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19th Century Immorality & Co.

A clip from Ghosts, from the 2014 Richard Eyre production at the Almeida Theatre in London, featuring Lesley Manville as Helene and Adam Kotz as Manders.

Ghosts is a play written by Henrik Ibsen in 1881 and was first staged in 1882. The play is shown to have critical views on 19th century immorality, which then breaks off to further factors that follow underneath this main idea. The overarching theme of immorality forms a throughline across the various topics the play touches on, the larger of which are STDs, sins, incest, and euthanasia. Not counting euthanasia, the way the play talks about these topics draws on the language of inheritance and links it to the wider motif of ‘ghosts,’ forces from the past that have a force on the present. Thus we know that Oswald wishes his illness was inherited instead of acquired, that his interest in Regine is immoral because they both have the same father, and that the shadow of the father’s sins seems to materialize itself in fire with the burning of the orphanage built using the money Oswald would have inherited.

Another underlying theme related to immorality is the role of ethics in this play. With the sins of one’s parents, the act of unfaithful affairs, and the role of ending one’s suffering, we should ask to what extent are all these situations and themes ethical? Both in modern day’s time and in the 19th century? Additionally, try and think about the transmission of not just disease, but of sins and tragedies as well. How can we connect the affairs of Oswald’s dead father to his own tragedies? Of Mrs. Alving keeping all her husband’s affairs secret and away from her own son, to Oswald’s shortcoming in the end? There is a line and history we can connect between immorality and the transmission of disease that can illustrate different perspectives and aspects of the story within Ghosts.

We should also consider the ethics and role of euthanasia within the text, the painless killing of a patient suffering from an incurable and/or painful disease. In the end of Ibsen’s play, Oswald requests his mother the difficult task of ending his life through a morphine overdose, if the time of his utmost suffering shall come. In addition to the ethics of one given the role to end a person’s disease-ridden life, what does it mean to have one’s own mother fulfil that role? Does the immorality of a person ending another’s somewhat vegetative life suddenly lessen if it is the mother ending her own son’s suffering? How can we even consider and determine a person’s suffering if we ourselves are not that person?

Overall, the overlying theme within Ibsen’s Ghosts is the topic of 19th century immorality. We break immorality within this play into different mini-themes, such as the transmission of STDs, the act of sinning, incest, and euthanasia. Moreover, we discussed the interplay of ethics and morality within all these themes and question what is the difference between ethics and morality? Are they different or the same?

Inheritance & Morality in Ghosts

Edvard Munch’s set design for the play

The play Ghosts by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, written in 1881 and first staged in 1882, sparked a lot of scrutiny from critics and the public. As it openly talked about venereal diseases, incest, religion and more. Thus, it brought in a new perspective on tragedy as a genre, since instead of discussing consequences of breaking moral code, it talks about the consequences of not breaking it (Wikipedia, 2021). And these consequences become ghosts for characters of the play. As Mrs. Alving says herself:

Ghosts… I’m inclined to think that we are all ghosts….. It’s not just what we inherit from our mothers and father that haunts us. It’s all kinds of old defunct theories … and things like that. It’s not that they actually live on in us; they are simply lodged there, and we cannot get rid of them.”

Although Mrs. Alving doesn’t want her son to inherit anything from his father and Oswald has no good memories of his father, they are unable to stop the genetic inheritance that Oswald receives.  Despite having no connections to his father, he inherits illness in the form of Neurosyphilis from him which questions the concept of nature vs nurture. Did growing up as an artist in Paris affect him enough to shape a different person or, like Oedipus, is he bound by fate after all? Manders does point out “When Oswald was standing there…. He looked the very spit and image of his father.” But Oswald also inherits much of his personality from his mother. 

Both the mother and the son are drawn to new and contagious ideas about the world. Early in the play, Pastor Manders confronts Mrs. Alving over books she is reading; although we don’t know their contents, we can imagine by his reaction that they challenge established ways of thinking. 

MRS. ALVING: What is it in fact you’ve got against these books?

MANDERS: Got against them? You don’t think I waste my time examining publications of that kind, surely

Note here Manders’ confidence to be entitled to judge things he had not read to begin with. This is a recurring theme within some texts for this semester – Bob, without much merit, quickly determined that nostalgia caused Alice to be fevered in Severance. He is similarly shocked later on when Oswald describes his friends in “illicit relationships.” Despite the pastor’s horror, Oswald challenges his reaction and insists that his friends are moral people, and Mrs. Alving later agrees. Ibsen emphasizes the book’s discussion of taboos by including this parallel thread contrasting the pastor’s 19th century morality with Mrs. Alving and Oswald’s new ways of imagining the world. 

It is interesting how when a group is exposed to a new form of contagion, a new value (moral solidarity in this case) is created to distinguish allies and enemies: if you agree you’re a friend, if you digress you’re the outsider. An interesting question then arises: where did this set of morals originate from? Is Manders, posing as a servant to God’s will, the de facto creator for the group moral? Or is he merely a guardian conforming to a collective will of the group?

