Introduction
Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts continues to remain one of the most criticized plays. The main motto of the modern playwright is to uphold the sexual issues of his contemporary age. In the play, Ghosts Henrik Ibsen, with his subtle knowledge and intelligence, has focused on the universal gender discrimination through depicting the dramatic male and female characters based on the 19th century Norwegian Bourgeois customs and values, and the contradictory attitude towards power and sexuality. The playwright as a self-conscious critic cum social reformer of his contemporary age, has unveiled the grim and mysterious images of the then filthy atmosphere. The play embodies of the hollowness and falsity of conventional morality, particularly the hollowness of conventional Bourgeois marriage and family life. His only motto is to deal with the contemporary social issues — the role of religion in modern life, the hypocrisies of family life, the subordinate and subservient status of women and corruption in the familial, social, cultural, and communal affairs are considered unorthodox of his own time. The main antagonists who are faced with conventions, hypocrisy, sexual passion, power, marriages of expedience, corrupt press, vested interest, and hardest of all, the past, both of society or of oneself may involve guilt and hamper autonomy. In the play, Ghosts, Ibsen has dealt with the Scandinavian middle class familial contradictory dilemma and pang of inner agonies between the patriarchy and the matriarchy. The modern playwright has demonstrated the spiritual and moral challenges of the society as it became increasingly urban and modern, and the influence of Christianity began to wane. Ibsen laid a great stress upon the norms of hereditary guilt based on power and sexuality. He studied the disordered human psychology and analyzed relentlessly the common relationship between the two siblings and husband and wife. There is much relationship based on sentimentalism, or a desire to dominate due to hypocrisy, sexual oppression, bondage, drug abuse and falsehood. This paper also discusses the Foucauldian and Belseyian concepts of patriarchal power and female sexuality and emancipation, Freudian theory of sex, Mackinnonian concepts of gender and sexuality, Northam’s viewpoint on Mrs. Alving, and Francis Ferguson’s comment on the personality of Pastor Manders and Engstrand and so on.
Foucauldian and Belseyian Comment on Power and Sexuality
We can investigate power and sexuality in Ghosts by applying Michel Foucauldian concept of ‘discourse’ and the clash of various discourses in society. Foucault’s theory establishes the system of producing knowledge which is bound by psychological constraints where rules and norms have to be perceived. Catherine Belsey (1985) in The Subject of Tragedy analyzes the Foucauldian concept of discourse and emphasizes that female sexuality is not autonomous, being regulated severely by patriarchal discourse. Belsey’s theorization of the relationship between patriarchal power and the controlling of female sexuality may be applied to Ghosts with a view to fostering power and sexuality among Ibsen’s dramatic personae. This paper highlights how the patriarchal discourse controls female sexuality as reflected in this discussion, where consolidation of power has a direct relation with the issues of sexuality.
Foucault, in his theorization of the relationship between power and knowledge, has constantly reiterated the fact that power uses knowledge for its own benefit. He reflects on the ubiquity of power and also sees every relation as a relationship of power. The concept of discourse is connected with the issue of power relation and Foucault shows how different discourses in society contend for power by using knowledge. Foucault also theorizes the connection between power and the discourse of sexuality. He says that power controls sexuality for its own interest and also regulates the “knowledge of sexuality to ensure a knowledge — based administration of power” (Booker 1996: p.125).
This Foucauldian idea, that power controls the discourse of sexuality, and decides what can be known or what cannot be known about sexuality, criticized by Belsey in The Subject of Tragedy. Belsey’s focus on the discourse of patriarchy controls female sexuality. She observes with an acute sense that patriarchal discourse has excluded women from the “discourses defining power relations in the state” and also from the “definitions of power relations within the family” (Belsey 1985: p. 149). Along with this exclusion comes the issue of control that, according to Foucault, is a way to produce power. Belsey argues that the control of female sexuality guarantees the male subject “supremacy over nature and over time, ensuring the stability of the family and the legitimacy of heirs” (Belsey 1985: p. 165). Her viewpoint suggests that patriarchy stifles female sexuality since it considers female sexual autonomy as a threat to its power and its authority upon the family. Hence for Belsey, the discourse that defines power is male-oriented and excludes women.
