ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality,
but they cling to us all the same, and we can't get rid of them.
. . . There must be Ghosts all the country over, as thick as the
sand of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid
of the light. . . . When you forced me under the yoke you called
Duty and Obligation; when you praised as right and proper what
my whole soul rebelled against, as something loathsome. It was
then that I began to look into the seams of your doctrine. I only
wished to pick at a single knot; but when I had got that undone,
the whole thing raveled out. And then I understood that it was
all machine-sewn. . . . It was a crime against us both.
Indeed, a crime on which the sacred institution is built, and for which thousands of innocent children must pay with their happiness and life, while their mothers continue to the very end without ever learning how hideously criminal their life is.
Not so Mrs. Alving who, though at a terrible price, works
herself out to the truth; aye, even to the height of understanding
the dissolute life of the father of her child, who had lived in
cramped provincial surroundings, and could find no purpose in
life, no outlet for his exuberance. It is through her child, through
Oswald, that all this becomes illumed to her.
Oswald. Ah, the joy of life, mother; that's
a thing you don't know much about in these parts. I have never felt it here. . . . And then, too, the joy of work.
