? The story of the play is that of a young man, who returns home from the bohemian life of an artist because he is suffering from a mysterious illness. He has been brought up abroad, and has always believed, as the world in general has believed, that his father was a pillar of the community. He begins to fall in love with his mother's maid.

? His mother is extremely alarmed when she realises what is happening. She is the only one who really knows what her dead husband was like, and she knows that he was in fact the father of the serving girl. There are parallels between her past history and the story of Nora in The Dollshouse; she too tried to leave her husband, though he was far more unpleasant than Nora's. She, however, was persuaded to return by the local church minister, with whom she had sought refuge. For the sake of her son, she spent the rest of her life covering up the tru

? Ghosts can also be seen as a play about family conflict, tracing out the interaction of parent and child, rather than a play concerned with physical inheritance: Much that Ibsen wrote about Oswald's illness reflected the attitudes of physicians of his day. Thus he suggested that its cause lay in the degeneration - or softening - of the brain as a result of the inheritance of disease from a profligate parent, and that its course would inevitably be a progressive decline to idiocy. Yet the essence of the play lies in the dramatic representation of the conflicts in the family triangle formed by Oswald and his mother and father.

? Completely unaware of how the other person thinks and responds, both characters act out a pattern of destructive responses in this scene. Regine, subjected in the past to a process of deliberate mystification by her mother, judges and condemns her father from a position of childhood fantasy. Engstrand, embittered and cynically hard-headed after his long years of suffering with Johanne, is totally incapable of understanding Regine's emotional sensitivity

? In more ways than one, Regine is like her mother, and as Engstrand begins to spell out the real nature of the deal he is proposing, his thoughts automatically return to Johanne. This in turn leads him into making what is meant to be a flattering comparison between Regine and her mother, who managed to do quite well for herself, according to the tale she told him, with some rich foreigner or other before Engstrand married her. Now this is a subject that presumably has only been mentioned before during Engstrand's drunken brawls with his wife and Regine has been taught, because of her partisan alignment with her mother, not to believe a word of it. In Regine's eyes, therefore, what Engstrand says is an unforgivable insult.

? Summoning up all her resentment, she insults him under her breath so that he shall not even properly hear what she says; significantly she picks on his club foot, his noisy, grotesque, clumping foot that her mother had so disliked. (In the next act Engstrand himself points to his gammy leg as one of the factors which made Johanne originally turn down his early proposals of marriage.) Even now Regine's rejection of her father, intended to be doubly insulting through being expressed in French, which Engstrand, as she well knows, is too vulgar and uneducated to understand, is conditioned, not so much by what is said and done in the present, but rather by the memory of what was said and done in Engstrand's household. Regine is still her mother's child and respo

Some common words found in the essay are:
Ibsen's Ghosts, Regine Engstrand, Johanne Regine, , Captain Alving, French Engstrand, Nora Dollshouse, Fortunately Engstrand, Philip Larkin's, ghosts seen play, regine mother, characters act pattern, ostensibly records, characters act, conflicts family, regine engstrand, ghosts seen, act pattern, family nexus, seen play,
Approximate Word count = 1737
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)