Patriarchy versus Matriarchy in Ghosts
An analysis of the play, Ghosts supports Belsey’s idea and thought that patriarchy has imposed control over female sexuality, and has excluded women from state power and has made their position in the family “inconsistent” (Belsey 1985: p. 149). The other common theme that runs through the play is the silencing of female sexual individualism to guarantee patriarchy the power it desperately seeks. Power and sexuality are inextricably connected in Ghosts: Johanna, a female character, is not appeared on the stage. She is pronounced through the dramatic dialogue between Pastor Manders and Mrs. Alving. Mrs. Alving, the female protagonist, mentions about Johanna while disclosing her husband’s immoral activities to Pastor Menders. Mrs. Alving states that her husband had a strong physical attraction towards women in society. Johanna, working as a maid servant at the Alving Heritage, fell victim to sexual bondage and found herself in the clutches of Captain Alving. She tells Pastor Manders about her husband’s unsocial behavior that she would live with Captain Alving despite his masochism. Mrs. Alving saw on the sly that he was greatly attracted towards Johanna. One day she observed the illicit sexual affair from the dinning room. At that time she was working very nearly. Standing at the door, she heard her own servant whisper: “Stop it, Mr. Alving! Let me go!” (Ibsen 1989: p.30). She felt very much pain on hearing their conversation. In this way, their physical relationship began to develop slowly. At one stage his physical union with Johanna got deepened. Johanna had no power to protest against her master where she was subjected to sexual exploitation. She did not get rid of his immoral deeds. Actually, Johanna has been shown as a disenfranchised woman of her age, and did not get any help from society, where she was confined to the cocoon. She had been totally victim of the aggressive nature of Captain Alving and inhumanly exploited and tormented through sexual violence and rape. We can realize about the sexual behavior and immoral deeds of Captain Alving in Johanna’s voice: “Let me go, Engstrand! Stop it! I’ve been in service for three years with chamberlain Alving at Rosenvold, and don’t you forget it!” (Ibsen 1989: p. 5).
It is quite apparent that Johanna had been acting both as a mistress and a maid-servant in the Alving Heritage. She never forgot that Captain Alving had made a chamberlain when she had been working for him. Captain Alving succeeded in having incestuous relationship with the maid servant. When she became pregnant, Mrs. Alving persuaded Engstrand to get married Johanna by giving him three hundred dollars due to social humiliation, and Engstrand also accepted the chance albeit it was a hideous crime from the social point of view. But Mrs. Alving conceals the sinful acts of her husband so that her only son Oswald can not fall victim of dreadful circumstances. In this play, Johanna has been mentioned as a “degenerate” (Ibsen, p.37) character. This female character has been presented in front of us with a view to focusing on the inner faults and vices of Mr. Alving’s personality.
Mackinnon argues that sexuality constitutes gender. In other words, there is no alienation between the concepts of gender and sexuality; male and female do not exist outside of the eroticization of dominance and subordination. As Mackinnon (1982) maintains: “Sexuality, then, is a form of power. Gender, as socially constructed embodies it, not the reverse. Women and men are divided by gender, made into the sexes as we know them, by the social requirements of heterosexuality, which institutionalize male sexual dominance and female sexual submission. If this is true, sexuality is the linchpin of gender inequality” (p. 533 quoted in Freedman 2002: p. 60).
Sexual Relationship between Regina and Oswald
This article further throws light on Regina’s physical glamour as well as a profound sexual relationship between half-brother and half-sister. In the play, Ghosts, Regina is one of the two female characters. Although she seems to be trivial in comparison with the main female character, Mrs. Alving, but Regina is not at all negligible under the over-all consideration of many critics and scholars. The complex sexual relationship in Ghosts can be seen in the incidents through getting involved Oswald and Regina. In the first part of Act I, Regina seems to be around 23 years old, appear as a physically and psychologically strong young woman, determined and optimistic, high ambitious, and convinces that she has a stay in Paris ahead together with Oswald, the son in the Alving Heritage where she herself has been brought up. In fact, she is an illegitimate daughter of Captain Alving. The Captain had a sexual relationship with a maid servant of his wife, and this Regina is the product of that affair.
