‘Here I go battling on with ghosts, both within and without…’
(Old Mrs Alving lamenting her lot in Ghosts, page 126)

A drama about not only the sexual and religious hypocrisies of late-nineteenth century bourgeois society but of the multiple levels of deceit and, more profoundly than that, the dead hand of old ways of thinking, which lie like ghosts upon the lives of the living.

Act 1

Pastor Manders arrives at the estate of widowed old Mrs Alving, situated near a fjord. The next day he is due to deliver a speech at the opening of a new orphanage named in honour of her dead husband, the Captain Alving memorial Home (p.103)

Mrs A is attended on by a young buxom serving girl, Regine. Regine’s crippled, often drunk carpenter father, Jacob Engstrand, has been over on the estate helping to build the new orphanage. He shambolically tries to persuade Regine to accompany him on a ferry back to his house in town but she refuses. Engstrand has a plan to set up a refuge for merchant seamen. He wants Regine to help out but this quickly degenerates into a vision of her dancing and entertaining the sailors in the evenings, and the suggestion that if she plays her cards right she’ll wangle herself a ship’s officer or even captain. And she wouldn’t have to marry them, just extract money in return for…At which point a furious Regine threatens him and forces him to back out through the French windows.

After some time away in Paris, her artistic son Oswald has returned for a visit.

There’s a long conversation between Manders and Mrs Alving which reveals a whole load of scandalous family secrets. Manders triggers it all by accusing Mrs A of being a bad wife for running away from her husband after just a year of marriage and seeking refuge with him, the pastor.

Nettled, Mrs Alving decides to reveal the truth. During that miserable first year of marriage she had discovered that Alving was a womaniser and a philanderer and how wretched it made her feel. Manders dismisses this by pontificating about the duties of a wife and mother:

MANDERS: All this demanding to be happy in life, it’s all part of this same wanton idea. What right have people to happiness? No, we have our duty to do, Mrs Alving! And your duty was to stand by the man you had chosen and to whom you were bound by sacred ties.

And:

MANDERS: It is not a wife’s place to sit in judgement on her husband. Your duty should have been to bear with humility the cross which a higher power had judged proper for you.

As if accusing her of being a bad wife isn’t enough, Manders then goes on to accuse her of being a bad mother, in that she sent her son away when he was only seven to be raised in a different household.

‘Slowly and with control’ Mrs Alving then unleashes the truth. Her husband never reformed, her husband carried on being a corrupt womaniser till the day he died. He forced her to sit with him getting drunk on wine and listening to his stupid stories before she had to roll him into bed. For nineteen long years of married purgatory she had to put up with his dire behaviour.

And he had an affair with their maid. She overheard them in the conservatory, her husband making a move, the maid (Johanna) trying to push him away. He got the maid pregnant. The whole thing was only hushed up by giving her a big cash sum ($300) and packing her back to the arms of her boyfriend, the very same ramshackle old Jacob Engstrand we saw at the start. So Regine is the illegitimate daughter of her ex-husband. Engstrand was flattered by her returning to him and then, she came with a tidy sum of cash and a story about some passing some rich foreigner who’d taken advantage of her, so shamefacedly went to Pastor Manders to get them married in a hurry (p.122).

It was because, aged seven, Oswald was getting old enough to ask questions that she sent him away. Not because she was a bad mother, because she was a good mother who didn’t want him raised in a household full of corruption and lies (p.118).

This is why she has devoted a lot of money to building the orphanage in her husband’s name, to try and prevent any whiff of scandal. But there’s another, buried motive. The orphanage cost exactly as much as her bride price. She wanted to get rid of it because ‘I don’t want any of that money to pass to Oswald. Anything my son gets is to come from me.’

When, on the morrow, the orphanage is opened, Mrs Alving will feel it like an exorcism. At long last the ghost will be laid and ‘this long, ghastly farce will be over’ (p.120).

