“The Great Imitator”: Staging Syphilis in A Doll House and Ghosts

While critical attention has focused on Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts and its controversial reception at its various European premieres, little attention has been paid to Ibsen’s use of syphilis or to the challenge that Ghosts and A Doll House pose for late-nineteenth-century theories of venereal disease. Reading these plays against contemporary medical literature, this essay argues that, rather than settling for a comforting conservatism (those who acquire syphilis have somehow deserved it), Ibsen, instead, condemns the constraining social practices that have led to its spread. By exploiting syphilis’s symptomatic confusion – it can imitate a host of other diseases – and introducing an aetiological conundrum, Ibsen does not condemn a sole person or a single circumstance but, instead, implicates a myriad of restrictive beliefs and customs; not least, the deleterious and condemnatory assumptions surrounding the disease itself. He may even intend Ghosts to function prophylactically. Far from desiring to contaminate spectators, Ibsen stages syphilis in order to protect audiences from more harmful societal ills.