Ludien, Taman, Mohammed, Sofia

Sitting with the big questions

Image via

Welcome to Contagion 2021, the ninth iteration of this course and the second actually to be taught during a pandemic. Starting our class remotely today was a bit of a reminder that our lives have been affected in any number of ways we may not yet be collectively aware of — and maybe that’s part of the work we need to do this semester. What was mostly hypothetical in 2012 when I started teaching this class is now world-defining for us, determining whether, where, and how we can travel, congregate, communicate effectively, or share experiences or feelings safely. “How do we respond to news that some among us are ill, and that the illness is, perhaps, contagious?” may not be how I would start the course description today. I would probably start with the question on the syllabus: “Are we too connected?” But I also want to think about a bunch of assumptions embedded in that question and the way it begs certain kinds of answers or evokes specific kinds of emotions.

If anything has happened to my thinking over the last eighteen months, it’s the clarification of this course’s central questions. I had seen them shape up over several years of teaching the texts we’ll read together — and several that are no longer part of the course.

For a few years, prior to the pandemic, I chose to begin the class with a very dense reading from Tony Sampson‘s book Virality. It was so dense, though, and so foreign to people who weren’t steeped in some specific jargon and conceptual frames, that I’ve decided just to give you the big takeaways and let the reading be optional. Sampson’s book sits at the nexus of poststructuralist literary criticism, continental philosophy, and media theory, drawing additional influence from late-19th-century sociology of crowd behavior. (Imagine all those early European sociologists, trying to make sense of overcrowded cities! The poor dears.)

Sampson’s project departs from some questions that I find quite useful in laying out a roadmap or orientation guide for the rest of our reading this semester. He’s the first one who prompted me to ask what it means to believe (or not) that we are “too connected”? Who is the “we” in that question? How do “we” quantify or measure “too”? What are the implications of a question like that? If the answer is yes, what then? Sampson lays out the stakes this way:

The proliferation of global transport networks makes this model of society susceptible to the spreading of biological diseases. Digital networks become volatile under the destructive potential of computer viruses and worms. Enhanced by the rapidity and extensity of technological networks, the spread of social conformity, political rumor, fads, fashions, gossip, and hype threatens to destabilize established political order. Likewise, financial contagions cascade through the capitalist economy, inspiring speculative bubbles, crashes, and aperiodic recessions. (Virality, 1)

Sampson sees the question “Are we too connected?” as rooted in a fear of human connectivity that accompanies the realities of globalization. He works hard to resist what he sees as a fear-based notion of “too much connectivity,” choosing to focus instead on the political operations of the fear that travels alongside the meme that connection places us in peril.

Political systems and marketers alike can play on such fears, but the fact of our connections very well may be moot: Is it possible at this point not to understand ourselves as already connected? Maybe, Sampson thinks, we’re better off asking exactly HOW we’re connected by networks — especially media/communication networks, but also by networks of interpersonal relations — and what these connections imply for how we understand individual and crowd behavior, especially in relation to “viral” media.

For Sampson, being “connected” in these ways is more than a metaphor. To make his point he asks another important question: What actually spreads when communication goes viral? The answer, for him, is affect, feeling, emotion: viral communications circulate not just fear, but also desire, love, a sense of belonging, a sense of being left out (#FOMO, anyone?). These affective transmissions result in what he calls “microimitations”: subtle adjustments in tone and behavior as we begin to conform to or imitate — or desire to conform to or imitate — mass behavior.

Sampson also asks whether the language of fear is overblown. He resists the too-much-connectivity thesis and biological metaphors for communication alike and worries that fear can be easily exploited. He has problems with the field of “memetics,” which seeks to treat the meme/gene analogy seriously. Nowhere is the problematic status of these ideas “more evident than in the … viral discourses surrounding network security, in which the recourse to immunological analogies and metaphors of disease shape the network space by way of igniting public anxieties concerning an epidemic ‘enemy’ that is ‘undetected, and therefore potentially everywhere’” (4). This is what he means by connection being more than metaphorical. The figurative language, that is, actually shapes the “forces of relational encounter” at play in social and political fields. The simplest way to put this: language matters, because feelings drive political and social forces and structure or reinforce power relations.

It’s easy for us to think about contagion in the register of social behavior, pandemic situation or not, when we think about memes or fashion or political sensibilities, especially as transmitted by social media. Something something something about TikTok and tweens saving turtles — “yeah, back in September 2019, maybe,” my own tween son observes. But what happens when we put these ideas into conversation with pandemics and the texts they have generated over time? That’s where we find ourselves starting this semester.

