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| 1042 |
| The Template of Great Literature |
| Henrik Ibsen - Ghosts |
| The play which rocked British society in the 1880s, and which changed the face of world drama for ever. Ibsen suffered hugely for his courage in exposing on stage the hypocrisy which refused to address the subservient position of women. They were supposed to endure infantilisation and mental and physical abuse out of ‘duty’.
Critics labelled the play ‘putrid’, and an ‘open sewer’, and its writer a ‘crazy cranky being’. Today the struggle of Mrs Alving to hold together a wretched marriage and keep her son out of harm from his father is simply heroic. Ibsen clearly sees her as a heroine, but 1880 society largely saw her as a wilful, fallen woman who, once only, had left her home. The last scene in which she realises that her son is dying of hereditary syphilis is one of the most powerful ever staged and stands level with Lear’s loss of Cordelia. Despite all she has done, ‘The sins of the father ‘ have indeed been visited on the next generation.
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