Ghosts

A talented artist, Oswald Alving returns to his childhood home after two years away. Ambivalent about his return home, Oswald struggles to reconnect with his mother, who loves him dearly, but who separated herself from him for much of his life. As his mother prepares to open an orphanage in his father’s name, Oswald grows curious about his father, who died when he was young. Meanwhile, Oswald hides the true reasons for his return home: He has tertiary stage syphilis, the debilitating neurological effects of which convince him to die by assisted suicide.

A catalyst for change, Oswald upends his mother’s plans to preserve his father’s legacy. As his father’s son, Oswald serves as a representation of his father and his choices. Ibsen uses Oswald’s father’s pipe and Oswald’s physical resemblance to his father as symbols of their limited connection. While Oswald has few memories of his father—he shares with his mother that “I remember nothing about him, except that he once made me sick” (61)—it is clear that he has possibly inherited many of his father’s qualities. Oswald’s doctor suggests that his syphilis may have been congenital, passing from his father to Helen, and then to Oswald during birth. Moreover, Helen worries that Oswald’s sexual interest in the maid, Regina, recapitulates her dead husband’s predilections.

In reality, Oswald pursues Regina in the hope that she will nurse him in his illness and then help him with his plan to die. After his mother destroys these plans by unveiling that Regina is his half-sister, Oswald turns to his mother in desperation and begs her to complete his request for death with dignity by using morphine pills. In the final moments of the play, Oswald suffers from a neurological attack that symbolizes the impact of his parents’ choices.

An old friend of the Alving family, Pastor Manders serves as the business advisor and confidant for Helen Alving. Dedicated to maintaining allegiance to social conventions, Manders criticizes Helen for her growing secular beliefs and attempts to reestablish social order. A foil to Oswald, Manders debates both Alvings’ liberal beliefs and disregard for social conventions.

Despite his ostensibly strict adherence to the tenets of Christianity, Manders demonstrates such a need to preserve his reputation that he is willing to bend the truth in self-serving ways. Ibsen criticizes the hypocrisy of Manders as a religious figure who fulminates against the women in his community by holding them to an impossible standard of piety and sexual purity while excusing the sexual misbehavior of men, including Helen’s husband and himself. In the past, Manders convinced Helen to ignore her feelings for Manders and return to her unhappy marriage to a man whose constant infidelities resulted in a child and possibly the syphilis that is killing his son. In contrast, Manders condemns Johanna, the maid with whom Helen’s husband had an affair, for having sex outside marriage.

Manders’s inability to see nuance inspires Helen to reject religious teachings altogether and follow through with her plans for independence and freedom. In addition to failing to realign Helen to a path of devotion to social conventions, Manders also demonstrates his moral failings in his dealings with Jacob. Because Manders is so worried that his reputation will suffer if he is accused of starting the fire that destroys the orphanage and of not having insured the building, Jacob is able to manipulate Manders into funding Jacob’s plans to build an inn for sailors by offering to take the blame for the orphanage fire.

A local carpenter, Jacob Engstrand builds and destroys the Alvings’ orphanage for personal gain. Renowned for his ability to manipulate others, Jacob represents upper class fears that the working class is always underhandedly using their betters. Jacob maintains a steadfast dedication to his goal to open a hotel for sailors in town and deftly navigates the complicated lives of Manders and the Alvings to fulfill that goal. Jacob sees through Manders’s hypocritical focus on self-preservation at all costs; he using the pastor’s flaw to convincingly demonstrate his religious devotion while manipulating Manders into supporting his hotel plans. Jacob highlights the hypocrisy of the religious by capitalizing on Manders’s self-obsession.