I said today that part of our work this semester will be to reflect on our own experiences of the pandemic — as varied and uneven as they may be. What connects “us”? When do we think of ourselves as belonging to collectives — the first-person plural — and when do we think of ourselves as individuals? Many of the connections you identified in your icebreaker introductions come back to the major questions this class centers on or circles back to again and again. Like Sampson, we will ask what it means to feel connected, what it means to worry about being too connected or not connected enough, to be unevenly networked, but also how the connections you talked about help us determine who we are. Like Sampson we will ask how communication matters in a time of epidemic disorder — and examine a range of authors who have thought about the relationship between communication about disease and the communication of disease. We will ask what the networks we belong to have to do with how we understand ourselves. Is individualism even possible? Is it possible not to be connected? Are all connections equal? How are we affected by the ways in which networks unevenly distribute social power and economic privilege?

With questions like these in mind, let’s embark. Here’s a slightly creepy but kind of cool and totally apt theme song for the semester from the artist Holly Herndon. Feel free to leave your thoughts about it, or anything else above, in the comments:

Ghosts of STDs (Ryoji’s Augmentor Post)

When I was reading Ghosts, I did not immediately understand that Oswald had inherited syphilis from Captain Alving until I did some readings about the play. In the play, they never mention the word “syphilis”, but unlike me, apparently, the audiences who saw the play in the late 19th century immediately understood its reference, as syphilis had become a widespread disease at that time. In a Guardian article, Richard Eyre, an English theater and film director who also wrote his own adaptation of Ghosts, recounts some of the initial responses of the play: 

In England the lord chamberlain, the official censor, banned the play from public performance but there was a single, unlicensed, “club” performance in 1891 on a Sunday afternoon at the Royalty theatre. It detonated an explosion of critical venom: “The experience of last night demonstrated that the official ban placed upon Ghosts as regards public performance was both wise and warranted”; “The Royalty was last night filled by an orderly audience, including many ladies, who listened attentively to the dramatic exposition of a subject which is not usually discussed outside the walls of an hospital”; “It is a wretched, deplorable, loathsome history, as all must admit. It might have been a tragedy had it been treated by a man of genius. Handled by an egotist and a bungler, it is only a deplorably dull play”; “revoltingly suggestive and blasphemous”; “a dirty deed done in public”.

Richard Eyre

Eyre explains that these responses were due to the play’s attack on religion, defense of free love, mention of incest, and syphilis. The stigma surrounding the topic of STDs has always been around, and this stigma is a very prevalent issue we witness today with the coronavirus pandemic. We see this stigma carried out in different forms. One would feel the discomfort in telling others that they have gotten the virus. We saw the discriminatory behaviors against people of certain ethnic backgrounds, especially to East Asians during the pandemic. One might face a loss of status because of the perceived link with a disease.  (See the WHO’s guide on Social Stigmas associated with COVID-19)

I found myself pondering the question of how these social stigmas affect us when talking about contagious diseases. Does that make us more vulnerable to the disease, or does it provide us with comfort in not having to openly discuss it? What does the euphemism mean to Oswald? Does Mrs. Alving keeping Captain Alving’s true nature secret from Oswald benefit him? In response to the initial responses of the play, Ibsen said, “It is reasonable to suppose that Ghosts will cause alarm in some circles; but so it must be. If it did not do so, it would not have been necessary to write it.” Although Ibsen seems to encourage us to speak of the stigma, whether it is related to STDs or patriarchy, is he himself still haunted by the shadow of the “ghosts”, by not mentioning for once the name of the disease and simply describing Captain Alving as “debauched”? Do we see ourselves today giving different reactions compared to the ones given to the responses that were given in England in 1891?

Is it only a numbers game?

Johnson’s talk at Google regarding his book The Ghost Map celebrates the mid-19th century physician John Snow and a local amateur Henry Whitehead’s effort in finding the reason for cholera outbreaks in the city of London. At the centerpiece of their efforts is the construction of a map — a map of all cholera-related deaths near a neighborhood water pump, bounded by the walking path around the neighborhood. Johnson tells us how this map spectacularly illustrated Snow’s theory that cholera was caused due to drinking contaminated water, going against the commonly accepted miasma theory of diseases being caused by bad smells, or the airborne particles that caused them, and not carriers such as water.

Snow and Whitehead’s Map of cholera deaths around Broad street water pump- each black bar marks a cholera death in the house and the area is bounded by walking path. Image via

However, in his paper titled “Incorporating Quantitative Reasoning in Common Core Courses: Mathematics for The Ghost Map,” describing quantitative reasoning approaches that could be included while reading or teaching The Ghost Map, the Beloit College Professor John R. Jungck urges Johnson’s readers to ask whether these quantitative tools such as the cholera map actually just spit out the truth as Johnson seems to suggest?

He reminds us of Florence Nightingale, who herself had pioneered in the practice of data analysis and visualization, and is credited to have invented the famous coxcombs to illustrate the mortality causes for British soldiers in the Crimean war and successfully advocated in the parliament for better nursing practices and sanitation. But as a contemporary of Snow, even after seeing the map, Nightingale did not believe in Snow’s theory of cholera being waterborne.