Oswald feels that his salvation lies in Regina’s physical glamour that is full of vitality and joy of life. He wants to go away from home taking Regina with him. He would like to work again with a new lease of life and fresh energy painting: “Light and sunshine and holiday — and shining, contented faces” (Ibsen 1989, p.58). He is afraid of remaining at home with his mother, where all his instincts should be warped into ugliness. But, when Regina understands her true relation with Oswald, She decides to leave the Alving Heritage. She, apparently, declares that there can never be anything serious between them. She is not going to stay out at the Alving’s home in the country and wear herself out looking after invalids. Regina feels the awakening of joy of life in her, but, it is the joy of her mother’s kind, a sullied joy. The values which are deeply rooted for so long in her soft heart, is now devastated like a turbulent storm of heredity. Regina says: “If Oswald takes after his father, I should not be surprised but what I’ll take after my mother” (Ibsen 1989: p.68). She decides to go to the “Sailor’s Home” an euphemism for a brothel.
Jankowski’s Concept of Patriarchal Power and Sexual Bondage
As Theodora A. Jankowski (1992) in Women in Power in the Early Modern Drama argues, an adult woman remaining unmarried is considered unacceptable and threat to society. Unmarried women in the late medieval and early modern period were seen as harmful to the “marriage paradigm”, and it is marriage that defines a woman’s normalcy adding to this is the powerful patriarchal control that women are subjected to, both before and after their marriage. Jankowski says that it is the father who ensures that his daughter would be married off as a virgin while “the enforcement of marital chastity, along with the production of heirs, becomes the task of the husband” (Jankowski 24). Patriarchy, in the form of the father and the husband, imposes an absolute control over women throughout their life.
The sexual bondage in the play, Ghosts serves as an example of Jankowski’s idea that patriarchy controls the female body. Captain Alving being a man of high rank was acquitted though he had committed a crime by having a sexual relationship with a helpless woman Johanna while he was holding a position of power. Moreover, Oswald’s sexual relationship with Regina is regarded as ‘incest’ because of brother-sister relationship. From the moral point of view, his union with Regina is “upon a tabooed relationship”… she is his half-sister and is illegally recognized by any religious or social law as an invalid marriage.
Regina’s decision to be a prostitute and her rejection of Oswald’s proposal can be taken as a proof of her determination to stand firm against patriarchy. Hence Regina’s fury at Oswald’s marriage proposal is more dreadful when Mrs. Alving pleads with her to accept Oswald’s demands. It shows that the patriarchal representative is bent upon exploiting female sexuality. The affection of male dominated power in violating the female body is firmly resisted by Regina when Oswald pleads with her to save his life by accepting his marriage proposal. She is furious with Oswald when she knows her true relationship from Mrs. Alving, and regards Oswald’s proposal as an incestuous commerce. As a woman of individual identity as well as freedom, Regina, leaving the Alving Heritage, decides firmly to follow her mother’s business (i.e. prostitution), and rejects Mrs. Alving’s and Oswald’s request. Regina violently replies: “No, thank you! A poor girl has got to make the best of her life while she’s young. Otherwise, she’ll be left high and dry before she knows where she is. And, I’ve got the joy of life in me too, Mrs. Alving” (Ibsen: p. 68).
Power, in the play, Ghosts is thus connected with power and sexuality in a complex way where the privileged are always advantaged by the law and order. The act of “producing” and “managing” the social guidelines of sexuality is “controlled” by the authority. Hence Captain Alving’s violation is not punished under the pretext of patriarchal power while both Regina and Johanna have been dominated and oppressed in the Alving Heritage by the name of social or traditional bondage. Moreover, the female body becomes the center of patriarchal control and a ground to display patriarchal “Power.”
The Inner Conflicting Struggle against “Ghosts” of Mrs. Alving
Mrs. Alving is the representative of the 19th century Scandinavian feminism; she is one of the most powerful women of his plays. Through her, Ibsen has exposed the unexpected truth of the then Bourgeois culture and community. The playwright has also focused on the silent mystery of all characters. Undoubtedly, Mrs. Alving is the round character. In this way, we may guess the underlying significance of the whole domestic tragedy of the Alving Heritage through the dialogue between Mrs. Alving and Pastor Manders.
