Allegedly retaliating for A Doll House's hostile reception two years earlier,
Henrik Ibsen wrote Ghosts ( 1881) to reveal the devastation of a marriage
based on lies. Instead of leaving her philandering husband, Mrs. Alving,
for the sake of appearances and conventional morality, stays in a loveless
marriage but sends son Oswald away at a young age. The play opens just
as an orphanage is to be dedicated to her dead husband's memory and as
Oswald has returned home to die from inherited syphilis, though disbe-
lieving vehemently that his father could be the cause. Ibsen uses Mrs. Alving
to condemn Pastor Manders, her longtime mentor, for her life of married
hypocrisy. Additionally, Ibsen makes Pastor Manders the dupe of Engs-
trand, a carpenter, who helped to build and later secretly burned the or-
phanage. A further complication is that Engstrand has raised Regina, Mrs.
Alving's house servant, as his daughter. In the final act Mrs. Alving tells

-128-