Ghosts

In Act II, Ibsen continues to develop his commentary on The Hypocrisy of Organized Religion. Even after hearing about Helen’s husband’s full depravity, the pastor excuses him but expresses disgust at Jacob’s choice to marry Johanna, Regina’s mother, whom Manders describes as an immoral woman for having had sex outside of marriage. As Helen confronts Manders for his lack of condemnation for her unfaithful husband, Ibsen highlights religion’s unfair double standards for the sexual purity of women. Fearing that her son inherited his father’s depraved ways despite her best efforts, Helen begins to break away from the social conventions promoted by Manders. While Manders views Helen’s obfuscation of the truth to Oswald as a sign of her morality and sacrificial heroism, Helen now sees her silence as evidence of her cowardice. Helen blames her inaction on “the ghosts that hang about me” (35), a metaphor for The Dangers of Social Conventions.

Haunted by her duty, Helen resolves to tell Oswald the truth about his father, attempting to do so multiple times. Act II thus marks the climax of Helen’s character development. In the past, Helen followed the advice of Pastor Manders and returned to her husband to live a life of duty and honor. In the present, Helen boldly alerts Manders of her mission to forge a new path of freedom from social conventions. Despite his intentions to strengthen Helen’s loyalty to her husband’s memory, Manders’s myopic insistence on black-and-white morality inspires Helen to reevaluate her belief system. Helen compares interrogating her belief system, instilled by the church and society, to unraveling a piece of clothing stitch by stitch: “I wanted only to pick at a single knot” but soon discovered that the garment of doctrine “was all machine-sewn” (35). The idea of “machine-sewn” rather than handmade clothing highlights its unsatisfying one-size-fits-all approach to the nuances of real life; the church’s factory-produced dogma is inauthentic and rote.

Oswald is also hiding a secret: He was diagnosed with syphilis. In Ibsen’s time, well before the discovery of antibiotics in 1928, this bacterial infection was a devastating diagnosis, eventually leading to facial deformities and neurological problems. This is why Oswald would rather die by assisted suicide. Although syphilis could be passed from an infected mother to a child during birth, leading Oswald’s doctor to blame the condition on Oswald’s father (who presumably inflected Helen before she gave birth), it is much more commonly spread through sexual activity, which is why Oswald blames himself for the diagnosis. The ambiguity of the origins of Oswald’s illness touches on the play’s interest in what children inherit from their parents. Oswald's revelation confirms for Helen that her efforts to follow social conventions and protect her son from his father’s influence have failed. Her allegiance to social conventions alienated her from her son while he continued to suffer from the inherited consequences of his father’s indiscretions. Ibsen uses the French word vermoulu, which means “worm-eaten,” to describe Oswald’s illness; this word choice implies that Oswald has reached the final, neurological stage of the disease, which is why he cannot continue his work as an artist. The word also symbolically illustrating the rottenness at the core of the Alving family, the corruption that results from restricted desire.

The fire at The Orphanage at the end of Act II marks the climax of Helen’s development. It represents the destruction of Helen’s plans to honor her husband’s memory for the sake of social approval. Named after Oswald’s father, the orphanage represented Helen’s desire to separate herself from her husband without exposing the truth to Oswald. The orphanage offered Helen a way to escape her past with Pastor Manders as a partner and facilitator. However, the fire destroys their work and forces Helen to confront her cowardice. Purging Helen’s past allegiance to social conventions and religion, the fire offers Helen the chance to abandon her past and find peace.