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Sophocles, Hegel and Ibsen

A Perspective on A Doll’s House, Ghosts and An Enemy of the People
by Helge Salemonsen

X. The Instruments of the Dead

      In the second drama of The Oresteia (The Libation-Bearers) Aeschylus lets Clytaemnestra be haunted by ominous dreams. Actually, it is Agamemnon who haunts her, her husband whom she has murdered. That is why she sends her daughter Electra to bear libations to his tomb, to placate his angry ghost, to calm his wrath, to keep him in his grave and to leave her house in peace. Electra pours out the libations and invokes the dead. But instead of praying for reconciliation for her mother, she curses her and implores revenge:

But for our foes I implore that there appear one who will avenge thee, father, and that thy slayer may be slain in just retribution. (Aeschylus 1999: 142 -144)

      Hiding by the grave stands Orestes, Electra’s brother. When Orestes was still a child, Clytaemnestra sent him away to the king of Phocis, to secure an ampler scope for herself and her lover Aegisthus. Now the hunger for revenge had brought Orestes home. “The dead, whose right is denied, knows therefore how to find instruments of vengeance,” Hegel writes, “which are equally effective and powerful as the power which injured it.”

      Like Orestes, Osvald is also a son who has returned to his mother’s house, and like Orestes he casts misfortune over his mother when he comes. But here all parallels end? Since one scarcely can maintain that Osvald has returned to be his father’s avenger? No, at least not to his knowledge, we must admit. What was there for him to revenge? But still, the dead Alving might have “found an instrument” in Osvald. The dead strike back.

      In the first act we are being presented with a quite one-sided picture of Osvald’s father, the picture of the depraved chamberlain. But all of a sudden another image of her husband awakens in Mrs. Alving, not of the dissolute chamberlain, but of the young lieutenant Alving whom she had married. Osvald’s deep sigh, his description of the sombreness, the lack of happiness in her house, the heavy burden of obligations that rested upon her home, had awakened the memory of a different Mr.Alving, the image of the healthy, strapping, free-spirited, life-seeking young lieutenant Alving, that had gradually withered as the depraved chamberlain grew:

Mrs. Alving: You were speaking earlier about the joy of life; and as you said those words, it was as if a new light had been shed over the whole of my life. Osvald: I don’t understand this. Mrs. Alving: You should have known your father when he was just a young lieutenant. He had the joy of life, he did! Osvald: Yes, I know. Mrs. Alving: It was like holiday just to look at him. All the energy, the unquenchable power that was in him!

      We are witnessing a quite surprising anagnorisis, a sudden acknowledgement of guilt by Mrs. Alving concerning her husband. She had contributed to his fall, empowered by the claustrophobic, gloomy and suffocating moralism that permeated herself, her home and the very culture and society she lived in. Moralism dries out the source of motivation – the vigour, the candour, the courage, the joy of life:

Mrs. Alving: You said yourself, earlier this evening, what would happen to you if you stayed at home. Osvald: You’re saying that Father-? Mrs. Alving: Your father never found any outlet for the overpowering joy of life that he had. And I’m afraid I couldn’t make his home very festive, either. Osvald: You, too? Mrs. Alving: They’d drilled me so much in duty and things of that kind that I went on here all too long putting my faith in them. Everything resolved into duties – my duties, and his duties, an – I’m afraid I made this home unbearable for your poor father.

      Mrs. Alving’s sudden recognition of guilt, her self-reproach, her rehabilitation of the husband, has provoked many readers. But who is she rehabilitating? The miserable chamberlain? No, he remains what he was: responsible for his own misery. It is the young lieutenant Alving she has qualms about: “I only saw the one thing: that your father was a ravaged man before you were born.” In fact Mrs. Alving acknowledges a murder – not in the physical sense of course, but in a spiritual one. She sees herself as an accomplice in suffocating her young lieutenant’s joy of life. One may feel that Mrs. Alving is unjust towards herself.  In any case, this is her newly won self-understanding.

      Pastor Manders has arrived to the manor to inaugurate the new building, the orphanage that would carry Alving’s name – Captain Alving’s Memorial. The initiative has three functions 1: The charity institution shall once and for all confirm the impression of Osvald’s father as a noble an admirable man, and 2: All remaining ties between Osvald and his father shall finally be broken. His paternal inheritance, all the chamberlain’s money had been put into the building of this orphanage, and 3. The building is to have a kind of exorcising function, to cleanse her house from the ghost of her husband – figuratively speaking: Remain in your grave! Bother us no more! Which, as Brian Johnston points out gives interesting references to The Libation-Bearers:

 Mrs. Alving: After tomorrow [the scheduled date for the inauguration], it will really seem as if the dead had never lived in this house. There’ll be no one else here but my son and me

      Her exorcising project did not succeed. The building burns down before the inauguration. And her house is haunted like never before by the ghosts of her husband – incarnated both in Osvald, Regina and herself. As we know Clytaimnestra did not succeed either – to placate the angry ghost. Dead Agamemnon found his “instruments of vengeance” [Electra and Orestes], equally effective and powerful as the power [Clytaemnestra] which injured him”. Brian Johnston comments:

In The Libation Bearers […] Clytaemnestra attempts to appease the shade of the husband she has wronged by a ceremony at his grave, at the same moment that Agamemnon’s son returns home to avenge him, and Ghosts shows us Helene [Mrs. Alving] preparing the memorial ceremony that will finally dispose of Mr. Alving, at the same moment that Alving’s son returns carrying the disease that is the terrible vengeance of Alving's repressed joy of life or sexuality against his wife. To be sure, Osvald’s avenging of his father (in which, like Orestes, he will also be a victim) is more unconscious and unintentional than that of his Greek prototype, but it will, similarly, destroy his mother and bring upon himself the furies of his spiritual collapse. (Johnston 1992: 198)

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