Helene Alving in Sodom and Gomorrah

[Gladys]

In struggling to get an overview of 'Ghosts', I realised that Mrs. Alving is the only character who behaves throughout with integrity, who does her duty, in this latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah.

Captain Alving and Pastor Manders, idealists as young men, soon become tainted like other corrupt and dissolute 'pillars of society'. The drunkard Engstrand and his wife, Johanna, live a lie. On returning from Paris, Oswald is worn down by living in this joyless and wicked society. Regine loses hope and will drown like her father before her.

Genesis 19:24____Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven;

Finally fire and brimstone begins to fall as it did on those two 'cities of the plain': the orphanage is gone and Manders and Engstrand with it. Young Oswald and Regine have fallen into despair like their common father. The lone survivor of the conflagration is Mrs. Alving - the one righteous person.

Oswald. Everything will be burned up; nothing will be left that is in memory of my father. Here am I being burned up, too.

(REGINA looks at him [her half brother] in alarm.)

If all this isn't bad enough, the righteous Mrs Alving has one last and terrible burden to bear. She, like Abraham, is asked to sacrifice her only son, her one hope for the future.

Genesis 22:2____And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering...

But will the angel of the LORD also call unto Helene out of heaven, saying, "Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him"?

[Gladys]

With this epithet the spokesmen of the people - the 'pillars of society', the democrats - label Dr. Peter Stockmann in "An Enemy of the People", a play written (in a few weeks!) soon after the crushing reviews of 'Ghosts'. Dr. Stockmann, a scientist and man of integrity, is isolated and vilified for voicing the truth about contaminated tourist baths in the town. "An Enemy of the People" is the only Ibsen play impossible to misconstrue.

Helene Alving is a subtle and muted version of that blatant witness to the truth, the persecuted Dr. Stockmann. I suspect Ibsen saw her as the righteous person, standing alone, resisting iniquity like Abraham, Lot and Noah of the Genesis narrative. So Pastor Manders in Act I vilifies Mrs Alving.

Manders. You have been overmastered all your life by a disastrous spirit of wilfulness. All your impulses have led you towards what is undisciplined and lawless. You have never been willing to submit to any restraint. Anything in life that has seemed irksome to you, you have thrown aside recklessly and unscrupulously, as if it were a burden that you were free to rid yourself of if you would. It did not please you to be a wife any longer, and so you left your husband. Your duties as a mother were irksome to you, so you sent your child away among strangers.

Mrs. Alving. Yes, that is true; I did that.

Ibsen was ever a scathing critic of the hypocrisy of society in Norway, but in 'Ghosts' his critique is extreme.