群鬼

A glass-walled conservatory sitting room, with steady rain and a mist-shrouded fjord outside the windows. The room is arranged with flowers and respectable furniture, and Mrs. Alving is going over the last details of the orphanage's opening with the local Pastor Manders. The room never changes from morning to night — the entire play burns itself out right here.

The orphanage opens tomorrow. Mrs. Alving has spent nearly the whole of her late husband's estate to build it — because yes, the orphanage exists to honor him. To outsiders he was a respected captain, a model husband, a man worth a monument. She means to write this last page of his life in fine handwriting.

Ghosts was published in the early 1880s by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, during the decade when he was dragging theater out of historical courts and into the sitting room, taking apart middle-class respectability piece by piece. The Norwegian title, Gengangere, literally means those who walk again; the English title is Ghosts. Along with A Doll's House, it is counted as one of the two cornerstones of modern drama — except that Nora slammed the door and walked out, and in this play no one gets to slam any door.

At the time it was scandalous: hereditary syphilis, religious hypocrisy, an incestuous parentage — several taboos stacked into a single play. Norway and Britain both banned public ticket sales for it. Looking back today, that very scandal is exactly why it is remembered.

Mrs. Alving is the mistress of this house. Her husband has been dead for years, and she has finally caught her breath after that marriage, only to discover that she spent the first half of her life cleaning up after a dissolute man. Her whole mind now is fixed on keeping that respectability patched together. Pastor Manders is the local moral authority, buttoned up and given to quoting scripture. Years ago it was his own hand that talked Mrs. Alving out of leaving her husband and sent her back into that cage.

Oswald is Mrs. Alving's only son, sent away as a boy to study painting in Paris. He has come home this time, he says, to be with his mother for the orphanage's opening. Regina is the young maid of the house, raised as the daughter of the carpenter Engstrand. She is clever, good-looking, and wants out of this place, wants a life not tied down by old debts. The four of them sit in a damp conservatory listening to the rain, and none of them knows — or all of them are pretending not to know — what is buried under this house.

The spark is the orphanage's insurance policy. Pastor Manders brings the papers for her to sign, a formality that should end the moment the ink dries. But the pastor likes to talk, and before the signing he praises her — how virtuous she has been these ten years, how dutiful a wife, how she has held up a respectable household single-handed. Mrs. Alving listens, and then she laughs. It is an uglier sound than crying.

Out it comes: years ago she ran away once, meaning to end this marriage for good. It was this very pastor who stopped her, with religion, with wifely duty, with the whole script of for the child's sake and for the family's sake. She was marched back to that house, to go on enduring a man she despised.

Pastor Manders's first response is not to admit fault but to defend himself. He says he acted for her own good, to save her soul. He says a wife is duty-bound to bear her husband's failings — that is her calling. Mrs. Alving does not argue. She simply lets the laugh drop from her face. This is the single most important scene in the play. Two respectable people flaying each other in a glass conservatory, and not one cut draws blood.

Oswald arrives. Warm with his mother, offhand with the pastor, he sits down and starts talking about the Paris sun, the Paris studios, the Paris air. He wants badly to carry that city home with him. But this young painter's hands shake. His eyes go suddenly blank. Mid-sentence he drifts off, like an old machine quietly stalling.

Here the play delivers its coldest cut: Oswald tells his mother that a doctor in Paris diagnosed him with what is delicately called softening of the brain. The doctor said it was inherited from his father. He asks his mother: did his father ever have some kind of illness?

Mrs. Alving doesn't answer at once. She goes rigid in the wicker chair, her back to the fjord beyond the window. The rain is still falling outside. No one knew better than she how wild his father had been. She had believed that if she buried the truth and sent her son far enough away, the next generation could start clean. Paris was far enough — it had to be clean. But the father never had to make the journey himself. His illness made it for him.

Oswald has fallen for Regina, the maid. On its own that would be nothing much, but when Mrs. Alving hears it, her face goes whiter than the fog over the fjord. She has to tell her son something — no, two things.

The first: Regina is not the carpenter Engstrand's daughter. Her mother is Johanna, who once worked as a maid in this house. Her father is Oswald's own father, the respected captain. Which makes Regina Oswald's half-sister. The sentence lands, and the whole conservatory feels like the floor has been pulled out from under it.

When Regina learns the truth, she doesn't cry, doesn't make a scene. She asks only one question: can I still leave? She says she won't stay in this house any longer, in a place where her name has gone rotten. She's going to go find that new life. She is arguably the only living person in the whole play: she chooses to tear herself out by the roots instead of staying and playing dead.

The next day, the orphanage opens. Ribbon cut, photographs taken, a few lines set to run in the paper. The ceremony has barely ended when the brand-new building — the respectable structure Mrs. Alving poured everything into — catches fire. No one can say exactly how it started. The carpenter Engstrand was on site that day, lame in one leg and fond of the bottle as always. Some say he left a cigarette burning in the workshed. The fire starts in the shed and burns its way to the main building.

That night, Mrs. Alving doesn't go back to the conservatory. She stands on the manor steps and watches the fire from a distance, watching her husband's name, ten years of her patchwork, and the clean inheritance she meant to leave her son, all burn down to ash. The first time I read this far, it stopped me too: Ibsen doesn't need anyone to tear the building down. He just lets the fire settle the account itself.

The fire is put out, and dawn is close. The rain has stopped completely, and for the first time sunlight breaks over the fjord and falls, with terrible irony, into this conservatory. But the light isn't shining on hope. It's shining on the end.

This is when Oswald's illness breaks over him. His eyes go unfocused, his limbs seize, like an animal finally caught fast by his father's old chain. The young painter's last words repeat over and over, just one thing: the sun, give me the sun. Earlier he had quietly passed his mother a packet of morphine tablets, telling her it was the last way out he was keeping for himself. Now she stands in front of him, holding it.

Will she tip those tablets into his mouth? The play ends without an answer. The lights go down and leave the audience holding one question: is ending your own child's suffering with your own hands an act of love, or another kind of crime? Ibsen hands the decision off. That is the cruelest trick of psychological realist drama: he refuses to render a verdict for anyone.

Ibsen has Mrs. Alving spell out the metaphor herself: we're all haunted, all of us, by ghosts of one kind or another... old dead ideas and beliefs and things of that sort... they hang on to us and we can't get rid of them. There isn't a single ghost in a white sheet anywhere in the play. The real ghosts are the respectability, the lies, the hypocrisy, and the religious rules of the parents' generation — they don't leave, they get inherited, and they sit back down in the parlor wearing a new face.

This is a play about a woman trapped in a marriage that is dead in everything but name, about religious doctrine forcing someone who wants to leave back into place, about a mother who spends ten years cleaning up after a dead husband only to find she can never get the stain out. It is about something colder still: the sins of one generation land, in the flesh, on the next, and the next generation gets no say in the matter. For readers today, Ghosts still cuts. Our own generation is still wrestling with what got handed down — about family, about respectability, about what gets said and what gets buried. The ghosts don't wear white sheets. They wear suits, clerical collars, fathers.

I can tell you the plot. What I can't do for you is sit you in that conservatory yourself, listening to rain on the glass roof, watching those four people trade civil words while they knife each other for two hours straight. Half the play's power comes from the fact that the setting almost never changes: the audience is trapped in the glass house right along with Mrs. Alving, holding its breath, gritting it out, blinded by the same sunrise in the fourth act. And then there's the packet of morphine. Knowing the plot, you think you already have an answer; the moment the line actually lands, you find you're not so sure after all. That's the feeling the text itself gives you, the one that won't let you close the book.