But then something strange happens. In a way which breaches realism but is packed with symbolic meaning, both the pastor and Mrs A hear a scuffled coming from the dining room and then Regine’s voice urgently whispering: ‘Oswald! Are you made? let me go!’

The heavily moralising or symbolic point is that – the young generation are repeating the sins of their parents. Or, as Mrs Alving puts it:

MRS ALVING: ‘Ghosts! Those two in the conservatory…come back to haunt us.’ (p.120)

Act 2

Act 2 picks up in the same drawing room immediately after dinner i.e. an hour later, and shows Mrs Alving still reeling from the revelation that his son is trying it on with her maid and Manders reeling from the way everyone involved lied to him. Manders reassures himself that the marriages were all carried out according to law and order but Mrs Alving blasphemously wonders whether it’s the law and order which cause all the trouble and delivers a Nora Helming outburst:

MRS ALVING: I’m not putting up with it any longer, all these ties and restrictions. I can’t stand it! I must work myself free! (p.124)

This leads into a classic ‘moral’ quandary, namely should Mrs Alving tell her son the truth about his father. Pastor Manders, as representative of social morality, finds himself arguing no, that she shouldn’t burst his illusions and ideals. But Mrs Alving now feels that observing the proprieties i.e. lying, for all those years, and continuing to lie to her son, just indicts her as a coward.

She starts out saying she needs to get Regine out of her house as soon as possible, to send her back to her father. But then, pondering her reluctance to go home, she voices another scenario: maybe she should encourage Oswald and Regine, if not to marry, then at least to commit to live together, unconventionally but honestly.

Manders is horrified because…it would be incest – they both share the same father, they are half-brother and sister. To which Mrs Alving delivers the devastating response:

MRS ALVING: Do you think there aren’t plenty of couples all over the country who are every bit as closely related? (p.125)

So now we can see how incest brought about by male philandering is the core of the plotline. But Mrs Alving goes on to deliver a little speech which rises above this ‘issue’ to address a more imaginative or symbolic level:

MRS ALVING: Ghosts! When I heard Regina and Oswald in there, it was just like seeing ghosts. But then I’m inclined to think that we are all ghosts, Pastor Manders, every one of us. It’s not just what we inherit from our mothers and fathers that haunts us. It’s all kinds of old defunct theories, all sorts of old defunct beliefs, and things like that. It’s not that they actually live on in us; they are simply lodged there, and we cannot get rid of them. I’ve only to pick up a newspaper and I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. Over the whole country there must be ghosts, as numerous as the sands of the sea. And here we are, all of us, abysmally afraid of the light. (p.126)

Impressive speech and compelling vision, especially to someone like me with my view of the unchangeability of human nature which condemns each new generation to repeat the behaviours of the previous ones.

Because now there’s another revelation (Ibsen’s plays seem to proceed from one devastating revelation to another) which is that back then, nineteen years ago, when Mrs Alving ran away from her unfaithful husband, she ran to Pastor Manders because she was in love with him and she knew he was in love with her. In the pastor’s mind, the greatest achievement of his life was overcoming his own personal wishes, putting duty and responsibility first and telling Mrs Alving to return to her husband. Now her revelations that this led to 19 years of purgatory throw into doubt the meaning of that great ‘victory’. He calls it a victory over himself but Mrs Alving calls it ‘a crime against both of us’.

What’s more it led her to rethink the entire notion of religious faith, honour, duty and so on, and the harder she thought about them the more they fell to pieces in her hands:

MRS ALVING: Yes, when you forced me to submit to what you called my duty and obligations. When you praised as right and proper what my whole mind revolted against, as against some loathsome thing. It was then I began to examine the fabric of your teachings. I began picking at one of the knots but as soon as I’d got that undone, the whole thing came apart at the seams. It was then I realised it was just tacked together.

So she’s quite the speech maker and quite the social radical.

