Henrik Ibsen was born in Norway in 1828, a place and a time that marked him indelibly.
Norway in the nineteenth century was Scandinavia's Ireland, a nation suffering from powerful neighbors. In Norway's case, the subjection was double. A cultural dependency of Denmark, and a political province of Sweden, it was a small country with no sovereign
identity of its own. This offended Ibsen's nationalist sentiments. Determined to give it a reputation, Ibsen studied his native land with a beady eye. Because it was small and provincial, its flaws were easy to see. And since it had learned its morality from Europe, Norway served admirably as a sampler of the larger continental corruptions that Ibsen could smell everywhere. By the time his career ended in 1900, he had produced a portrait of his homeland that made most of its respectable citizens long for their lost anonymity.
Thanks to the date of his birth, Ibsen was an impressionable twenty year old in 1848, the year of widespread European revolution and the publication of the Communist Manifesto. Both the events and the ideas of that delirious time excited him, suggesting the possibility of radical change in the hypocritical and complacent world of his elders. And so his sense of mission expanded: while giving Norway an identity, why not try to transform European civilization as well? After fifty years of farce and melodrama, Ibsen reasoned, it was time for playwrights to show a little ambition.
That ambition was realized beyond his wildest dreams. By 1881, when "Ghosts” was published, Ibsen had become the most irritating man in Europe, a good thing for his audiences, since irritability is the universal symptom of life. Periodic episodes of Outrage-Over-Ibsen's-Latest-Play had been recurring for almost twenty years, becoming virtually a standard feature of European cultural life. As he wrote to his publisher at the time, "The violent criticisms and insane attacks which people are leveling against Ghosts don't worry me in the least. I was expecting this. . . . They moaned about Peer Gynt too, and The Pillars of Society and A Doll's House, just as much." And they would go on moaning to the end of the century, over plays like An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, and Hedda Gabler. Tradition has it that Ibsen's dying words were, "On the contrary," the perfect curtain line for this supremely contentious playwright. Before Ibsen, theater was largely a vehicle providing escapist entertainment and moral flattery for a comfortable public--the way network television does today. This would not be Ibsen’s approach. On the contrary. Instead, he made a career of offending the audience, thereby inventing the playwright's modern vocation. In fact, one of the reasons Ibsen is so often cited as the father of modern drama is that he was the first to establish what is still the prevailing relationship between serious theater and its respectable patrons: mutual hostility.
We can see that hostility at its bitterest in Ghosts. If we combine the outrage excited by The Last Temptation of Christ with the counter-cultural joy that greeted Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, we might get some approximation of the uproar and excitement
surrounding its publication in 1881. Like Martin Scorsese's movie, Ghosts offended the pillars of society by turning an unconventional eye on a sacred institution—in Ibsen's case, the bourgeois family. Like the Beatles' music, the new play delighted the young and the dissident by its artistic daring and moral subversiveness. And it was published at Christmas time, the better to stuff everyone's stocking.
One Norwegian newspaper declared that Ghosts, "has no place on the Christmas table of any Christian home," while other organs of respectable opinion urged a ban on its sale. A Swedish theater director, formerly one of Ibsen's most ardent admirers, unconditionally refused to produce the play, calling it "one of the filthiest things ever written in Scandinavia." High-minded elderly poets published elegiac verses mourning Ibsen's spiritual fall into "the black earth, swollen with corpses." All through that holiday season of peace and good will, the execrations of right-thinking society rained down on Ibsen's head.
Meanwhile, young Scandinavia was ecstatic. "The play was distributed to the booksellers towards evening," recalls a Danish novelist, aged twenty-five when the play was published. "The keenest buyers ran out in the dark to get it. That evening I visited a young actor who had just read Ghosts. . . . 'This,' he said, 'is the greatest play our age will see.'" The writer goes on to tell of an insatiable hunger for the play that drove crowds of people to"the obscure places where [public] readings took place, out by the bridges, far into the suburbs."
In Germany, students attending a production of Ibsen's previous play, A Doll's House, sat in the audience with books in their hands. "They read when the curtain was down, and they read when the curtain was up. They read furtively and amazed, as though fearful,
read . . . a little, humble, yellow, paperbound volume . . . bearing the title Ghosts. . . . They did not dare to read the book at home, so they read it secretly here."
