HELMER

  Are you not clear about your place in your own home? Have you not an infallible guide in questions like these? Have you not religion?

  NORA

  Oh, Torvald, I don’t really know what religion is.

  HELMER

  What do you mean?

  NORA

  I know nothing but what Pastor Hansen told me when I was confirmed. He explained that religion was this and that. When I get away from all this and stand alone, I will look into that matter too. I will see whether what he taught me is right, or, at any rate, whether it is right for me.

  HELMER

  Oh, this is unheard of! And from so young a woman! But if religion cannot keep you right, let me appeal to your conscience—for I suppose you have some moral feeling? Or, answer me: perhaps you have none?

  NORA

  Well, Torvald, it’s not easy to say. I really don’t know—I am all at sea about these things. I only know that I think quite differently from you about them. I hear, too, that the laws are different from what I thought; but I can’t believe that they can be right. It appears that a woman has no right to spare her dying father, or to save her husband’s life! I don’t believe that.

  HELMER

  You talk like a child. You don’t understand the society in which you live.

  NORA

  No, I do not. But now I shall try to learn. I must make up my mind which is right—society or I.

  HELMER

  Nora, you are ill; you are feverish; I almost think you are out of your senses.

  NORA

  I have never felt so much clearness and certainty as to-night.

  HELMER

  You are clear and certain enough to forsake husband and children?

  NORA

  Yes, I am.

  HELMER

  Then there is only one explanation possible.

  NORA

  What is that?

  HELMER

  You no longer love me.

  NORA

  No; that is just it.

  HELMER

  Nora!—Can you say so!

  NORA

  Oh, I’m so sorry, Torvald; for you’ve always been so kind to me. But I can’t help it. I do not love you any longer.

  HELMER [Mastering himself with difficulty.]

  Are you clear and certain on this point too?

  NORA

  Yes, quite. That is why I will not stay here any longer.

  HELMER

  And can you also make clear to me how I have forfeited your love?

  NORA

  Yes, I can. It was this evening, when the miracle did not happen; for then I saw you were not the man I had imagined.

  HELMER

  Explain yourself more clearly; I don’t understand.

  NORA

  I have waited so patiently all these eight years; for of course I saw clearly enough that miracles don’t happen every day. When this crushing blow threatened me, I said to myself so confidently, “Now comes the miracle!” When Krogstad’s letter lay in the box, it never for a moment occurred to me that you would think of submitting to that man’s conditions. I was convinced that you would say to him, “Make it known to all the world”; and that then——

  HELMER

  Well? When I had given my own wife’s name up to disgrace and shame——?

  NORA

  Then I firmly believed that you would come forward, take everything upon yourself, and say, “I am the guilty one.”

  HELMER

  Nora——!

  NORA

  You mean I would never have accepted such a sacrifice? No, certainly not. But what would my assertions have been worth in opposition to yours?—That was the miracle that I hoped for and dreaded. And it was to hinder that that I wanted to die.

  HELMER

  I would gladly work for you day and night, Nora—bear sorrow and want for your sake. But no man sacrifices his honour, even for one he loves.

  NORA

  Millions of women have done so.

  HELMER

  Oh, you think and talk like a silly child.

  NORA

  Very likely. But you neither think nor talk like the man I can share

  my life with. When your terror was over—not for what threatened

  me, but for yourself—when there was nothing more to fear—then

  it seemed to you as though nothing had happened. I was your lark

  again, your doll, just as before—whom you would take twice as

  much care of in future, because she was so weak and fragile.

  [Stands up.]

  Torvald—in that moment it burst upon me that I had been living

  here these eight years with a strange man, and had borne him

  three children.—Oh, I can’t bear to think of it! I could tear

  myself to pieces!

  HELMER [Sadly.]

  I see it, I see it; an abyss has opened between us.—But, Nora, can it never be filled up?

  NORA

  As I now am, I am no wife for you.

  HELMER

  I have strength to become another man.

  NORA

  Perhaps—when your doll is taken away from you.

  HELMER

  To part—to part from you! No, Nora, no; I can’t grasp the thought.

  NORA [Going into room on the right.]

  The more reason for the thing to happen. [She comes back with out-door things and a small travelling-bag, which she places on a chair.]

  HELMER

  Nora, Nora, not now! Wait till to-morrow.

  NORA [Pulling on cloak.]

  I can’t spend the night in a strange man’s house.

  HELMER

  But can we not live here, as brother and sister——?

  NORA [Fastening her hat.]

  You know very well that wouldn’t last long.

  [Puts on the shawl.]

