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Of This Time, of This Place: Mrs. Alving's Ghosts and the Shape of the Tragedy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Joan Templeton
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Abstract

Ibsen's Ghosts is conventionally viewed as a Sophoclean quest tragedy in which the protagonist achieves self-knowledge when she confesses to her son that she was not sexually warm to his father, thus announcing, in Lionel Trilling's phrase, the “summation of the play.” But this interpretation disregards Ibsen's spirit and purposes and contradicts the play's tragic structure: the careful exposition, which shows that no amount of wifely responsiveness could have affected the fatum already in place, and the brilliant development, the inexorable revelation of the truth about Helene Alving's cowardice, her marriage, and her son's disease. The “summation” of Ibsen's tragic schema is the request the doomed son makes of the woman who, in submitting to his father, gave him life: “Take it back again.” Part 5 of the essay tells what happened in the author's Tours classroom as her students helped solve the mystery of Ghosts and its commentators.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 101 , Issue 1 , January 1986 , pp. 57 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1986

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