No European theater would touch this filthy play, so Ghosts had its world premiere in Chicago, a city steeped in offal. It was the first of Ibsen's plays produced in the United States. Surprisingly, the event passed without incident, though that may have been due more to the fact that the performances were in Norwegian than to America's toleration for radical ideas.
Hovering above the storm was the author himself, then living in Rome at a safe distance from the northern turmoil. At a Christmas party there, he announced that he had no interest in the holiday spirit of reconciliation and bonhomie. The book-buying season of Christmas, when he always published his new plays, was for him, he said, a time of intellectual battle, something he relished far more than the bourgeois complacency called peace. And, to his satisfaction, the battle raged on, well into the new year.
What was the source of this intellectual violence? Ibsen isn't shy about telling us: "all these fading and decrepit figures who have spat upon [Ghosts] will one day bring upon their heads the crushing judgement of future literary historians. . . . My book contains the future." But who, wedded to the authority of the past and the comforts of the present, would want such a thing? Only a revolutionary, which is fundamentally what Ibsen was, and why he was so loathed by the powerful and loved by the disenfranchised of his time.
He was, in fact, as much a revolutionary as one of his famously political contemporaries, Friedrich Engels, Marx's long-time partner in radical mischief. In 1884, three years after Ibsen's play, Engels published a book on the same subject as Ghosts, with a far more formidable title: The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
Though he never mentions Ghosts, and possibly knew nothing of the play as he wrote, Engels inadvertently described life in the Alving household with astonishing accuracy. "[T]here may be a certain element of love in the marriage as, indeed, in accordance withProtestant hypocrisy is always assumed for decency's sake. . . . [But] all that this Protestant Monogamy achieves, taking the average of the best cases, is a conjugal partnership of leaden boredom, known as 'domestic bliss.'" Hence Captain Alving's recourse to forbidden delights in
pursuit of the "joy of life;" and hence, too, the likely success of Engstrand's new business. Engels even accounts for Pastor Manders's role in the action: he is there to swaddle the nasty realities in the bubble-wrap of piety.
Such marriages, says Engels, usually degenerate into "the crassest prostitution . . . commonly of the woman, who only differs from the ordinary courtesan in that she does not let out her body on piecework . . . but sells it once and for all into slavery." A thought that occurs more than once to Mrs. Alving as she wrestles her drunken husband to bed.
This boredom and prostitution--Marxist-talk for monogamous marriage and the patriarchal family--have come into being, Engels tells us, solely to organize our sexual instincts in the service of private property. The point of it all is, "to produce children of undisputed paternity; [which] is demanded because these children are later to come into their father's property as his natural heirs." Isn't a certain paternal inheritance Osvald's biggest problem in the play?
Mrs. Alving tries her best to engineer her son's escape from his father's legacy by using up all of Captain Alving's money on the orphanage, thus leaving Osvald nothing but his mother's property. Engels provides the terms to describe this strategy. He would identify it as an attempt by the woman to supplant what he calls "father-right" with "mother-right," that system of female hegemony in determining origins and tracing descent prevalent in primitive societies, before the development of private property. Of course, Mrs. Alving fails ultimately in freeing her son from his father's--and his society's--legacy of corruption.
What Mrs. Alving would have preferred instead of her nightmare marriage to the jolly Captain--and what would have prevented the tragedy that wrecks three lives--would have been a relationship that Engels calls "modern individual sex love." Under the dispensation of this idea, it would be the duty of "lovers to marry each other and nobody else." The world would finally experience "men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman's surrender with money. . . . women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love." Above all, such women would refuse to consider "the economic consequences" of desire. Most compellingly, given the middle-class obsession with respectability, such people will "care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do." And the ultimate consequence will be the disappearance of "the indissolubility of marriage." Pastor Manders is nearly shocked to death when Mrs. Alving, expressing her regret at not having embraced these principles herself, sanctions them for Osvald and Regina.
So our Norwegian provincial anticipated by three years the analytical exertions of Europe's most notorious living radical on the subject of marriage. Not only was Ibsen there first, but he published his ideas in a form immensely more entertaining and accessible than Engels's learned tome. In terms of what Engels would discover, then, Ibsen's book quite literally contained the future. And since the future is now, does that mean it contains the present as well?
