Taylor Walters
Mr. Q
AP Language and Composition
5 June 2013
Ibsen’s Hidden Messages Conveyed Through Symbolism Henrik Ibsen was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father of realism" and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre. Ibsen is often ranked as one of the truly great playwrights in the European tradition. He has been widely regarded as the most important playwright since Shakespeare. His plays are the most frequently performed in the world after Shakespeare. Although most of his plays are set in Norway—often in places reminiscent of Skien, the port town where he grew up—Ibsen lived for 27 years in Italy and Germany, and rarely visited Norway during his most productive years. The translated title of Ghosts is actually misleading compared to the Danish and Norwegian titles. The correct translation would have been Revenants. When Ibsen finished Ghosts in October 1881 he created a “scandal greater than that created by any other book in the history of Norwegian literature” (Beyer). Thirteen years later Ghosts was produced as a play in the United States. Henrik Ibsen is well known for his scandalous plays but what many people do not see are his deep, woven, hidden messages. Ibsen used many different rhetorical devices to his advantage while he wrote Ghosts but it is clearly evident he uses symbols to convey all his messages.

The round table in the living room becomes a field of slaughter littered with evidence of all the battles in the play. It holds the books that symbolize Mrs. Alving’s new ideas, the orphanage papers that represent the enormous lie of Captain Alving, and the champagne that Oswald requests (the one symbol of joy in his life). The table is also the resting place of the lamp, the artificial light Mrs. Alving gives Oswald when he complains about the excessive darkness. What Oswald really needs is the sun: the truth. He understands this just as he slips into delirium and Mrs. Alving turns off the lamp. The table is the holding spot of many symbols Ibsen uses.
In the opening stage directions, Ibsen establishes a big wall of glass through which a “gloomy fjord landscape” (Ibsen) is visible. He complains that it keeps him from thinking and walking, so he drinks in order to deal with it. The rain there never seems to stop which oppresses Oswald. The town supposedly had “no joys to offer him- only dissipations” (Ibsen). The rain can be also be interpreted as a symbolic expression of the oppressive atmosphere Mrs. Alving has created. In her iron willed determination to bury her husband’s memory, she does not want truth – traditionally represented by the sun- anywhere near her house. Oswald’s last plea for the sun, for instance, sums up his need for the “joy of life” in himself as well as in his work. He needs sunlight in which to paint and he needs illumination on the nature of his father. A pall hangs over the entire landscape of the play; if there is no rain at the moment, the scene outside the window is obscured by mist. The weather only clears up when Mrs. Alving faces the truth, but it ends up being too late. Thrust into darkness, Oswald weakly cries out for the sun. His last monosyllabic plea has a twofold significance: not only symbolizing the “light of truth”, it might also stand for the relief of pain which would leave in the lingering moments of darkness that would surround Oswald’s diseased mind. When Oswald confesses to his mother that he has syphilis, he echoes the doctor’s biblical diagnosis that, as in the old Testament, he can be doomed to further atonement by a jealous God, visiting the inequity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me” (Bible). In a worldly sense, where no transcendental perspective obtains, Oswals’s venereal disease is a manifestation of his father’s promiscuity applied to his son by God or fate without consideration of his own personal life, virtuous or sinful. Ibsen believed, like most in his day, that syphilis was hereditary. Therefore through Ibsen’s eyes Oswald obtained syphilis from his father at conception causing them to be the only characters in the play with the disease. While a person cannot obtain syphilis from their father, unless they have sexual relations with each other, the symbol behind this disease is what is most important. Syphilis represents what Oswald inherited from his father’s buoyant, joyful nature, a nature suffocated and defiled by the puritanical Norwegian society. In this play, syphilis is a symbol of what happens when an important, natural life force like sex is driven out of “respectable homes” and into dark corners like the brothel Engstrand wants to start. Mrs. Alving is a main player in forcing her husband into a twisted expression of his passion. Mr. Alving’s actions are what cause Oswald to become diseased. Even Oswald himself can predict that this disease will leave him “helpless, like a new-born baby, impotent, lost, hopeless, past all saving” (Ibsen). When his infection comes back to haunt her, she must face the decision of whether or not to kill her diseased son.
The most pervasive symbol, of course, is that of ghosts. These ghosts show how an “isolated moment from the past can continue to affect one’s life” (Kelly). The ghosts are worn ideals and principles of law and order so misapplied that they have no actual significance. All the untested maxims and abstract dogma that Manders, a man of “poor instrument in a Higher Hand” (Ibesn), maintains are ghosts; all the sources of personal cowardice in Mrs. Alving are ghosts. Ghosts are also the lies about the past, perpetrated to the present, which will haunt the future. Finally, ghosts are the actual and symbolic diseases of heredity which destroy the joy of life in the younger, freer generations.
Ibsen used many different rhetorical devices to his advantage while he wrote Ghosts but it is clearly evident he uses symbols to convey all his messages. It is also evident that Ibsen enjoys taking the symbols he uses and making them complicated, deep, and “braided like a rope” (Kelly). Though his topics may be controversial, Ibsen never cared. He continued what he was doing never listening to all the criticism and his plays have been performed, translated, and are now being taught to people all over the world.

Works Cited
The English Standard Version Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments with Apocrypha. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.
Ibsen, Henrik. Ghosts. New York: Bantam Dell, 2005. Print.
Beyer, Edward. Ibsen, the man and his work. New York: Taplinger, 1978. Print.
Drama Criticism. Ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 8. Detroit: Gale Research, 1998. Literature Resources Center.