Henrik Ibsen – Ghosts

• Theme: Legacy, hidden transgressions, the trauma of moral hypocrisy.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

In Ghosts, Ibsen doesn’t just critique religion, marriage, and bourgeois morality—he forensically dissects the ethical decay that emerges when personal life is overcoded by what Foucault calls “the moral apparatus of sexuality.” The ghostly forces in the play are not supernatural—they are discursive structures: guilt, law, inheritance, and the silences constructed by Victorian sexual morality.

Mrs. Alving, the central figure, is a woman who attempted to break from convention but was repeatedly reabsorbed by it. She married out of duty, concealed her husband’s debauchery, and sacrificed her desires at the altar of social respectability. She confesses that her efforts to protect her son, Oswald, were all acts of preservation of appearance, of upholding moral ideology—mirroring what Foucault describes as subjectivation through external ethical codes rather than care of the self.

The title Ghosts refers to what Foucault names in The Use of Pleasure as “the internalization of ethical injunctions”—the inheritance not just of disease (Oswald’s syphilis), but of modes of thinking, feeling, and acting. “We are all so pitifully afraid of the light,” Mrs. Alving says. This is Foucault’s epistemic darkness—when individuals are unable to articulate or pursue their own truth because social morality has foreclosed alternative ethical possibilities.

What Oswald inherits is not merely a sickness, but a bio-political destiny—a life foreordained by patriarchal sin and maternal concealment. This determinism reflects the genealogical logic that Foucault critiques: society’s insistence that the sins of the fathers are inscribed in the flesh of their children, not just biologically, but ethically.

Oswald’s final cry for “The sun! The sun!” is not merely poetic—it’s a final appeal for clarity, for the truth that never arrived. It embodies Foucault’s understanding of truth-telling as a form of resistance—but in this play, resistance fails. The care of the self was never enacted; the characters never broke free from their moral scripts. They are specters, not of death, but of unlived life.

Ghosts thus offers a philosophical tragedy of unsubjected lives: lives bound to obsolete norms, suffocated by inherited duties, unable to make ethical ruptures. For Foucault, ethics is not about conformity—it is about freedom through transformation. Ibsen’s characters are what happens when this transformation is denied.