The self-denial enforced by Pastor Manders and practiced by Mrs. Alving seems inconceivable in twentieth-century America, where the self and its fulfillment have become our supreme cultural obsessions, decisively supplanting respectability. A search of Amazon for books with the word “self” in the title produces more than 80,000 entries, many of them offering guidance on the cultivation of that sacred entity. The me-ness of what was the "me generation," the thriving culture of victimhood, and--of course--the sexual revolution, all seem to testify to the obsolescence of the problem of self-denial confronted by Ibsen in Ghosts. Can't we all imagine a contemporary Pastor Manders who would gladly throw open the guest room of his progressive parsonage--cohabited by Mrs. Alving--to welcome home Osvald and his significant other, all in the name of "the joy of life?"
Or was Ibsen confronting social concerns that retain their currency, despite our changes in "lifestyle"--inadequacies more enduring than nineteenth-century family arrangements? The "ghosts" of the title, Mrs. Alving tells the Pastor, refer ultimately to a society's stale ideas and "old dead doctrines" that take hold of living people and transform them into walking corpses. "I just have to pick up a newspaper," she says, "and it's as if I could see the ghosts slipping between the lines." That ought to be a familiar experience, as immediate as the morning headlines, the evening sound bites, the tweets on our i-phones, or the banalities of pretty much every political campaign. As long as there are dead ideas "haunting" us, to quote Mrs. Alving again, making us "miserably afraid of the light," Ghosts will retain its freshness as a work of art.
And how long will that be? Forever, presumably--or just as long as there are new, living ideas bidding for attention in a world of stale minds and moribund beliefs. Which means that Ibsen was more than a nineteenth-century sexual reformer. He was a permanent revolutionary, anticipating Trotsky by decades.
One of the dead ideas we might be aware of as we watch the play is the ideology of selfishness that has gripped us in recent years--an ugly caricature of Ibsen's plea for moral integrity and emotional courage. In some ways, our world may have turned into a mirror-image of Pastor Manders’s universe, but Manders's successors, having swapped one doctrine for another, are still gainfully employed. We may find them in politics and elsewhere, preaching a new orthodoxy--a doctrine of the avaricious self that stands Manders on his head, yet is just as pernicious.
As a depiction of the struggle to liberate ourselves from ideological suffocation, then, Ghosts speaks to the present as well as the past, despite the loop-de-loop transformations that have occurred. Ibsen, the permanent revolutionary, would have appreciated that dialectical turn of events. So would all the other revolutionaries who have followed in his footsteps.
The author wishes to acknowledge his debt to Michael Mayer’s biography of Ibsen in preparing this essay.
With "Ghostsï we see that enmity at its bitterest. "ïBy 1881
when he wrote the play,"ï Ibsen had been shocking the public for
nearly two decades. So he was prepared for the assault on his
latest work. "The violent criticisms and insane attacks"ï which
people are levelling at "Ghostsï don't worry me in the least," he
wrote to his publisher. "I was expecting this. . . . They moaned
about "Peer Gyntï too, and "The Pillars of Societyï and "A Doll's
Houseï, just as much."
"ï Actually, they moaned about "Ghostsï somewhat more. Published
at Christmas time, the play seemed especially appalling to
Ibsen's Scandanavian readers. One newspaper declared that it
"has no place on the Christmas table of any Christian home,"
while others urged a ban on its sale. A Swedish theater
director, formerly one of Ibsen's most ardent admirers,
unconditionally refused to produce the play, calling it "one of
the filthiest things ever written in Scandanavia." All through
that season of goodwill, the execrations rained down on Ibsen's‹f ‹
head. Was he dismayed? Again, on the contrary. He loved it.
Ibsen was then living in Rome, at a safe distance from the
northern uproar.
If his work outraged the pillars of society, it delighted
the young and the dissident.
What was it about Ibsen's work that so outraged his
audiences? Their indignation seems incomprehensible to us as we
watch his plays today. In "Ghostsï there isn't a single obscene
word or indecent gesture, not an inch of flesh on display that
our great(c)grandmothers wouldn't have exposed to the world.
