Is there any major obvious stuff I should fix? Are there parts of it that don’t flow? Are there concepts that aren’t clear? Is there anything I should explain better? Anything? Anything? 🙂

Is Ibsen’s Ghosts a tragedy? Robert Corrigan believes so and makes a compelling case. He examines the play from the perspective that Mrs. Alving is a victim in a conflict over which she has no control. He does so in a somewhat unconventional fashion though. Early in his article he details many of the previously held positions on the play and then explains why they are wrong. This approach serves to prompt the reader with their own preconceptions and leads this reader to also have in mind that if other theories can be discounted, the theory being presented might be fallible as well. He manages to avoid getting into his theory in detail until late in his article and so gives the reader a great deal to mull over until he gets to his point. Ultimately deciding that Mrs. Alving is a tragic figure, though of a type never really seen before.
Disclosing four major interpretations of the play allows the reader to consider additional points even if the reader had no previous experience with criticism about the play. The first theory presented is that Ghosts is some sort of reaction to A Doll’s House, which is intriguing. This brings to the forefront of a reader’s mind that these stories center on the conflicts that the female characters go through. Most major works of fiction up to this point in history were decidedly masculine in their focus. Examining the play through with this light also prompts the reader to move away from a close reading and to bring in other sources of information, which could be handy.
The second theory revolves around Mrs. Alving and Oswald as the victims of fate, and the world is viewed as “mechanistic,” and respectability is “stultifying,” and “debilitating.” These adjectives serve to create a very cold impression on the reader. Given that this play is more about human passions run amuck and the horrible consequences of such passions, it is somewhat obviously inappropriate to describe their world as impersonal. Using the word “mechanistic” seems to help Corrigan’s overall thesis because eventually the reader sees that Corrigan largely believes that people are irrational and how can the world be predictable and mechanical if the people who make up the world are irrational?
The third theory involves the “determinist forces that crush humanity,” which is a wholly inflammatory way of speaking. “Crushing humanity” is such a dramatic and provoking statement that Corrigan must be once again influencing the reader through his choice of emphasis on parts of other theories, even as he discounts them. He states that the strongest instinct of all is maternal passion, which is arguable. It seems as though selfishness is much more compelling to most people as is evidenced by Oswald asking someone else to kill him after he is incapacitated instead of simply committing suicide. He shows that he has no notion of pity for his mother or Regina by planning to have them be responsible for his death. He intended to be selfish in this way before having inkling that he might want to blame his mother for his state and want to punish her for it. This theory seems flawed before it has even been fully presented.
By bringing up the fourth theory almost flippantly, he perfectly sets the stage for his own theory. He engages the reader in a tone of comradery; obviously the reader is more likely to be sympathetic to the play and therefore his theory after seeing that some people discount the play on the basis of modern medicine. It should be entirely clear, based on his tone, that it is inappropriate to reduce the level of meaning in the themes of an influential play because of discoveries made in a laboratory about moldy bread. Perhaps a reader might infer more sarcasm than Corrigan strictly intended, but it is unlikely.
He opens the main body of his text with the sentence, “Ibsen’s biography is a study in conflict and contradiction,” seemingly because it gives him license to then present contradictory points in supporting his argument with no real evidence to support their validity or explain why he feels he can contradict himself. He completely skips an entire segment of Ibsen’s life because it does not help support his claims. He alludes to Ibsen being famous for being successful one sentence after talking about how Ibsen needed support from friends to survive. The juxtaposition weakens his overall thesis.
He does brings up interesting points about Ibsen’s life and desire to be part of the bourgeois. He discusses Ibsen using his plays to manifest the guilt he felt for desiring values he knew to be false. This is especially poignant in the case of Ghosts. Mrs. Alving is an interesting character in the sense that she seems to be the epitome of being a victim of the bourgeois. She forgave her husband and continued the marriage solely for the reason that society expected her to and this lead to her child experiencing unconscionable horror. Considering Corrigan’s implication that Ibsen is working out negative feelings towards this segment of society, Mrs. Alving becomes symbolic of the deep need for social change. Society placed her in a marriage she did not really want and conspired to convince her to stay despite her innate moral objections. Ibsen seems to projecting a very clear message that a person should listen to their own inner voice over the opinions of society. Corrigan states repeatedly that she has no control; implicit to his statement is that she should have control.