  Good-bye, Torvald. No, I won’t go to the children. I know they

  are in better hands than mine. As I now am, I can be nothing to

  them.

  HELMER

  But some time, Nora—some time——?

  NORA

  How can I tell? I have no idea what will become of me.

  HELMER

  But you are my wife, now and always!

  NORA

  Listen, Torvald—when a wife leaves her husband’s house, as I am doing, I have heard that in the eyes of the law he is free from all duties towards her. At any rate, I release you from all duties. You must not feel yourself bound, any more than I shall. There must be perfect freedom on both sides. There, I give you back your ring. Give me mine.

  HELMER

  That too?

  NORA

  That too.

  HELMER

  Here it is.

  NORA

  Very well. Now it is all over. I lay the keys here. The servants know about everything in the house—better than I do. To-morrow, when I have started, Christina will come to pack up the things I brought with me from home. I will have them sent after me.

  HELMER

  All over! all over! Nora, will you never think of me again?

  NORA

  Oh, I shall often think of you, and the children, and this house.

  HELMER

  May I write to you, Nora?

  NORA

  No—never. You must not.

  HELMER

  But I must send you——

  NORA

  Nothing, nothing.

  HELMER

  I must help you if you need it.

  NORA

  No, I say. I take nothing from strangers.

  HELMER

  Nora—can I never be more than a stranger to you?

  NORA [Taking her travelling-bag.]

  Oh, Torvald, then the miracle of miracles would have to happen——

  HELMER

  What is the miracle of miracles?

  NORA

  Both of us would have to change so that——Oh, Torvald, I no longer believe in miracles.

  HELMER

  But I will believe. Tell me! We must so change that——?

  NORA

  That communion between us shall be a marriage. Good-bye. [She goes out by the hall door.]

  HELMER [Sinks into a chair by the door with his face in his hands.]

  Nora! Nora!

  [He looks round and rises.]

  Empty. She is gone.

  [A hope springs up in him.]

  Ah! The miracle of miracles——?!

  [From below is heard the reverberation of a heavy door closing.]

  GHOSTS: A FAMILY DRAMA IN THREE ACTS (1881)

  INTRODUCTION

  BESIDES A DOLL’S HOUSE (1879), the play immediately following it, Ghosts (1881; Gengangere), is the most notorious Ibsen ever wrote. This time, however, the scandal was not due to an abrupt, implausible, and unorthodox ending, but to a study of what happens when a female character does not leave the oppressive atmosphere of the patriarchal home. While Nora in A Doll’s House deserts her home, Mrs. Alving stays; the scandal of a wife leaving her husband is avoided, but the result is worse. Ghosts is a play that diagnoses the price at which a family is salvaged.

  While A Doll’s House goes against the traditional expectation of a conciliatory end with a clean break, Ghosts is formally coherent, seeking not so much to break a traditional plot but to reimagine the oldest of all traditional forms: tragedy. Ibsen knew that tragedy could not be applied to the bourgeois world; it had to be radically reinvented. This is particularly the case with that most vexed of tragic categories: fate. The language in which Ibsen reinvented Greek fate was that of medical and moral inheritance. Not the Gods or the fates, but nature dictates the terms of human life.

  Mrs. Alving keeps up appearances in order to save her son from knowing that his father is morally bankrupt; this is her struggle and her only desire. But in Ibsen’s modern tragedy, the forces that shape character are larger than the will of any individual. The son grows up far from the internally broken home, protected from all knowledge, but the family history ends up repeating itself anyway, for he has “inherited” his father’s failings. The son begins to show the same desire as his father, and more important, he is dying from a disease that is really nothing more than the outer sign for an inner corruption that cannot be stopped by anyone. And so the son drifts toward his bitter end, waiting for the final morphine shots to be given by his mother.

  Ghosts uses some of the elements of Ibsen’s other plays: a hypocritical minister; a shocking revelation about the past; the question of scandal and appearances; even a “cheap” suspense trick in the form of a new orphanage that lacks an insurance policy and burns down. All these elements, however, are merely the frame within which Ibsen tries to imagine a modern tragedy centered around Mrs. Alving, whose self-sacrificing attempts to shield her son from his inherited fate end up bringing about this fate all the more surely. The scandal surrounding this play may have had to do with its overt treatment of moral disease and inheritance, but it was also a reaction to this attempt to create a radically modern tragedy, for which the audience was little prepared and to which it responded with fear and loathing. Ghosts is a great modern tragedy and the model for a whole tradition of modern tragedy from Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night to the tragedies of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.