Florence Nightingale’s famous coxcomb charts. Image via

While Johnson blames Nightingale’s disbelief on factors such as ideology, social prejudice, and limited imagination, in essence pointing that she did not understand Snow’s data, Jungck urges us to ask whether this data and its visualizations might actually support multiple clashing interpretations? He argues that the process of finding the truth is not just as straightforward as its revelation using the data but that it involves argumentation, controversy, and reconciliation with multiple alternate interpretations of the same data, a lengthy but robust process.

Jungck’s argument reminds me of my own changing interpretations of the COVID-19 case numbers over time. While the numbers remain the same, I see 1000 daily cases very differently now than I did a month ago. This interpretation can change from person to person, while Nightingale might have found 1000 COVID-19 cases normal (the new normal I mean), maybe Snow might have thought them to be extremely high. And even beyond that, behind these numbers is the story of how they are even generated: How many tests were done that day? What kind of tests were they? Where in the country were they done? Can we actually trust these numbers?, questions that require even further query than just the daily case numbers. Thus, varying interpretations and seemingly endless questions that ask for even more data are sufficient to remind us that a data set and visualizations alone cannot completely represent the truth.

Finally, tying back to the mortality bills we read about in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, at the start of the plague when the deaths are quite low, the narrator H.F. interprets those deaths as being caused by the spread of the infection rather than dismissing them as just normal variation. I want to leave you to think about how much of his interpretation was caused due to his anticipation of the coming of plague?

Defoe: Spilling the Tea Since 1723? (Convener’s Post)

Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year is an elusive text. First published in 1722, it describes life in London during the Bubonic Plague through one man’s experiences and documentation. Though Defoe refers to it as a “Journal”, which is evident in the title of the book, it is debatable whether this book can be categorized as factual or fictional. It leans towards an objective account when it depicts documentation of the times, such as mortality bills, and then leans to the comparatively new fictional form of the novel when it conveys the emotional atmosphere of the plague, such as the descriptions of people’s suffering in both mental, physical, and spiritual dimensions. Today, Defoe’s book is categorized as a historical novel, which seemingly accounts for the dual nature of the book’s contents.  As this previous convener’s post notes, Defoe weaves both storytelling and documentation together, to paint a picture of London in its direst straits, describing all the facets (societal, classist, psychological, etc.) of London that the plague changes. 

  1. London’s Dreadful Visitation, or, A Collection of all the Bills of Mortality for this Present Year (London: E. Cotes, 1665) 

2. Bill of mortality for the week of 19th–26th September 1665, which saw the highest death toll from plague.

We are interested in exploring the subjectivity of the documents and bills quoted by Defoe, as mentioned in the convener’s post above. The recurrent use of weekly mortality bills gives the text of the narrative sections an administrative, authoritative, and authentic texture. However, there is a corollary impression with this choice to emulsify fiction and nonfiction. With fiction and information in such close proximity to each other (they’re not social distancing!), it results in a situation whereas the narrative becomes more authentic, the documentation becomes more suspect. Specifically, Ellen Cotes’ ‘London’s Dreadful Visitation’ (Fig. 1), a collection of all the bills of mortality printed in London during the Great Plague of 1665, elicits a question of to what extent a primary historical document could be a product of manipulation or reconstruction. Labels on causes of death, such as ‘suddenly,’ ‘frighted,’ and ‘grief’ (Fig. 2) are in the approximated language, leading to a question of who assigned these causes to the deaths. Whether it’s in fiction or in reality, the attempts to cover up and distort the numbers of the pandemic have continued from centuries ago. However, such continuity does not take human societies’ adaptations to the nausea of statistics, percentages, and predictions (of the pandemic) for granted.

    “Preparedness, for Defoe, needed to be a closer collaboration between individual citizens and the state, one in which both parties understood their social and ethical responsibilities to each other. To be prepared involved much more human work.” — Travis Chi Wing Lau

Central to reading any piece of literature is the reader’s relationship and interactions with the text. There is no denying that reading A Journal of A Plague Year during a pandemic equips a reader with a lens through which one can further engage with and critique the text. For instance, the bills listing the number of burials per week remind us of daily COVID case announcements. The exacerbation of class issues and inequalities by the plague (as with the poor and the servants falling sick in greater numbers than other demographics) reminds us of the way the poorest and most vulnerable populations around the world today are hit hardest by the spread of the coronavirus. The lack of citizen compliance to home quarantine in the Journal when infected resembles our current-day anti-maskers and anti-lockdown rioters. Such close and jarring comparisons between our current pandemic and a legendary plague which took place hundreds of years ago, tells us a lot about the nature of governance and citizenship in crises.

The questions we had after grappling with the Journal’s elusiveness are these- What sort of literary form is most useful to warn our descendants of epidemics and pandemics, and to convince them to live in austerity that protects their community? Is it the objective form, such as through using mortality bills and statistical models? Is it the narrative form of exploring people’s grief and the dimensions of their suffering? Or do we combine both forms in as Defoe does? Which forms help us tolerate the uncertainty and subjectivity of plagues? And how can we spread useful information in a counter contagion? If A Journal of A Plague Year does warn us of times such as the one we live through, are we even paying attention to Defoe?