Scene: Engstrand plays the pastor

Then enters Engstrand. He puts on a big performance for the pastor, claiming that now the orphanage is finished he and the lads would like the pastor to mark it with a little service. Manders hits him between the eyes with everything Mrs Alving’s told him, that Engstrand only took Johanna back for the money and lied and lied to him (Manders) about getting her pregnant etc etc. But Engstrand (who needs, I imagine, to be played by a slyly comic actor) comes over all working class piety, clutching his hat in his hand and yes my lord no my lord-ing Manders. He spins events to place himself in the light of a pious hard-working soul who saw it as his duty to rescue this poor sinner woman (Johanna) etc. When directly accused of only marrying her for her money (the $300) Engstrand loftily insists he never touched a cent of it but used it all to educate his (legal) daughter, Regine.

Manders is completely taken in and enchanted. When Engstrand exits to go and prepare the building for a little service Manders turns triumphantly to Mrs Alving and says ‘Well?’ but she (presumably like the audience) has completely seen through Engstrand and finds Manders’ naivety touching: ‘I say you are a great big baby and always will be’ and goes as if to hug him till the pastor flinches back in naive horror. He exits to go carry out the promised service.

Scene: Oswald’s illness

In the silence that follows Mrs Alving hears the tink of glass from the dining room and is disconcerted to realise Oswald is still in the dining room. She thought he’s gone for a walk. She calls him in to the living room (the main set) worried he might have overheard some of their talk. But this is quickly eclipsed by Oswald making a revelation to her (another of Ibsen’s revelations) that he is ill, very ill, so ill that he thinks he’ll never be able to work again.

In Paris, he’s been having more and more severe headaches and he went to see a specialist who confirmed that he has some kind of inherited sexual disease, or, as the doctor put it, ‘The sins of the father are visited upon the children.’ But Oswald shows the doc all the letters from his mother (Mrs A) praising her husband, Oswald’s father, to the skies (lying, as required by social convention), and so proved it couldn’t have been an inherited STI.

At which point Oswald blames himself for leading an indulgent bohemian lifestyle. He reiterates that it’s all his own fault and he can’t live with the guilt of wrecking his own life. If only he had someone else to blame it on…

Well, there’s a ton of dramatic irony here because half an hour earlier we learned that it almost certainly was inherited from his dissolute father (though the genetics and/or disease theory of all this is pretty ropey: he could, in fact, only have been infected via his mother i.e. the captain gave Mrs A syphilis or some such which she transmitted to Oswald at birth. The Wikipedia entry has a footnote dealing with the science).

Anyway, obviously Mrs Alving paces up and down in anguish, knowing that with a few sentences she could release her son from his crushing guilt but only at the cost of destroying his illusions about his father. I know it’s meant to be heart-wrenching scene of a poor mother torn between etc etc, but the patness of it, the cunning artifice of it, is quite funny.

But Mrs Alving doesn’t get to tell the truth because first he a) desperately asks for something to drink to wash away his headful of anguish and then b) makes his mother sit with him while he drinks champagne and…asks her opinion about Regine: ‘Isn’t she marvellous looking, Mother?’

He is, in other words, unconsciously copying his father, drinking far too much, forcing her to listen to him burble on, and fancying the maid. But then he goes further (as I say, Ibsen’s plays seem to consists of a succession of revelations).

He tells his mum that last time he was home he was waxing lyrical about the joys of life in gay Paris when one thing led to another and he playfully said: ‘You must come with me there’. Now, on his return, he’s discovered that Regine remembered that remark and took him literally. (This is why she’s been learning French and explains why Regine’s character keeps popping little French tags into her conversation). Anyway, she asked him: ‘What about my trip to Paris?’ and it suddenly made sense to him – that Regine, so full of life and certainty, can be the cure for the dread and anxiety he feels.