Mrs. Alving has securely locked up all the repressive mental suppressions and conflicts. Instead of getting rid of the exorcism. She, following the advice of Pastor Manders, the personification of false, conventional stupid respectability, sends her son Oswald to school away from him, and has assiduously nurtured the myth of her husband as a noble and worthy figure, presumably suffering all the while in silence bitter agonies of shame and frustration. But now, on her husband’s death, she wants to free herself of the past in all its forms. She wants to set up an orphanage with the Captain’s money, on the one hand to pacify any rumors, there may be of her husband’s immoral, sinful life. Mrs. Alving sees the stranglehold of her “dissolute” husband on herself even after his death in Oswald’s preference for unconventional joys of life. However, she gets rid of her superstitions regarding Duty and Decency and braces herself to make a new beginning only to be crushed by the terrible denouement that her son has contracted venereal disease “Syphilis” as an inheritance from his father.
Mrs. Alving, like a true tragic protagonist, perceives truth at last through the irreparable wreck of her present life. As her world, finally, collapses, she becomes aware of the utter superficiality of her earlier view that she might some day live as though the past had never been. It is through her abandonment of all hopes that she, finally, comes to terms with life. Moreover, sexual relationship between Pastor Manders and Mrs. Alving before her marriage is also manifested through their dialogue. Mrs. Alving had a sexual relation with Pastor Manders. From their conversation, it is, apparently, proved that a sexual relationship is deeply grown up between Mrs. Alving and Pastors Manders.
Hypocritical Behavior of Pastor Manders
Both hypocrisy and immorality are noticed in Pastor Manders’s personality. Though Manders is a pious and devoted Christian, we are told that he had an illicit relationship with Mrs. Alving before her marriage. He is the spokesman of old morality, of duty or ideals. But despite his professed rectitude, he is a timorous fellow, extremely sensitive to public opinion. It is his weakness which prevents him from holding the hand of Mrs. Alving, and later allows Engstrand to blackmail her. His behavior with Engstrand shows that he is not only a poor judge of people but also gullible and childish. His final decision to support the proposed home for the sailors is a kind of brothel which makes a mockery of all his teachings. Pastor Manders is fully conscious of plays the role of an active partner and who is the full supporter of Engstrand’s plan to set up the social, moral and religious laws; he indulges his incontinence to the full and a brothel. Even being quite aware of his status and moral values, he does not consider his indiscretion illegal and pretends to himself that he keeps all values rightly, and does not violate them in the least. One begins to doubt whether his morality is just an eye-wash. Pastor Manders is the subtle villain of the whole play. His play is to establish prostitution with a view to earning money and to burn the orphanage of the Alving Heritage though persuading Engstrand. From the ethical point of view, Pastor Manders is also the comprising of crime.
Engstrand’s Filthy Personality
Engstrand is the greedy character in the play, Ghosts. He is the main culprit, traitor and hypocrite. His physical deformity symbolizes psychological crookedness. He is selfish, shrewd, cheat. He is detrimental to society. Unlike Pastor Manders, he knows his business very well how to intrigue people around him. He conspires with the help of Pastor Manders to burn the orphanage of the Alving Heritage. Though he has no institutional background, he is adroit in conversation and an adept in the artistic simulation. He has more audacity and intelligence than Pastor Manders whom he can easily blackmail. With his collected money, Engstrand hits upon a plan to establish “a kind of hostelry for the sailors” like the “captains and officers and the tip-top people” (Ibsen 1989: p. 6). He reveals his sinister design to Pastor Manders of whom he feels the necessity for the establishment of the brothel. For this, Engstrand persuades Regina to get indulged in the prostitution with a view to earning money in the most unfair means.