The big questions

Image via

Welcome to Contagion 2020, the eighth iteration of this course but the first actually to be taught in a pandemic. After class today, one of you asked how our current situation — with courses being taught remotely and our lives affected in any number of ways we may not yet be collectively aware of — has shaped the way I’m approaching things this semester. The short answer is: the stakes are higher than ever! What was mostly hypothetical in 2012 is now world-defining for us, determining whether we can travel, congregate, communicate effectively, or share experiences or feelings safely. “How do we respond to news that some among us are ill, and that the illness is, perhaps, contagious?” may not be how I would start the course description today.

But if anything has happened to my thinking over the last six or seven months, it’s the clarification of this course’s central questions. I had seen them shape up over several years of teaching the texts we’ll read together — and several that are no longer part of the course.

I mentioned today that after leading the course for a while now with a very dense reading from Tony Sampson‘s book Virality, I’ve decided just to give you the big takeaways and let the reading be optional. His book sits at the nexus of poststructuralist literary criticism, continental philosophy, and media theory, drawing additional influence from late-19th-century sociology of crowd behavior.

Sampson’s project circles around some questions that I find quite useful in laying out a roadmap or orientation guide for the rest of our reading this semester. What does it mean to believe (or not) that we are “too connected”? What are the dangers implied in being too closely connected?

The proliferation of global transport networks makes this model of society susceptible to the spreading of biological diseases. Digital networks become volatile under the destructive potential of computer viruses and worms. Enhanced by the rapidity and extensity of technological networks, the spread of social conformity, political rumor, fads, fashions, gossip, and hype threatens to destabilize established political order. Likewise, financial contagions cascade through the capitalist economy, inspiring speculative bubbles, crashes, and aperiodic recessions. (Virality, 1)

Sampson resists this fear-based notion of “too much connectivity,” choosing to focus instead on the political operations of the fear that travels alongside the meme that connection places us in peril.

Political systems and marketers alike can play on such fears, but the fact of our connections very well may be moot: Is it possible at this point not to understand ourselves as already connected? Maybe, Sampson thinks, we’re better off asking exactly HOW we’re connected by networks–especially media/communication networks, but also by networks of interpersonal relations–and what these connections imply for how we understand individual and crowd behavior, especially in relation to “viral” media.

For Sampson, being “connected” in these ways is more than a metaphor. To make his point he asks another important question: What actually spreads when communication goes viral? The answer, for him, is affect, feeling, emotion: viral communications circulate not just fear, but also desire, love, a sense of belonging, a sense of being left out (#FOMO, anyone?). These affective transmissions result in what he calls “microimitations”: subtle adjustments in tone and behavior as we begin to conform to or imitate — or desire to conform to or imitate — mass behavior.

Sampson also asks whether the language of fear is overblown. He resists the too-much-connectivity thesis and biological metaphors for communication alike and worries that fear can be easily exploited. He has problems with the field of “memetics,” which seeks to treat the meme/gene analogy seriously. Nowhere is the problematic status of these ideas “more evident than in the … viral discourses surrounding network security, in which the recourse to immunological analogies and metaphors of disease shape the network space by way of igniting public anxieties concerning an epidemic ‘enemy’ that is ‘undetected, and therefore potentially everywhere’” (4). This is what he means by connection being more than metaphorical. The figurative language, that is, actually shapes the “forces of relational encounter” at play in social and political fields. The simplest way to put this: language matters, because feelings drive political and social forces and structure or reinforce power relations.

It’s easy for us to think about contagion in the register of social behavior, pandemic situation or not, when we think about memes or fashion or political sensibilities, especially as transmitted by social media. Something something something about TikTok and tweens saving turtles — “yeah, back in September 2019, maybe,” my own tween son observes. But what happens when we put these ideas into conversation with pandemics and the texts they have generated over time? That’s where we find ourselves starting this semester.

I asked you today to offer key lessons you’ve learned in the last six months, and much of what you came up with reinforces what I think are the major questions this class centers on or circles back to again and again. Like Sampson, we will ask what it means to worry about being too connected, but also how these connections determine who we already are. Like him we will ask how communication matters in a time of epidemic disorder — and examine a range of authors who have thought about the relationship between communication about disease and the communication of disease. We will ask what the networks we belong to have to do with how we understand ourselves. Are we individuals? Nodes in a series of networks? Members of collective bodies with their own conscious or unconscious identities? If so, how are we affected by the ways in which these networks unevenly distribute social power and economic privilege?

