As we transition from Ibsen to Porter, let’s take a moment to remember poor Oswald, slipping into unconsciousness just as the cold, cold Norwegian daylight finally comes streaming through that window. The ending of Ibsen’s play resonates with the final lines of Porter’s story: No more war, no more plague, only the dazed silence that […]
Read More →Archive for October, 2019
Ibsen and Eyre
We encountered Richard Eyre’s revival of Ibsen’s Ghosts in a clip we watched in class to start our discussion of the play. It also came up in a post from earlier this week, “Can you see my ghosts?”, which draws from an interview with Eyre. Thinking about this 2013 version, being screened over a century […]
Read More →Bound in the past, loom of the future
Ibsen’s Ghosts is a dramatic play that centers around the theme of family and inheritance. There are also other themes such as the role of women, power, and hierarchy that are present throughout the play, and all these themes are presented to the audience through the drama of the Alving family and their interactions with […]
Read More →The Sins of the Father…
In this play, one of the most present themes throughout the novel is how the mistakes and beliefs of the parents are passed on to the children. In other words, as the Biblical saying says, “the sins of the father will be visited among the children”. Moreover, besides these abstract inheritances, Oswald’s syphilis is assumed […]
Read More →Can you see my ghosts?
Richard Eyre was the director of Ibsen’s Ghosts at the BAM Harvey Theater in 2015. In this interview he is asked “Why do people have to write plays which are so sad?” He answers that “that is what art is about… perceiving pieces of the world that can’t be put together in any other way.” He is touching […]
Read More →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 […]
Read More →Seeing is believing
In The Ghost Map, Johnson mentions how even highly respected doctors and other intellectuals were prone to the miasma theory, rarely challenging the notion that cholera was directly caused by the polluted air in a space or the stench of sewage that consumed London. The insistence on this theory was a result of the sway […]
Read More →The Urban Dialectic
Johnson, in the beginning pages of the book, presents us with several different accounts of the cholera outbreak, each building on the changes the other has led to. He talks of institutional changes in London politics as prices for nightsoil-men services has gone up; he mentions how such changes led to cesspools being clogged, and […]
Read More →A Triptych of Unfortunate Events
Early on in the book, Johnson takes his time to explain the significance of toshers during the Victorian era – specifically the ‘night-soil men’. In those times, cities such as London did not have a formal system for waste management or recycling, and one of the biggest problems Victorian Londoners faced was human waste. With […]
Read More →Absorption
Johnson’s book evolves much like the bacteria he describes within it. Every chapter brings forth new elements, incorporating a multitude of macro-level and micro-level components which seem to build off one another in a fascinating way. The author’s “bird’s-eye view” of storytelling is enthralling. One cannot get much further than the next page before being […]
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