  Ghosts was first performed in Chicago in Norwegian, before it proceeded to shock audiences across Europe in Helingborg, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Christiania (all 1883), Augsburg (1886), Berlin (1887), Paris (1890), and London (1891), assisted by a host of translations into English, German, French, Russian (all before 1891), as well as Czech (1891), Polish (1891), Italian (1892), Catalan (1894), and Portuguese (1895). For theater historians, Ghosts is significant because it was the first Ibsen play directed by André Antoine, the promoter of naturalism on the stage. That Antoine would be drawn to this play is not surprising, since its central theme of inheritance resonates with the naturalist doctrine that the formation of character is determined by environment and inheritance, leaving little room for free will and self-creation. The past here becomes the environment by which these characters find themselves trapped and from which they cannot escape. Zola had bemoaned the lack of naturalist plays and theater practice. Antoine and Ibsen both laid the groundwork for naturalism to become a central movement for both dramatic literature and its presentation on the stage. Other notable directors followed suit—for example, Max Rein hardt, whose celebrated 1906 production was designed by one of the most famous expressionist painters, Edvard Munch.

  —Martin Puchner

  CHARACTERS

  MRS. HELEN ALVING, widow of Captain Alving, late Chamberlain126 to the King.

  OSWALD ALVING, her son, a painter.

  PASTOR MANDERS.

  JACOB ENGSTRAND, a carpenter.

  REGINA ENGSTRAND, Mrs. Alving’s maid.

  The action takes place at Mrs. Alving’s country house, beside one of the large fjords in Western Norway.

  ACT FIRST

  A spacious garden-room, with one door to the left, and two doors to the right. In the middle of the room a round table, with chairs about it. On the table lie books, periodicals, and newspapers. In the foreground to the left a window, and by it a small sofa, with a work-table in front of it. In the background, the room is continued into a somewhat narrower conservatory, the walls of which are formed by large panes of glass. In the right-hand wall of the conservatory is a door leading down into the garden.Through the glass wall a gloomy fjord-landscape is faintly visible, veiled by steady rain.

  ENGSTRAND, the carpenter, stands by the garden door. His left leg is somewhat bent; he has a clump of wood under the sole of his boot. REGINA, with an empty garden syringe in her hand, hinders him from advancing.

  REGINA [In a low voice.]

  What do you want? Stop where you are. You’re positively dripping.

  ENGSTRAND

  It’s the Lord’s own rain, my girl.

  REGINA

  It’s the devil’s rain, I say.

  ENGSTRAND

  Lord, how you talk, Regina.

  [Limps a step or two forward into the room.]

  It’s just this as I wanted to say——

  REGINA

  Don’t clatter so with that foot of yours, I tell you! The young master’s asleep upstairs.

  ENGSTRAND

  Asleep? In the middle of the day?

  REGINA

  It’s no business of yours.

  ENGSTRAND

  I was out on the loose last night——

  REGINA

  I can quite believe that.

  ENGSTRAND

  Yes, we’re weak vessels, we poor mortals, my girl——

  REGINA

  So it seems.

  ENGSTRAND

  ——and temptations are manifold in this world, you see. But all the same, I was hard at work, God knows, at half-past five this morning.

  REGINA

  Very well; only be off now. I won’t stop here and have rendezvous’s127 with you.

  EGSTRAND

  What do you say you won’t have?

  REGINA

  I won’t have any one find you here; so just you go about your business.

  ENGSTRAND [Advances a step or two.]

  Blest if I go before I’ve had a talk with you. This afternoon I shall have finished my work at the school-house, and then I shall take to-night’s boat and be off home to the town.

  REGINA [Mutters.]

  Pleasant journey to you!

  ENGSTRAND

  Thank you, my child. To-morrow the Orphanage is to be opened, and then there’ll be fine doings, no doubt, and plenty of intoxicating drink going, you know. And nobody shall say of Jacob Engstrand that he can’t keep out of temptation’s way.

  REGINA

  Oh!

  ENGSTRAND

  You see, there’s to be heaps of grand folks here to-morrow. Pastor Manders is expected from town, too.

  REGINA

  He’s coming to-day.

  ENGSTRAND

  There, you see! And I should be cursedly sorry if he found out anything against me, don’t you understand?

  REGINA

  Oho! is that your game?

  ENGSTRAND

  Is what my game?

  REGINA [Looking hard at him.]

  What are you going to fool Pastor Manders into doing, this time?

  ENGSTRAND

  Sh! sh! Are you crazy? Do I want to fool Pastor Manders? Oh no! Pastor Manders has been far too good a friend to me for that. But I just wanted to say, you know—that I mean to be off home again to-night.

  REGINA

  The sooner the better, say I.

  ENGSTRAND

  Yes, but I want you with me, Regina.