Unsyphilised behaviour

摘要

It is said by his most important biographer that after he reached middle age Henrilc Ibsen (1828-1906), the great Norwegian playwright, never read anything other than the Bible and newspapers. It did his plays no harm. He wrote Ghosts in 1881. The plot turns on what was then called hereditary syphilis. Oswald, son of Mrs Alving, returns from Paris, where he has lived for some years as an artist in Bohemian circles. He has been told by a great specialist there that he has that dread disease; and it emerges that he contracted it from his father, the now dead Captain Alving (who clearly died from neurosyphilitic dementia), who lived a secret dissipated life but was regarded as a pillar of the respectable community. The whole play is an attack on bourgeois hypocrisy and pharisaism, of which hereditary syphilis is only a symbol.