Norway in the nineteenth century was Scandinavia's Ireland, a nation suffering from powerful neighbors. In Norway's case, the subjection was double. A cultural dependency of Denmark, and a political province of Sweden, it was a small country with no sovereign
identity of its own. This offended Ibsen's nationalist sentiments. Determined to give it a reputation, Ibsen studied his native land with a beady eye. Because it was small and provincial, its flaws were easy to see. And since it had learned its morality from Europe, Norway served admirably as a sampler of the larger continental corruptions that Ibsen could smell everywhere. By the time his career ended in 1900, he had produced a portrait of his homeland that made most of its respectable citizens long for their lost anonymity.
Thanks to the date of his birth, Ibsen was an impressionable twenty year old in 1848, the year of widespread European revolution and the publication of the Communist Manifesto. Both the events and the ideas of that delirious time excited him, suggesting the possibility of radical change in the hypocritical and complacent world of his elders. And so his sense of mission expanded: while giving Norway an identity, why not try to transform European civilization as well? After fifty years of farce and melodrama, Ibsen reasoned, it was time for playwrights to show a little ambition.
That ambition was realized beyond his wildest dreams. By 1881, when "Ghosts” was published, Ibsen had become the most irritating man in Europe, a good thing for his audiences, since irritability is the universal symptom of life. Periodic episodes of Outrage-Over-Ibsen's-Latest-Play had been recurring for almost twenty years, becoming virtually a standard feature of European cultural life. As he wrote to his publisher at the time, "The violent criticisms and insane attacks which people are leveling against Ghosts don't worry me in the least. I was expecting this. . . . They moaned about Peer Gynt too, and The Pillars of Society and A Doll's House, just as much." And they would go on moaning to the end of the century, over plays like An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, and Hedda Gabler. Tradition has it that Ibsen's dying words were, "On the contrary," the perfect curtain line for this supremely contentious playwright. Before Ibsen, theater was largely a vehicle providing escapist entertainment and moral flattery for a comfortable public--the way network television does today. This would not be Ibsen’s approach. On the contrary. Instead, he made a career of offending the audience, thereby inventing the playwright's modern vocation. In fact, one of the reasons Ibsen is so often cited as the father of modern drama is that he was the first to establish what is still the prevailing relationship between serious theater and its respectable patrons: mutual hostility.
We can see that hostility at its bitterest in Ghosts. If we combine the outrage excited by The Last Temptation of Christ with the counter-cultural joy that greeted Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, we might get some approximation of the uproar and excitement
surrounding its publication in 1881. Like Martin Scorsese's movie, Ghosts offended the pillars of society by turning an unconventional eye on a sacred institution—in Ibsen's case, the bourgeois family. Like the Beatles' music, the new play delighted the young and the dissident by its artistic daring and moral subversiveness. And it was published at Christmas time, the better to stuff everyone's stocking.
One Norwegian newspaper declared that Ghosts, "has no place on the Christmas table of any Christian home," while other organs of respectable opinion urged a ban on its sale. A Swedish theater director, formerly one of Ibsen's most ardent admirers, unconditionally refused to produce the play, calling it "one of the filthiest things ever written in Scandinavia." High-minded elderly poets published elegiac verses mourning Ibsen's spiritual fall into "the black earth, swollen with corpses." All through that holiday season of peace and good will, the execrations of right-thinking society rained down on Ibsen's head.
Meanwhile, young Scandinavia was ecstatic. "The play was distributed to the booksellers towards evening," recalls a Danish novelist, aged twenty-five when the play was published. "The keenest buyers ran out in the dark to get it. That evening I visited a young actor who had just read Ghosts. . . . 'This,' he said, 'is the greatest play our age will see.'" The writer goes on to tell of an insatiable hunger for the play that drove crowds of people to"the obscure places where [public] readings took place, out by the bridges, far into the suburbs."
In Germany, students attending a production of Ibsen's previous play, A Doll's House, sat in the audience with books in their hands. "They read when the curtain was down, and they read when the curtain was up. They read furtively and amazed, as though fearful,
read . . . a little, humble, yellow, paperbound volume . . . bearing the title Ghosts. . . . They did not dare to read the book at home, so they read it secretly here."
