GHOSTS

About The Author:

Henrik Johan Ibsen; 20 March 1828 – 23 May 1906) was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father of realism" and is one of the founders of Modernism in theatre. His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler,Ghosts, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, and The Master Builder. He is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, and A Doll's House became the world's most performed play by the early 20th century.

Several of his later dramas were considered scandalous to many of his era, when European theatre was expected to model strict morals of family life and propriety. Ibsen's later work examined the realities that lay behind many façades, revealing much that was disquieting to many contemporaries. It utilized a critical eye and free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality. The poetic and cinematic early play Peer Gynt, however, has strong surreal elements.

Summary:

In the second spell of writing, ibsen started writing play in which social problems of the day were elaborated with subjects. His plays like THE PILLARS OF SOCIETY (1877), A DOLL'S HOUSE (1879), GHOSTS (1881) and ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE (1882). These plays have been described dramas of ideas, or problems plays. Drafted in the september of 1880, published on 13 December 1881, the play Ghosts could not be produced on the stage before 1882. The play created more uproar than any other of Ibsen's plays. The play has been described as "domestic drama" in three acts in prose. The theme deals openly with syphlis, defends free love and even implies that an incestuous marraige might not havebeen a bad thing. The contemporaries of Ibsen were so shocked that, at first, not only the Scandinavian theatres but also the book-shops rejected it. An editorial in the christiania newspaper Margenbla der concluded : "The book has no place on the Christmas table of any Christian home." Thus Ghosts shocked the establishment, but it made an immediate and stimulating impact on the young, Herman Bang, then 25, and later to become a celebrated Danish novelist, described how "one or two restless people....having no good name to be smeared by association with Ghosts, gave public readings. People flocked to the obscure place, far into suburbs.

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 Henrik Ibsen has set his play Ghosts in the contemporary Norway. He has depicted his theme through three acts in prose with the help of only five characters, namely, Mrs. Alving, Oswald Alving, Pastor Manders, Jacob Engstrand and Regina Engstrand. The action of the play takes place at Mrs. Alving's country house, beside one of the large affords in Western Norway. Mrs. Alving(Helen), is the widow of Captain Alving, late Chamberlain, which was the only title oh honour now existing in Norway. The title Chamberlain was conferred by the King on men of wealth and position and it is not hereditary. Mrs. Alving is the widow of an esteemed man who led a secret life of debauchery and fathered an illegitimate daughter, Regina, on a servant. Regina, who Mrs. Alving now employs as a maid, does not know this. Mrs. Alving's son, Oswald a painter, has returned from paris, and Regina, unaware that she is his half-sister, has her sights set on him. Pastor Manders, whom Mrs. Alving once loved, has come to open the orphanage which Mrs. Alving has built with her dead husband's money as a memorial to him, and to expunge the memory of his sins. But the orphanage is burned down by accident. Oswald, whose mental state worries his mother, reveals to her that he has syphilis. Regina, who he hoped might marry him and sustain him, leaves him to start a life of prostitution. Oswald hands his mother morphene tablets which hebegs her to give him should he become helpless. The play comes to end with him drooling like a child while she (Mrs. Alving) wrestles with the dilemma whether to kill her son or allow him to live on perhaps for years as a helpless lunatic.

 Ibsen's Ghosts is primarily a realist play, in which sphere Ibsen seems to be pioneer. Initially the play was severely criticised and receivedtremendous hostility, for it presented 'the bane reality devoid of superficial garb'. Thus, the audience was shocked beyond measure due to the stinking facts that laid beneath the sphere of morality. The play of Ibsen in precisely the negation of every pillar of bourgeois morality. It portrays the fact that the borgeois class is obsessed with the mad lust for power, sex and glory. The play appears to be brilliant drama even in terms of metaphor. Metaphorically, Ghosts refers to the distortion and the evils that have become the defining traits of bourgeois society. Thus, it has not to be seen literally. The crux of the play is to depict the immorality and the perversity that have become intrinsic to the bourgeois sphere of life. The very concept of an idealistic family gets undermined and everybody and rivalry seems to be the hallmarks.In such a society, there is no genuine emerges as the greatest shock is that the people take recourse to religion in order to justify their deeds.
 The character of Regina evokes our sympathy since she has been disowned by her actual father (Captain Alving) after the satiation of the father's sexual lust. This highlights the subservient status of the women where they were only seen as inanimate objects to be greedily devoured by their male counterparts. Regina is a product of illicit sexual relationship, who is kept as a slave by Mrs. Alving. All this indicates the character of Captain Alving who was highly immoral and full of sexual valour that he used to further degrade the women by exploiting them sexually. Engstrand's position is no better because he claims to be genuine father (well-wisher) of Regina, but he tries to confine the girl within the patriarchal norms without allowing her any privilegs. He claims to be Regina's legitimate guardian and proposes to take her to the sailors's den which is nothing but an organised form of prostitution. Regina shows enough guts to pay him back in the same coin, by choosing to embrace prostitution on herown terms, instead of nursing a sick and bed-ridden Oswald. Mrs.Alving's character has been systematically presented as emblematic of a modern and emncipatory woman. Towards the end of the play, her role undergoes a drastic change and she tells Oswald of his father's degrading past. She ultimately emerges as the most powerful of all the characters as she makes consistent efforts to rid her son Oswald of his father's heritage. Therefore, she proposes to establish an orphanage in the honour of her dead husband, Captain Alving.