Alving has been shown as a self-respective, self-egotistic, self-revolutionary figure in the name of social duty and responsibility for which she always conceals herself in fear of outer stigma and scandal. This paper also explicates Captain Alving as a symbol of a dissolute, drunkard, libertine, rakish, sinful and masochistic behavior. Alving's inner struggle, and Francis Ferguson's criticism on the personality of Pastor Manders and Engstrand. This paper is explained by expressing the assumptions of Foucauldian and Belseyian theory of power and sexuality, and Women in Power in the Early Modern Drama by Jankowski and Freudian theory of sex and venereal disease syphilis, Menckenian concepts of gender and sexuality, Northam's viewpoint on Mrs. It looks at brutality, falsehood, deception, irrationality, and above all, matriarchal sexual subjugation, and oppression through the patriarchal power and domination between individuals of the 19th century Scandinavian Bourgeois society. Ibsen, always quick to build on such constructive feedback, decided that his next play, An Enemy of the People, would be about just that: a man who finds out the water supply is polluted but nobody wants to listen to him and believe the ugly truth.This paper aims to examine Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts in the light of his attitude towards the hollowness of traditional Bourgeois marriage and family life.

When a London theatre (eventually) staged it, one critic called it ‘an open sewer’. Curiously, the first performance of the play was in Chicago, of all places. He knew he needed to give society a glimpse of itself in the mirror, what Oscar Wilde, a few years later, would call ‘the nineteenth century dislike of realism the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.’Īt first, no European theatre would dare to stage Ghosts: it remained a play on the page rather than stage, largely unsold, and Ibsen’s name was mud for a while because the play provoked such a strong negative response when it was published. Ibsen himself later told the King of Sweden that he had to write the play elsewhere, he wrote that he knew the play would shock readers, and that if it didn’t, he wouldn’t have needed to write it in the first place. It’s easy to see why Ghosts caused such an uproar.

The ghosts henrik ibsen