No European theater would touch this filthy play, so Ghosts had its world premiere in Chicago, a city steeped in offal. It was the first of Ibsen's plays produced in the United States. Surprisingly, the event passed without incident, though that may have been due more to the fact that the performances were in Norwegian than to America's toleration for radical ideas.
Hovering above the storm was the author himself, then living in Rome at a safe distance from the northern turmoil. At a Christmas party there, he announced that he had no interest in the holiday spirit of reconciliation and bonhomie. The book-buying season of Christmas, when he always published his new plays, was for him, he said, a time of intellectual battle, something he relished far more than the bourgeois complacency called peace. And, to his satisfaction, the battle raged on, well into the new year.
What was the source of this intellectual violence? Ibsen isn't shy about telling us: "all these fading and decrepit figures who have spat upon [Ghosts] will one day bring upon their heads the crushing judgement of future literary historians. . . . My book contains the future." But who, wedded to the authority of the past and the comforts of the present, would want such a thing? Only a revolutionary, which is fundamentally what Ibsen was, and why he was so loathed by the powerful and loved by the disenfranchised of his time.
He was, in fact, as much a revolutionary as one of his famously political contemporaries, Friedrich Engels, Marx's long-time partner in radical mischief. In 1884, three years after Ibsen's play, Engels published a book on the same subject as Ghosts, with a far more formidable title: The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
Though he never mentions Ghosts, and possibly knew nothing of the play as he wrote, Engels inadvertently described life in the Alving household with astonishing accuracy. "[T]here may be a certain element of love in the marriage as, indeed, in accordance withProtestant hypocrisy is always assumed for decency's sake. . . . [But] all that this Protestant Monogamy achieves, taking the average of the best cases, is a conjugal partnership of leaden boredom, known as 'domestic bliss.'" Hence Captain Alving's recourse to forbidden delights in
pursuit of the "joy of life;" and hence, too, the likely success of Engstrand's new business. Engels even accounts for Pastor Manders's role in the action: he is there to swaddle the nasty realities in the bubble-wrap of piety.
Such marriages, says Engels, usually degenerate into "the crassest prostitution . . . commonly of the woman, who only differs from the ordinary courtesan in that she does not let out her body on piecework . . . but sells it once and for all into slavery." A thought that occurs more than once to Mrs. Alving as she wrestles her drunken husband to bed.
This boredom and prostitution--Marxist-talk for monogamous marriage and the patriarchal family--have come into being, Engels tells us, solely to organize our sexual instincts in the service of private property. The point of it all is, "to produce children of undisputed paternity; [which] is demanded because these children are later to come into their father's property as his natural heirs." Isn't a certain paternal inheritance Osvald's biggest problem in the play?
Mrs. Alving tries her best to engineer her son's escape from his father's legacy by using up all of Captain Alving's money on the orphanage, thus leaving Osvald nothing but his mother's property. Engels provides the terms to describe this strategy. He would identify it as an attempt by the woman to supplant what he calls "father-right" with "mother-right," that system of female hegemony in determining origins and tracing descent prevalent in primitive societies, before the development of private property. Of course, Mrs. Alving fails ultimately in freeing her son from his father's--and his society's--legacy of corruption.
What Mrs. Alving would have preferred instead of her nightmare marriage to the jolly Captain--and what would have prevented the tragedy that wrecks three lives--would have been a relationship that Engels calls "modern individual sex love." Under the dispensation of this idea, it would be the duty of "lovers to marry each other and nobody else." The world would finally experience "men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman's surrender with money. . . . women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love." Above all, such women would refuse to consider "the economic consequences" of desire. Most compellingly, given the middle-class obsession with respectability, such people will "care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do." And the ultimate consequence will be the disappearance of "the indissolubility of marriage." Pastor Manders is nearly shocked to death when Mrs. Alving, expressing her regret at not having embraced these principles herself, sanctions them for Osvald and Regina.
So our Norwegian provincial anticipated by three years the analytical exertions of Europe's most notorious living radical on the subject of marriage. Not only was Ibsen there first, but he published his ideas in a form immensely more entertaining and accessible than Engels's learned tome. In terms of what Engels would discover, then, Ibsen's book quite literally contained the future. And since the future is now, does that mean it contains the present as well?
