Ghosts

Ghosts is a play written by Henrik Ibsen in 1881, in three acts. It is one of the masterpieces of the movement known as Literary Naturalism.

The book introduces us to Helen Alving, who is building an orphanage dedicated to the memory of her late husband, who was an Army Captain and a very loved person in the area and whom everyone had as an example.

However, the marriage was not so happy. Years before, Helen had gone to Pastor Manders to tell him the marriage was unbearable: her husband drank and pursued other women, and had fathered a child on the housemaid.

Manders sent her back to her duty, and to keep her family's standing in the community she said nothing. Until the day her husband died she stayed at his side and kept up appearances.

But on the eve of the orphanage's opening Helen learns that her only son, Oswald, is ill with a disease inherited from his father, and that he has fallen in love with Regina, the maid in her own house — the captain's illegitimate daughter, and Oswald's half-sister.

[A spacious garden-room, with one door to the left, and two doors to the right. In the middle of the room a round table, with chairs about it. On the table lie books, periodicals, and newspapers. In the foreground to the left a window, and by it a small sofa, with a worktable in front of it. In the background, the room is continued into a somewhat narrower conservatory, the walls of which are formed by large panes of glass. In the right-hand wall of the conservatory is a door leading down into the garden. Through the glass wall a gloomy fjord landscape is faintly visible, veiled by steady rain.]