During the scene Mrs Alving had asked Regine to fetch a half bottle of champagne. Now Mrs Oswald tells her to bring another, whole, bottle and Oswald adds, ‘as a glass for yourself.’ As Regine returns with the bottle and the third glass and, very nervously accepts a drink, Oswald tells his mother his mind is made up. He’s returning to Paris and taking Regine with him.

This finally stings Mrs Alving into action and she stands and announces she has something to tell them (obviously a) his father’s immorality and b) their incestuous consanguinity). But at that moment, probably meant to be dramatic but also has a comic impact, the parson enters, as in a Whitehall farce.

He is surprised to see Regine sitting with the other two and holding a glass of champagne as if she is their social equal but flabbergasted when Oswald announces that she (Regine) is leaving with him for Paris as his wife! For the second time Mrs Alving stands and says now she is going to speak plainly but, for a second time is interrupted. For this time they hear shouting in the distance, throw open the windows and see that the brand-new orphanage, which was due to be opened the next day, is on fire!

Act 3

Scene 1

They’re all back in the main house later the same night, with the embers of the ruined orphanage glowing in the distance. It burned to the ground. Nothing was saved.

Remember how I described the scene where Engstrand posed as the embodiment of aggrieved piety, insisting that he married Joahnna out of Christian charity rather than for her little nest egg, in order to wrap the pastor round his little finger? Well, that scene has its sequel here. For we find Engstrand with mock reluctance persuading the pastor that it was him (Pastor Manders) who started the fire, it was he who they left to put out the candles, who they all saw pinch one out with his fingers and chuck the stub away, unfortunately into a pile of shavings.

Manders doesn’t remember any of this and insists that he never puts candles out that way, but Engstrand’s mock-apologetic insistence wins him round. The con man (for that is what he is) insists that he’ll stand by Manders at the public hearing, which there’ll have to be, and will do his best to deflect the anger of the townspeople at the loss of the orphanage which was going to be benefit everyone (by taking parentless children off the rates).

And one last thing: the money to find the maintenance and expenses of the orphanage was to come from the interest from her bride price which Mrs Alving had invested. Now that money needs a purpose at which point Engstrand usefully pipes up to remind the pastor about his plan for a Seaman’s Home.

Just in case there was any doubt whatsoever that Engstrand invited the pastor down to the orphanage to carry out a ‘service’ precisely in order to burn it down and blame him, and thus secure the funding and support for his own project, Ibsen gives Engstrand an ‘aside’ to his daughter in which he says: ‘Now we’ve got him nicely, my girl.’ Ibsen is routinely described as a giant of modern theatre but moments like this are as subtle as a stage villain twirling the ends of his black moustache and cackling, ‘My evil plan is working!’

There’s a final joke so broad surely the audience was meant to laugh. Engstrand helps Manders on with his coat and makes a parting promise:

ENGSTRAND: And this place for seafaring men, it’s going to be called the ‘Captain Alving Home’, and if I can run it my way, I think I can promise it’ll be a place worthy of the Captain’s memory. (p.152)

Well, as we learned earlier, the captain turned out to have been a world class philanderer, adulterer and womaniser, and this confirms the passage of the opening scene where Engstrand was trying to encourage his own daughter to come back to the city with him so as to provide ‘entertainment’ for the sailors, in the form of singing, dancing and sexual favours. I was surprised to find Ibsen doing such broad comedy.

Scene 2

So the comedy duo of Manders and Engstrand exit, leaving the tragic trio of Mrs Alving, Oswald and Regine. Oswald has only just staggered in from the scene of the fire in a semi-catatonic state. He sits stiffly while his mother cleans his face and then calls for all the doors to be closed to try and shut out his terrible feeling of dread. He starts to talk wildly, almost cackling. Basically, the actor has to give the impression of someone who’s mind is genuinely going.

Mrs Alving hurries to comfort him but poor Regine is, understandably, bewildered. Nobody told her her posh knight in shining armour was going mad.