The self-denial enforced by Pastor Manders and practiced by Mrs. Alving seems inconceivable in twentieth-century America, where the self and its fulfillment have become our supreme cultural obsessions, decisively supplanting respectability. A search of Amazon for books with the word “self” in the title produces more than 80,000 entries, many of them offering guidance on the cultivation of that sacred entity. The me-ness of what was the "me generation," the thriving culture of victimhood, and--of course--the sexual revolution, all seem to testify to the obsolescence of the problem of self-denial confronted by Ibsen in Ghosts. Can't we all imagine a contemporary Pastor Manders who would gladly throw open the guest room of his progressive parsonage--cohabited by Mrs. Alving--to welcome home Osvald and his significant other, all in the name of "the joy of life?"
Or was Ibsen confronting social concerns that retain their currency, despite our changes in "lifestyle"--inadequacies more enduring than nineteenth-century family arrangements? The "ghosts" of the title, Mrs. Alving tells the Pastor, refer ultimately to a society's stale ideas and "old dead doctrines" that take hold of living people and transform them into walking corpses. "I just have to pick up a newspaper," she says, "and it's as if I could see the ghosts slipping between the lines." That ought to be a familiar experience, as immediate as the morning headlines, the evening sound bites, the tweets on our i-phones, or the banalities of pretty much every political campaign. As long as there are dead ideas "haunting" us, to quote Mrs. Alving again, making us "miserably afraid of the light," Ghosts will retain its freshness as a work of art.
And how long will that be? Forever, presumably--or just as long as there are new, living ideas bidding for attention in a world of stale minds and moribund beliefs. Which means that Ibsen was more than a nineteenth-century sexual reformer. He was a permanent revolutionary, anticipating Trotsky by decades.
One of the dead ideas we might be aware of as we watch the play is the ideology of selfishness that has gripped us in recent years--an ugly caricature of Ibsen's plea for moral integrity and emotional courage. In some ways, our world may have turned into a mirror-image of Pastor Manders’s universe, but Manders's successors, having swapped one doctrine for another, are still gainfully employed. We may find them in politics and elsewhere, preaching a new orthodoxy--a doctrine of the avaricious self that stands Manders on his head, yet is just as pernicious.
As a depiction of the struggle to liberate ourselves from ideological suffocation, then, Ghosts speaks to the present as well as the past, despite the loop-de-loop transformations that have occurred. Ibsen, the permanent revolutionary, would have appreciated that dialectical turn of events. So would all the other revolutionaries who have followed in his footsteps.
The author wishes to acknowledge his debt to Michael Mayer’s biography of Ibsen in preparing this essay.
With "Ghostsï we see that enmity at its bitterest. "ïBy 1881
when he wrote the play,"ï Ibsen had been shocking the public for
nearly two decades. So he was prepared for the assault on his
latest work. "The violent criticisms and insane attacks"ï which
people are levelling at "Ghostsï don't worry me in the least," he
wrote to his publisher. "I was expecting this. . . . They moaned
about "Peer Gyntï too, and "The Pillars of Societyï and "A Doll's
Houseï, just as much."
"ï Actually, they moaned about "Ghostsï somewhat more. Published
at Christmas time, the play seemed especially appalling to
Ibsen's Scandanavian readers. One newspaper declared that it
"has no place on the Christmas table of any Christian home,"
while others urged a ban on its sale. A Swedish theater
director, formerly one of Ibsen's most ardent admirers,
unconditionally refused to produce the play, calling it "one of
the filthiest things ever written in Scandanavia." All through
that season of goodwill, the execrations rained down on Ibsen's‹f ‹
head. Was he dismayed? Again, on the contrary. He loved it.
Ibsen was then living in Rome, at a safe distance from the
northern uproar.
If his work outraged the pillars of society, it delighted
the young and the dissident.
What was it about Ibsen's work that so outraged his
audiences? Their indignation seems incomprehensible to us as we
watch his plays today. In "Ghostsï there isn't a single obscene
word or indecent gesture, not an inch of flesh on display that
our great(c)grandmothers wouldn't have exposed to the world.