engstrand, in the most grotesque form imaginable, is insulting both her mother’s memory and herself at one and the same time. Any further communication between them is unthinkable, except at the level of physical violence. And it is precisely this that Regine now threatens.
Completely unaware of how the other person thinks and responds, both characters act out a pattern of destructive responses in this scene. Regine, subjected in the past to a process of deliberate mystification by her mother, judges and condemns her father from a position of childhood fantasy. Engstrand, embittered and cynically hard-headed after his long years of suffering with Johanne, is totally incapable of understanding Regine’s emotional sensitivity.