Also in the play is Regina who chooses to reject a possible entrance into bourgeois society and instead go into a life of almost certain disaster. Without learning about Ibsen’s eventual rise to the bourgeois it would be possible for a reader to believe that Ibsen was entirely sympathetic to the plight of middle class woman and condemning of societal pressures. If Corrigan is correct then Ibsen is presenting these characters as examples of why the bourgeois is horrible then it seems that Ibsen is the worst kind of misogynist for wanting to be part of a society that treats women so abominably.
Corrigan thinks that Mrs. Alving is a new kind of tragic hero because tragedy has evolved. Long ago it was believed that a tragic hero could suffer and come to wisdom and that somehow there would be enlightenment for the audience. This view is predicated on the belief that people were once more simple. Now that life and people have become more complex we need to be represented by people like Mrs. Alving; people who suffer and go through horrible experiences and come out knowing absolutely nothing that enriches their lives. They have simply suffered. What can this mean about modern people? People have more leisure time now and that gives them more time with which to be idle and examine themselves. This self-examination seems only to lead to more unhappiness. Maybe we would all be better off if we stopped examining ourselves.
This examination of people has produced the general belief that people are irrational, which is probably true. Regina certainly seems to be an excellent example of people being irrational. Though she is a minor character, Ibsen seems to focus a great deal of his general social criticism through her. Early in the play she is very moralistic and certain of her worth. She declares that she was raised to be ladylike and was treated almost like a daughter of the house. In the end when she finds out that she is literally a daughter of the house she chooses to reject the easier life she could inherit. She rejects Mrs. Alving and her offers to help. She turns her back on all of the security and affection she has ever known in order to go out into a world that is certain to damage her. There is nothing rational about this act. In fact her behavior shows an incredible depth of self-destructiveness. She is one of the early women to live out the bad stereotype of women never making the right choice.
Oswald is also irrational. If he were truly as frightened of his potential suffering he would end his life on his own. He decides to allow other people to decide if he should suffer or not and that is the cowards retreat. His pursuit of Regina because he thinks she is cold enough to end his life is callous and unwise. When he learns that his mother was not strong enough to leave his father he still trusts her enough to make a harsh decision for him. He has no reason to trust her. All of his life his mother pushed him away without explanation and trusting her at this point seems ridiculous.
Early in the play Mrs. Alving is presented as optimistic and forward thinking. She is planning for a future in which she helps orphans. At the end she sees the ruin of all of her plans for the orphanage and the prospect of either watching her son’s body slowly deteriorate into death or killing him. There is no honor to be gained by either choice of action. In this juncture of considering the honor of her actions it is useful to think of the picture that Corrigan paints of Ibsen. By the end of his life Ibsen was rather a caricature of bourgeois respectability. He sat in his café and walked the correct streets and seemed to be the most ordinary of men. Out of the mind of this seemingly ordinary man sprang an understanding of the most torturous of choices a human might have to make. It seems as though he took on a façade knowing that it was just a façade and therefore is the single most unsympathetic member of the audience that might exist. Anyone who reads the play is nothing more than an outsider, yet the one person who might be most inclined to feel sympathy for these characters, the creator, has no sympathy. He knows that there is no honor in his aspirations yet he pursues them.
This piece of criticism is particularly valuable in analyzing the play because he brings up so many other theories that a reader has their choice of ways in which to interpret each action of the play. The reader gets to understand that even though it is possible to discount a great deal of this tragedy because a simple shot of penicillin would have fixed the problem before it became a problem, human suffering is deeper than that. Even though tragedy is no longer something that can lead to enlightenment and wisdom, it is still part of the modern landscape of literature—for some value of modern. Tragedy is still viable even though it has morphed in proportion.