Ghosts: Act Two Summary & Analysis

Now that Oswald’s romantic feelings for Regine have come to Mrs. Alving’s attention, she has to deal once again with the repercussions of Captain Alving’s behavior. In this way, then, Ibsen demonstrates the ways in which the past keeps rearing its head in Mrs. Alving’s life. In addition, Engstrand’s willingness to take the blame for impregnating Johanna aligns with his opportunistic nature, supporting the idea that he is constantly looking for ways to get ahead—even (or perhaps especially) in unfortunate situations.

Ibsen complicates Mrs. Alving and Pastor Manders’s dynamic by introducing the idea that Mrs. Alving once loved the pastor. Of course, Manders claims that he never picked up on this when she ran away from Captain Alving, but it’s unclear whether or not this is true, since this is most likely what he’d say even if he did recognize that Mrs. Alving had feelings for him. After all, if he knew that she loved him, he would certainly feel even more compelled to uphold his priestly duty to tell her to return to her husband, since he wouldn’t want anyone to think that he had failed to do so based on her fondness of him. In contrast, Mrs. Alving disparages society’s obsession with duty and obligation, perhaps believing that this is exactly what kept Pastor Manders from responding to her affection.

Yet again, Pastor Manders shows his dedication to traditional ideas about familial relationships, this time saying that Oswald should continue to look up to the memory of this father even though that image of Captain Alving is inaccurate. Whereas he chastised Mrs. Alving earlier for being a bad mother, now he reassures her by saying that she was right not to tell her son about Captain Alving’s wicked ways. However, Mrs. Alving has decided that she wants to tell Oswald because she thinks it’s the right thing to do. In turn, audience members see that Mrs. Alving’s ideas about right and wrong have to do with real-life circumstances, whereas Pastor Manders’s morals are based on abstract ideas regarding what’s proper. 

Although Mrs. Alving’s ideas about ghosts and the past are largely about the ways in which the things her husband did continue to haunt her, she also uses the metaphor to address the fact that old belief systems often encroach upon her life—as evidenced by Pastor Manders’s overbearing manner of judging her. When Pastor Manders turned her away and urged her to return to her husband, he emphasized the importance of adhering to society’s customs surrounding marital loyalty. Consequently, Mrs. Alving decided to reexamine the very framework that gave birth to these customs, which is ultimately what led her to take such a dim view of Pastor Manders’s system of belief and the way it shapes society.   

Pastor Manders is capable of willfully forgetting his past because he can turn to his faith, using it as a way to reassure himself that he was right to deny his love for Mrs. Alving. She, on the other hand, doesn’t believe in the outdated ideas that keep Manders from following his heart, which is why these ideas haunt her. In other words, she believes that Manders’s reasons for denying her are trivial, and this makes it even harder for her to cope with the fact that she endured a miserable life with Captain Alving simply because Manders told her to.

In this exchange between Engstrand and Manders, the audience sees how skillful Engstrand is at getting people to side with him. Although Manders is angry at him for lying, Engstrand manages to frame himself as a selfless and morally upstanding man, thereby exhibiting his talent for presenting himself in a flattering light regardless of the circumstances.

Once again, Engstrand attempts to manipulate another person into feeling sorry for him, this time using his injured leg to gain sympathy from Pastor Manders. As he delivers an unlikely story about how he got this injury, he convinces Pastor Manders that he’s a good man who took in Johanna and Regine out of the kindness of his heart.

It’s hard to believe that Engstrand really put all of the money he received for marrying Johanna toward Regine’s education, considering that Regine’s only education has been in Mrs. Alving’s house—an experience that clearly hasn’t cost her any money, since it’s not actually a formal education. On another note, Manders demonstrates his naivety when he says that he’ll consider funding Engstrand’s hotel, since it’s rather obvious that the hotel will be nothing but a glorified brothel. Nonetheless, his failure to recognize this aligns with his tendency to judge people from afar, never bothering to look beyond the surface to examine a person’s true character.

The notion that Oswald has been “worm-eaten” since birth suggests that his illness is out of his control, something that would have come upon him no matter what he did. This, in turn, aligns with Mrs. Alving’s ideas about ghosts and inheritance, since she believes that there are certain things a person simply cannot outrun. In this sense, then, Oswald’s sickness can be seen as something he inherited, though Ibsen doesn’t yet reveal what the illness is or why, exactly, it has doomed Oswald since the very moment he entered the world.

Nobody in Ghosts ever directly states it, but audiences during Ibsen’s time would have recognized that Oswald is suffering from syphilis. Most scholars note that although a son cannot biologically inherit syphilis from a father, this is nevertheless what seems to happen in the play. However, Oswald still believes that his father was a good and morally upstanding man, so he doesn’t understand how he could have possibly inherited his disease. Left with no other explanation, then, he blames himself, believing that his lifestyle—which he previously told Pastor Manders is quite pure and innocent—has led to his illness. In turn, the audience sees how Captain Alving’s behavior continues to affect his loved ones, as Oswald not only suffers from syphilis because of him, but also tears himself apart for having contracted the disease.

Mrs. Alving has to face her husband’s ghost once again when she realizes that her son has inherited his syphilis. It remains unclear whether the disease was actually passed on biologically, but even if it wasn’t, it could still be that Oswald contracted it through risky sexual behavior of the same kind his father once indulged in. Furthermore, she also has to face the consequences of her husband’s decisions when she considers Oswald’s newfound fondness for Regine, Captain Alving’s illegitimate daughter (and Oswald’s half-sister). Consequently, the audience sees how utterly incapable Mrs. Alving is of escaping her wretched husband’s influence, which becomes increasingly impossible to ignore. 

Oswald’s belief that nobody in his hometown knows how to be happy shows his mother that he has never coveted the way she or her husband lived. This, in turn, gives her the freedom to tell him the truth about Captain Alving, finally seeing that she won’t hurt the boy too much by telling him how wretched his father was—after all, it’s clear that Oswald doesn’t want to follow in Captain Alving’s footsteps anyway. For a moment, then, she feels for the first time that she might be able to help Oswald from inevitably going down the same path as his father, thereby stopping the past from repeating itself.

Yet again, Pastor Manders emerges as a critical, judgmental, and emotionally insensitive voice. Rather than taking pity on Mrs. Alving, his first reaction to the orphanage going up in flames is to blame her, once more trying to argue that her failure to lead a conventional and religious life is the source of all her troubles.