Ibsens Ghosts

Want to read the rest of this paper? Join Essayworld today to view this entire essay and over 50,000 other term papers

spent the rest of her life covering up the truth about her husband.
? The story very powerfully brings out its themes, but is very much less shocking than it seemed over a hundred years ago. It is still a play which makes one think about what you really inherit from your parents, anticipating Philip Larkin's famous poem by many years.
? Ibsen's Ghosts has been subjected to a succession of interpretations and re-interpretations. Like any great work of art, it has meant widely different things for different generations. It has been seen variously as a social drama of revolt, offering an outspoken challenge to the hypocrisy of late nineteenth-century European society, as a melodramatic pièce à thèse focusing attention on 0svald Alving's inherited disease and his final lapse into dementia, and, in complete contrast, as a moving tragedy showing the suffering of a mother who finds that the past cannot simply be exorcised.
? Over the years critics have differed widely in their ...

Get instant access to over 50,000 essays. Write better papers. Get better grades. Already a member? Login

suggested that its cause lay in the degeneration - or softening - of the brain as a result of the inheritance of disease from a profligate parent, and that its course would inevitably be a progressive decline to idiocy. Yet the essence of the play lies in the dramatic representation of the conflicts in the family triangle formed by Oswald and his mother and father.
? During the action of Ghosts a number of decisive events occur, engendering a crisis with a catastrophic issue. Important things are said and done which have far-reaching consequences, but the characters involved are not necessarily aware of what it is they are doing and saying. The play presents a complex tissue of on-going ...

Succeed in your coursework without stepping into a library. Get access to a growing library of notes, book reports, and research papers in 2 minutes or less.

CITE THIS PAGE: