Play: Ghosts

Setting and Premise
Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts unfolds in a rain-soaked Norwegian coastal home on the eve of opening an orphanage dedicated to the late Captain Alving. Widow Helene Alving has spent years constructing this memorial as a way to control her husband’s posthumous reputation. Her son, Oswald, a painter who has lived in Paris, returns for the ceremony, while Pastor Manders, the family’s moral adviser, arrives to officiate. Also present are Regina, Mrs. Alving’s ambitious maid, and her supposed father, the rough carpenter Jakob Engstrand, who schemes to start a sailors’ home.

Revelations and Conflicts
Beneath the household’s respectable surface, suppressed truths press to the surface. Pastor Manders once urged Helene to return to her philandering, alcoholic husband for the sake of appearances; she obeyed and then sent young Oswald abroad to shield him from influence. Now Manders still champions duty, reputation, and the sanctity of marriage, warning Helene against modern ideas and scolding her for insuring the orphanage, which he deems a sign of distrust in Providence.

Helene confides that the orphanage is less a tribute than a strategy to dispose of her husband’s fortune, ensuring Oswald inherits nothing morally tainted. She discloses that Regina is actually Captain Alving’s illegitimate daughter by a former servant, information known only to Helene and Manders. Meanwhile Oswald and Regina are drawn to each other, an attraction laden with danger Helene dreads to name.

Catastrophe and Exposure
The carefully constructed façade collapses. The orphanage burns to the ground the night before its dedication after a careless accident. Because Manders had persuaded Helene to forgo insurance, the loss is total. Engstrand deftly exploits Manders’s guilt, promising to shield the pastor’s reputation if he backs the sailors’ home, a refuge that Engstrand envisions less as philanthropy than as a profitable front.

With the memorial in ashes, Helene resolves to tell Oswald the truth about his father, only to learn Oswald carries a more devastating legacy. He is afflicted with a degenerative brain condition he believes he has “inherited” from his father’s debauchery, an illness that has shadowed his Parisian life and now advances inexorably. When Helene finally reveals Regina’s parentage, the flirtation ends in shock; Regina, seeing her prospects ruined, leaves to seek her fortune elsewhere.

The Final Demand
As dawn breaks after a night of revelations, Oswald’s condition worsens. He describes bouts of paralysis and terror at the prospect of living without his mind. He begs his mother to promise a final mercy: if he slips into helpless darkness, she must administer morphine to release him. Torn between maternal love and moral horror, Helene hesitates. Oswald collapses into an infantile state, staring at the rising light and repeating “The sun, the sun,” while Helene stands with the ampoules, trapped between mercy and law, faith and responsibility.

Themes and Resonance
Ghosts maps how past sins and dead ideas haunt the living. Respectability, religious orthodoxy, and marital duty appear as “ghosts” that bind Helene, Manders, and the community to lies. Ibsen exposes a society that prizes appearances over truth, charity over justice, and public virtue over private honesty. Heredity and environment intertwine: Oswald bears a physical curse, Regina a social one, Helene a moral one, all emanating from the same patriarchal hypocrisy. The play ends not with consolation but with a stark, modern tragedy, as the morning light lays bare the cost of silence and the inescapable return of what has been repressed.