Thus Ibsen has created melancholic and dirty atmosphere, where both Johanna and Regina fall victim to sexual bondage where they find themselves in the clutches of patriarchal power and domination. Both of the two female characters bear the testimony of the 19th century Scandinavian Bourgeois society. In this way an obvious and explicit theme of the play is the exposure of the hollowness and falsity of hypocritical cannons of conventional morality, particularly the hollowness of conventional Bourgeois marriage and familial conflicts, patriarchal power and female sexual bondage and oppression, incestuous relationship between half-brother and half-sister, a secret plan to establish prostitution and persuade women to get involved in it for livelihood, struggle for self-identity and self-respectability and so on.
Freudian and Menckenian Viewpoint on “Hereditary Disease”
Regarding ‘Hereditary Disease,’ Freud argues that congenital ‘variation of the sexual constitution’ upon which the greatest height falls but the existence may be easily understood and can be established through the later manifestation. The variation of the original disposition must lead to the formation of an abnormal sexual life. One calls these ‘degenerative’ and considers them as an expression of hereditary deterioration. In more than half of the severe cases of hysteria, compulsion neurosis etc. which Freud has treated through psychotherapy that their fathers have gone through an attack of syphilis before marriage they have either suffered from tabs or generasis, or there is a definite history of lues. Thus Freudian concept of hereditary disease may be applied in Ibsen’s Ghosts for which the whole Alving Heritage is eventually turned into devastation.
Thus Freudian and Menckenian concept regarding venereal disease can be applied in the play, Ghosts: we see that heredity is an important issue of the same family; ‘Syphilis’ is a hereditary disease which stands for poison in relation to sexual life. It has had poisonous effect upon Captain Alving and Oswald. Society considers Alving as one of its pillars though he is “a dissolute,” a drunkard, “a degenerated,” “a libertine” and a rakish. The sexual attraction of Captain Alving makes a permanent impression upon Oswald at the age of seven. In Paris, Oswald lives a bright and happy life among the comrades, but according to him that is too much for his strength and he is incurably ruined for life by his own heedlessness. Thus Ibsen shows the effect of syphilis as a hereditary disease leading to the softening of the son’s brain at the age of 20 or so for the father’s promiscuous living before or about the time of the child’s birth. Ibsen’s Ghosts is not only about syphilis but also about the consequences of human predicament “about the cause of some kinds of suffering, and its relationship to moral responsibility.” Oswald is attacked by an ancestral curse namely syphilis. He says to his mother in accordance with his doctor’s comment: “The sin of the father is visited upon the children” (Ibsen 1989: p.5).
Incest and Taboo
Formidable taboo regarding incestuous relationship works in human mind in all societies and cultures. The relationships which are regarded as ‘incest’, being changed with the passage of time and society. The principal relationships which are almost tabooed and forbidden in all human societies, and are not altered. They are — the sexual relationship between father and daughter, son and mother, and brother and sister. It is said that these types of relationships are considered beyond the natural sexual relationship in the moral sense of the modern people.
During the middle 19th century of the Northern Europe, the prevalent concept was somewhat changed regarding incestuous relationship. Though the passage of time is changed slowly, in course of time the incestuous matter in the mind of the common people emerging from ‘sin’ was regarded as social injustice. Though the custom of capital punishment was almost mollified and annulled due to this crime at that time, it is expressed that the capital punishment was announced illegal as a punishment of incest in 1842 in Norway.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we may say that the issues of power and sexuality cannot be separated in the play, Ghosts. In fact, the outcome of the play is decided through the clash of the discourses of power and sexuality where the assertion of power is directly or indirectly related with the controlling of the sexual discourse in the society. In Ghosts incestuous relationship becomes an issue around which the clash between power and sexuality revolves. Mrs. Alving’s ‘complexities’ make her falter as she fights with the ghosts of the past actions for power and possession of her only son and of the whole Alving Heritage. The question of power controlling sexuality for social welfare remains complicated and undismissed as Henrik Ibsen shows that it is in the very nature of man that he cannot resolve the conflict between salvation and morality, individual sexual impulse and social responsibility. Henrik Ibsen has created a permanents impression of a middle class society upon which the female body is fixated to ensure that the discourse of power and sexuality remain masculinity. The play, Ghosts continues to evoke wider interest because the complex portrayal of the discourse of power and sexuality remain central concerns in today’s societies as well.