With those questions in mind, let’s embark. Here’s a theme song for the semester from the artist Holly Herndon:

Ghosts of Dead Ideas, Lifeless Old Beliefs

Henrik Ibsen was a well-known Norwegian playwright whose plays provide a critical view on 19th-century morality, especially as it pertains to womanhood. His other plays, Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House, both discuss the social norms at the time, which treated women like household objects, potential topics of scandal if they behaved out of the norm. Many of his plays were scandalous at the time, with some theatres refusing to perform his plays in order to not encourage social misbehavior. A Doll’s House, for example, has an alternative ending made by German theatres that implies an eventual reunion between the “dissenting” protagonist, Nora, and her husband, but Ibsen (like most modern audiences) did not consider this a useful or a valid alternative to the themes of his plays. Indeed it can be considered that the outcry against his work, the attempts to hush up taboo subjects such as venereal disease, incest, and female freedom, is precisely in line with the social norms that Ibsen wanted to dredge up and expose to light so that the audience has no choice but to face them. Ibsen’s plays have therefore gained a reputation for being “realistic,” no matter how disquieting the truths may be, and some see them as among the earliest literary case studies for the “modern woman” and “Electra complex.”

Ibsen’s Ghosts is set in late-19th-century Norway in the Alving household. The beginning of the play is set on the day before the opening of “Captain Alving Memorial,” an orphanage Helen Alving — the widow of the Captain — is determined to open in his memory. Upon her meeting with Pastor Manders, who had been helping with the plans for the memorial, she reveals to him that her marriage was far from perfect. Her husband, regarded with respect by the people of his town, had been unfaithful, yet she had stayed with him to prevent a scandal. She then reveals to him that Regine, Mrs. Alving’s maid, who at the beginning of the play was introduced as the daughter of Engstrand, a carpenter helping with the orphanage, is in fact Captain Alving’s bastard child. Captain Alving had an affair with their maid, who soon became pregnant, and Mrs. Alving paid the nurse to begin a relationship with Engstrand and raise the girl as his. Once Alving died, his widow used all his money to build the orphanage, hoping that once it was built and running her son would not inherit anything from his father and they will finally be free. 

Throughout the course of their conversation, the two witness Regine and Oswald, Mrs. Alving’s son, seemingly in a relationship. Stunned, Mrs Alving and Manders try to end the relationship, since the two are siblings, even though they do not know it. Although his mother tries to convince him to end the relationship, Oswald believes that Regine is his salvation. He confesses to his mother that he has been diagnosed with a hereditary illness, and as his father was a great man, he believes he must have contracted Syphilis due to his questionable way of life in Paris. 

As Mrs. Alving contemplates telling Oswald the truth, they suddenly learn that the orphanage had burned down. This only worsens his agony, and his mother finally decides to end his pain and tells him and Regine the truth about their father. Once the truth is revealed, Regine leaves, adding further to Oswald’s pain. Mrs. Alving, determined to care for her son afterwards is shocked when he asks her to help give him a fatal morphine overdose if his disease reaches its final stages. The play then ends in a dramatic scene in which Mrs. Alving is confronted with this decision as her son’s disease quickly progresses.

Ghosts, very likely by design, raises many questions of morality, namely what purpose it serves for the people. Is morality merely a product of society in order to preserve itself? Or is there a universal virtue of morality that seems to fail in special — but possibly common — circumstances? If morality is an important guideline that people should follow, to what extent is it valid across both circumstance and time?

In terms of our overarching theme of Contagion, these questions are undoubtedly in regards to contagion of social norms, especially through generations. The ghosts of the norm created by those that came before us create a society’s burden, which affect us far more realistically and directly than the ghosts of the dead themselves. Can we ever escape from these ghosts? Have we, as a modern society, learnt to recognize and concede to them? Or are we doomed like Oswald, bound to death by burdens that realistically should have no bearing on us? 

Ibsen presents many different aspects of his characters, particularly those of women. There is an inherent sacrificial and selfless element that is an expectation in each of the female characters. Was Mrs. Alving a devoted wife, a responsible mother? Was Regine wrong to not agree to leave with her father, knowing fully well that he was a deceitful person? This paper divides itself to spell out features of an ideal woman, as a person, a daughter, a mother and a wife. But no matter how one acts in the scenario presented, it is almost impossible to fit the “ideal” image. This is particularly evident when analyzing Mrs. Alving’s character. From a societal point of view, there is an expectation to hide the flaws of one’s husband and present the best possible image. Yet, when reading the play, there is an urge that one has to stop Mrs. Alving from presenting such a false reputation of her husband to the entire world. This paper walks us through the many ways that the women of the play try hard to fit the criteria of “perfection,” but fail to do so not because of their shortcomings, but because of the preposterous expectations of society. 

In relation to a previous post on Ghosts, the overarching theme of 19th-century immorality is what encapsulates the entire character of ghosts in the play. With inadvertent critiques on filial piety, or societal standards constantly being made such as those found within Ibsen’s work, the shackles of the past are slowly loosened. As with Regine, social standards are questioned, and within time society will soon disregard them, but as with any contagious disease, if it’s not fought it will once again prevail.

“Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.” -George Santayana

A Feast During the Plague is one of three of Alexander Pushkin’s plays [published?] during his lifetime. This play is particularly iconic as its origins and inspirations are very different from his other plays. As explained in The Little Tragedies, Pushkin derived some inspiration for this play from his visit to the Caucasus where he witnessed the outbreak of the plague in Erzum, Armenia. Pushkin’s tragedy, which takes place in the 19th century, is about a man who is having a feast when the entire city is dying of Cholera. Pushkin, however, writes this about the plague not merely as a means of reflecting on his personal experiences, but the idea of “plague” in this play offers a deeper metaphorical symbolism. Throughout the play, Pushkin forces his audience to grapple with the questions:

 

“What is the response of an individual to a catastrophe that has enveloped the community as a whole but he or she has so far escaped? Is it possible to save oneself by turning one’s back on the doomed community, or does one’s own humanity demand solidarity with other human beings even in their agony? And what bond — if any — remains between the saved and the lost? The living and the dead?

(Pushkin, 182)

 

The feast and the members in attendance, according to Pushkin, represent a microcosm of the larger society. Pushkin, therefore uses this small society to draw the audience’s attention to the relationship between the living and the dead. He therefore uses this setting to pose the following questions: To what extent do the revelers at the feast act as a true microcosm of the larger society? We believe that the revelers expose only a small faction of society. However, their thoughts and experiences reflected in the play demonstrate that like the victims of the plague in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, the experience of a plague or catastrophe forces the individual to switch his/her already established convictions from the idealized belief in the glorified society, to the glorification of the individual self.

 

SIDE NOTE: *How is Mr. Walsingham represented at the feast? Does he truly embody the character of a chairman seated at the helm of affairs, or does he stand in a representative for the audience watching the play?

 

The idea of hosting a “feast” during a plague was to celebrate that most of Mr. Walsingham’s group is still alive; that’s why they shouldn’t grieve over their dead friend and they should drink to the fact that they are still alive, and for the memory of their dead friend, Jackson. The Feast symbolizes the consumption of lives, the toast itself symbolizes life though they are actually toasting for a loss of life. Their act of enjoying what is left of life overrides their emotions of grief to the loss of a friend. They were feasting in the street, while a cart that is weighted down with the bodies passes by. Were they ignoring the fact that the disease is contagious or were they just accepting that death is inevitable? The Chairman started the feast by Mary singing a sad song. Mary’s song compares the church before and during the plague by saying it was “full of folk,” and “the steeple bell would sound.” However, during plague the church became “mute and empty,” “like a burned, abandoned homestead”  (Pushkin, 96-97). This leaves us with a question: Why did people stop going to the church during the plague? Was it to avoid gathering because the disease is contagion?

 

In The Mask of the Red Death, by Edgar Allan Poe, Prince Prospero, the main character, decided to isolate thousands of people from higher classes in an abbey to protect them from a contagious disease called the Red Death. In A Feast During the Plague, the group was also celebrating during a plague but they weren’t trying to protect themselves from the plague. The group seems to accept the inevitability of death because they are feasting, while a cart that is weighted down with bodies passes by.

 

The question of “the bond” between the living and the dead does not lie with the physical or emotional bond per se, but with the choice of either acknowledging or denying those ties. The introduction of Mary’s ballad proves that there is indeed a convergence between the worlds of the living and the dead. In Mary’s ballad, there is no glorification of the isolated individual as “…there is no such thing as “we”: our church, our children, our fields. And in the disaster […], everything is we” (Pushkin 185). In fact, her ballad introduces an actual, physical example of the graveyard where the worlds of the living and the dead converge. The belief in the bond between the living and the dead is further strengthened as there is a reinstatement that that dead were once a part of the community of the living. So, even though the dead are not physically present, there still exists an emotional connection between both worlds that help to strengthen the bond. Even Mr. Walsingham acknowledges the link between the living and the dead. Mr. Walsingham beliefs that “…the nearness of death is an experience that sharpens the edge of of life, which intensifies one’s joy in living” (Pushkin 191). From this statement, we can infer that the living and the dead share similar experiences as they’ve both had to live on the edge of life. The only differences arise as the dead have crossed over that edge and the living, who haven’t, then use their experience to intensify their joy of living.

 

Mary’s song:

In A Feast During the Plague, one of the most touching moments is Mary’s song. The operatic account depicts the horrors and struggles of the wretched plague, whilst also following the doomed relationship between two lovers of this time. The final two lines of her hymn–

“All is still — the graves alone

Thrive and toll the bell”

–illustrate the binary contrast between the context. There was both happiness and horror. Pushkin’s purpose of the libretto was to emphasize the benefit of living in the middle rather on two binary extremes. This binary motif is illustrated from the title itself “A Feast” being held during the “Plague” a time of repulse. Although Mary’s hymn is important in its illustration, it is essential to emphasize the contrast by Walsingham, which contains a different note. Nevertheless, the binary does portray rather in appealing features after a while, allowing the reader to become comfortable with living a middle-class life. This was important during Pushkin’s time at the turn of the 20th century, as many changes were taking place in Russia, and the importance of the middle class was not as apparent with the traditional folklore or stories of royalty. To conclude, Mary’s song holds an important role in the libretto by emphasizing a binary contrast of the context, and the extremes that many should avoid.