So Mrs Alving proceeds to tell her son that his father was just like him, full of joy and energy but, finding himself trapped in a provincial town with a wife confined by her sense of duty, he felt trapped and took it out in womanising and getting drunk. And then, elliptically, refers to the fact that Regine is his father’s daughter i.e his half-sister. That makes them both sit up!

And Regine announces she will leave at once. She was having second thoughts about mad Oswald and this thunderbolt clinches it:

REGINE: No, you won’t catch me staying out in the country, working myself to death looking after invalids. (p.156)

So she wraps her shawl around her and announces she’ll hurry off to try and catch the same ferry as the pastor and her ‘father’ or ‘that rotten old carpenter’ as he calls him. Angry at being lied to, and being brought up as a servant instead of on equal terms to Oswald, she storms out, leaving the sad mother and mad son.

Scene 3

The thrust of the scene is that Oswald doesn’t feel anything for his dead father. He barely knew him and has one and only one memory of him, as a boy, making him smoke a cigar till he was sick. When Mrs Alving gives way to convention (contradicting her speeches earlier in the play) and says surely a son ought to have a duty to love a father, Oswald replies that’s just one of those old superstitions, just a relic lying around, to which Mrs Alving replies, ‘Ghosts’, and the audience go, ‘Yes, the title, the theme, we get it.’

But Oswald reveals a dismayingly instrumental view of Mrs Alving, he likes her and she will do to look after him in his illness. But then he makes her pull up a chair and reveals (remember how Ibsen plays consist of a carefully paced series of revelations?) that his illness is not physical, it’s in his head. He had an attack in Paris which rendered him helpless as a baby.

Mrs Alving is horrified but promises to be a mother to him when these attacks happen. But Oswald explains that the next attack might be permanent, infantilise him forever, and he’d be a bed-bound baby until he was old and grey. This is the course of his dread.

Which is why he shows her the small box he keeps in his breast pocket. In it are 12 shots of morphine. When he has his next attack he wants her to administer them and kill him. She screams and says, ‘What? Me who gave you life?’ to which Oswald makes the slightly teenage reply:

OSWALD: I never asked you for life. And what sort of life is this you’ve given me. I don’t want it! Take it back!

So from having been about incest this has become a play about euthanasia. Packs in the topical issues, doesn’t he, Ibsen? Mrs Alving promises she will, if he has an attack, administer the poison. Oswals calms down. She pulls up her chair and promises to look after him like a mother looks after a child. Dawn breaks over the mountains and the fjord.

And it’s at this moment that Oswald has an attack, saying, ‘Mother give me the sun,’ then shrinking in his chair, going flaccid, losing his mind, repeating flatly ‘the sun, the sun’. Mrs Alving leaps to her feet and screams, struggles to find the box Oswald just gave her, says yes, yes, then no, no, and stands staring at him in horror as the curtain falls.

Comment

I thought it was going to be a predictable number about Victorian sexual hypocrisy and double standards but the central plot of Regine and Oswald being half-siblings by the same father and the threatened risk of their incest takes things to a higher, more dangerous level.

But then, in the last few pages, the entirely new topic of a mother faced with the euthanasia of her stricken son has a blistering intensity which blots out everything which came before it.

A searing, intense, deeply disturbing experience.

The title

According to Wikipedia:

Ibsen disliked the English translator William Archer’s use of the word ‘Ghosts’ as the play’s title, the Danish or Norwegian Gengangere would be more accurately translated as ‘The Revenants’ which literally means ‘The Ones Who Return’…It has a double meaning of both ‘ghosts’ and ‘events that repeat themselves’ which the English title ‘Ghosts’ fails to capture.

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Related links

• Ghosts online

Ibsen reviews

• The Doll’s House (1879)
• Ghosts (1881)
• An Enemy of the People (1882)
• The Wild Duck (1884)
• Rosmersholm (1886)
• Hedda Gabler (1890)
• The Master Builder (1892)

Play reviews

• Play reviews