Ghosts

The play is set in the garden room of Helen Alving’s country home. As characters move in and out of the room, confidential conversations take place against the backdrop of the Alvings’ country estate. The events of the play take place over the course of one gloomy day—weather that complicates the seemingly peaceful garden setting. The Rain highlights the obfuscation and secrets that direct the life of each character. Rain symbolizes both destruction and renewal—a layered interpretation that emerges when Jacob refers to the rain as “the Lord's own rain,” while Regina calls it "the devil's rain” (7). The characters attempt to assign morality to the rain yet cannot agree on their interpretations. Ibsen features this discrepancy between perceptions as the play explores the theme of The Subjective Nature of Morality. His characters debate various aspects of morality and struggle to reconcile their disparate points of view.

Conflicting points of view about gender, class, and religious views fuel the play’s plot. In Act I, Regina and Jacob argue over Regina’s desire to rise above the lower class of her birth and dissociate from her father. Nurtured by Helen in their upper-class estate, Regina has been given the tools for social mobility: For example, she uses French phrases repeatedly because of the education she has received. Her working-class father, Jacob, does not understand French or his daughter; this difference in language displays their disconnection.

Ibsen uses the conflict between Pastor Manders and Helen to represent the influence of religion on morality. When Manders notices Helen’s secular books on her table and chastises her for indulging in the secular world, they debate over the value of non-faith-based philosophy. While the pastor finds exposure to the secular world sinful, Helen welcomes the freedom that comes from independent thought. These debates concerning religion continue throughout the play. Despite the pastor’s proclaimed devotion to his Christian beliefs, Pastor Manders exemplifies The Hypocrisy of Organized Religion—his deepest concern is for his reputation and image. The pastor prides himself on having browbeaten Helen into returning to her womanizing husband, caring more about saving face when she came to his house for aid than about Helen’s health and safety within her marriage. He convinces Helen not to insure the orphanage to avoid external judgment, not because of concerns about the institution or Helen’s future. In contrast, Helen’s actions embody tenets of Christianity: When she welcomes her wayward son Oswald home without hesitation, she models the biblical Parable of the Prodigal Son, showing the unconditional love promoted in the story.

Ibsen expands this commentary on religion through the conflict between Oswald and Manders. The two men debate the unconventional relationships of Oswald’s artist friends, which Manders condemns as sinful. Untied to religious and social conventions, Oswald views their common-law marriages and their devotion to their children as moral, defending them as examples of “warm-blooded young people who love each other” (23-24). For Manders, relationships that have not been granted religious certification through the marriage ceremony are moral failures, but he does not condemn the hidden sexual inconstancy of Helen’s ex-husband: Manders is above all else concerned with appearances rather than psychological or moral reality.

The play sets up a comparison between Oswald to his deceased father, asking whether Oswald is shaped more by his inherited nature or by Helen’s nurture, which purposefully kept Oswald away from his father’s influence. These scenes suggest that Oswald is like his father in important ways. There is a strong physical resemblance: After seeing Oswald with his father’s pipe, Manders declares, “I could have sworn I saw his father, large as life” (21). Moreover, like his father, Oswald engages in a relationship with his family’s maid, displaying an attitude toward sex that eschews religious and social conventions. Ibsen unites Oswald and his father in their desire to escape their stable home life in search of sex and freedom. However, as future events in the play will reveal, there are marked differences between Oswald’s openness about his desires and honestly about his failings and his father’s secret and damaging misbehavior.

As a symbol of religious authority, Pastor Manders criticizes the choices of other characters, particularly women. He promotes a constricted view of womanhood that idealizes female sacrifice and chastity. In the past, Manders convinced Helen to return to her unfaithful husband and fulfill her role as a dutiful wife. In the present, Manders uses Helen’s desire to leave her husband as a cudgel with which to scold her for what he perceives as maternal failures: “Just as you once disowned a wife’s duty, so you have since disowned a mother’s” (26). In contrast to this helpless and dependent role, Ibsen portrays Helen’s reclamation of power through the financial control she exerts over her husband’s assets and her decision to protect Oswald from his father’s terrible example. She singlehandedly saved the family’s reputation, not Manders: “It was I who had to drag the whole load when [my husband] relapsed into his evil ways, or sank into querulous wretchedness” (29). The orphanage exhibits Helen’s final break from her required duty to her late husband: She will spend his entire estate (including her dowry, or the money granted to a groom by a bride’s family as a measure of value) on this institution, leaving Oswald only the money she has earned. By choosing to divest Oswald of her dowry, Helen hopes to allow him to break free from all inheritance (financial and genetic) from his father and to forge a new path for her child.

Through Helen’s character development, Ibsen demonstrates The Dangers of Social Conventions to restrict individuals from finding personal freedom and peace. Without freedom from social conventions, individuals like Helen and Oswald suffer under the unrelenting patterns of torment perpetuated by a strict adherence to society’s mores. Like his father, Oswald continues the pattern of engaging in scandalous affairs. Upon hearing Oswald and Regina together, Helen calls the couple “ghosts” and reminds herself of her husband and Regina’s mother (30). Helen’s reference to ghosts connects not only to the title of the play but also to the haunting patterns of restriction and deviance that plague the Alving family. Throughout the play, Ibsen continues to explore the remnants of depravity driven by restriction inherited through generations.