 

Unlike Mary and Mr. Walsingham, Louisa refuses to acknowledge that a bond exists between the living and the dead. As expressed by the thoughts and words of Louisa, it can be inferred that for a bond to be existing between the living and the dead, there has to be a clear mode of communication. Louisa perceives the dead “were muttering in some hideous, unknown language” (Mary, stanza 1, lines 4-5). What role does communication play in establishing a link between the worlds of the living and the dead? Is verbal communication necessarily the only means of establishing a link between the two realms? The foreignness of the language, as expressed by Louisa acts as a means of alienating the world of the living from the world of the dead. So, the dead living and communicating in their own world can interact with each other and the living can do the same. But, there exists no bridged mode of communication to the link the world of the living to the dead.

 

How does the theme of love blur the contrasts between the glorification of the individual or the society,as established by Pushkin? (Pgs. 185-6) The theme of love as presented through the relationship between Edmund and Mary provides the audience with more food for thought outside the ones already highlighted by Pushkin on page 182. Pushkin, from the start of the play, has demonstrated a stark contrast between the living and the dead, and the glorification of the sole individual as opposed to the glorification of the society. However, the love that exists between Mary (who’s alive but is frightful of the plague) and Edmund (her lover) proves that the living individual chooses to exit, not for their own self-glorification or revelry — like the attendants of the feast, but for the glorification of another individual.

 

Interestingly, the translator of the play, Nancy K. Anderson, calls the young man’s proposal to toast for Jackson, a dead member of the feast, a form of “ugly egotism”, that he, as a member of a community, only displays caring for the ones closest to him and not necessarily the entire society. And Nancy points that his egotism roots from the deepest fear that the young man has of his possibly imminent death. Yet, isn’t it justified for him to put his life first ahead of others’ in such situation? This poses a question on the effect of a plague on a society: if it seems that the human egotism to preserve their own selves is natural, is the crumbling of society, as commonly found in literary works that present plague, inevitable in the face of disasters?

 

In The King Oidipous and Journal of a Plague Year, there are agencies — Oidipous in the former and the government of London in the latter — that seem to be responsible for efforts in putting an end to the plague and preventing the communities from falling apart. It appears that the cure for the plague comes from these agencies: Oidipous being assassinated and the government exercising the policy of shutting up houses of the infected. Yet in Pushkin’s play, these agencies are ostensibly absent, and this absence is perhaps why the people channel their frustration for a seemingly endless plague by having the feast. We may say that Mr. Walsingham holds the authority in the microcosm he creates at the feast table, yet even his proposed solution is that of ignoring the reality rather than confronting it. When he is criticized by the priest for initiating the feast, he shows his unstable stance on the approach towards the plague. The absence of scapegoat to yell at (like Oidipous) or government to turn to is what fuels the chaos rather prominent in the play. Everyone is caught up in their inner conflicts, and the audience, who may or may not have experienced a plague creeping into their cities, can feel this. Like Mr. Walsingham, who is left with his own thoughts after the priest leaves, this play, leaves us, too, in contemplation.

— Odera, Dayin, Noora and Nada.

Bowing to the Greeks: “the Dead are killing the Living”

During our discussion in class we have briefly touched upon some of the apparent parallels that can be found between Ibsen’s Ghosts and Oedipus Rex. Pursuing this line of thought, I delved into the bowels of the internet and found some fascinating articles about Ibsen here.

 In Sophokles’ Oedipus Tyrannos, Oedipus defies the warning of his priest, Tiresias, and embarks on a quest for truth that ends in the devastating knowledge that he is the criminal he seeks, the unintentionally guilty destroyer of his own family.

In Ghosts Helene Alving defies her priest, Pastor Manders and embarks on a journey towards the truth that ends in the devastating knowledge that she is the unintentionally guilty destroyer of her family.

Another interesting issue brought by these essays is the temporal sequence of the play: how can it be that the play begins in the morning, is only interrupted by lunch, and yet somehow ends morning next day? This is

…a passage of at least sixteen hours. Yet the action of the play…is just two hours.  Even in the most laid-back Norwegian households, lunches don’t go on for fourteen hours.

How can this inform our reading of the play? What is Ibsen trying to convey with this impossibility? How is this similar to Oedipus’s journey of discovery that unfolds in a matter of a few hours? What are some of the deterministic elements present in Oedipus Rex and how do these translate to 19th century Norway?

On a different note, perhaps one of the most intriguing metamorphoses that a text can undergo is its adaptation through the movements of the human body, i.e. dance. Here is a trailer for Cathy Marston’s dance adaptation, filmed at the Royal Opera House, London.

Finally, here you can find a beautifully haunting interpretation of ghosts by a contemporary Italian sculptor, Livio Scapella.

Ps.: The quote of the title is from Aeschylus’ The Libation Bearers.