"The spirit of rebellion makes us seek happiness here in this life; that's precisely its aim. But what claim have we human beings to happiness? No, Mrs. Alving, we must do our duty!"
Happiness plays a significant role in the life of human beings, but one character of Ibsen’s play considers that a person doesn’t have a right to be happy. As Manders says, life is given to people to do their duty. But what is a life without the pursuit of happiness? Yes, Ibsen contends, people must do their duty; however, when duty completely supplants happiness, it is no longer worth pursuing. The Manders way of life is much more deadening, ironically, than the Osvald/Captain Alving one is.
"Yes—law and order. I often think they cause all the misery in the world."
Every person desires order in society—they dream to live without wars, pain, famine, suffering, and inequality—yet this is almost impossible. Here, Mrs. Alving suggests that law and order are at fault for these. At their worst, these well-intentioned forces can be stultifying, mindlessly conformist, and lacking in meaning. When Mrs. Alving says this is, it is a bit ironic since she represents both of those things—but, to her credit, she is trying to push the boundaries in her mind as to how one should live their life.
"When Osvald came through that door there with a pipe in his mouth, it was as if I saw his father alive again."
"Really?"
"How can you say that? Osvald takes after me."
Mrs. Alving is shocked and annoyed to hear Manders proclaim that Osvald looks like his father. After all, she has worked assiduously to separate the two, making sure that Osvald inherits nothing from his father and everything from her. But the play suggests that this is futile: the sins of the father haunt the son. In this case, Osvald not only looks like his father but also acts like his father. He inherits his father's disease in both the literal and symbolic sense. He does not want to be confined, but he wants to live the life of an artist—to live filled with the "joy of life." This quote also reveals Mrs. Alving's impressive, albeit problematic, ability to ignore things she doesn't want to acknowledge.
"Your longings have drawn you toward everything undisciplined and lawless."
Manders's characterization of Mrs. Alving reveals more about him than about her. It is almost laughable to hear him describe this uptight, bourgeois, conforming, duty-bound woman as reckless and lawless. Yes, she left her marriage in the first year, but that was because she found Captain Alving distasteful and debauched—she returned to him and remained married to him for the rest of his life. She endeavored to present a face of respectability for herself and the family, and, despite the books she reads, she never really embraces a modern way of looking at life. So what we really see here is Manders desperately trying to keep people's behavior within the confines of Christian norms so as to not have his parishioners' behavior reflect poorly upon him. He derives pleasure from making sure that others do not sin and, when they do, pointing out these sins, judging them, and suggesting his ideas for remedying them.
"Let's not talk abstractions. Let's ask: Should Osvald love and honor Chamberlain Alving?"
This is a question over which Mrs. Alving and Manders argue. Some critics, however, ask another pointed question: How is it that no one is asking if Mrs. Alving has to love and honor her husband? Regardless of whether or not Captain Alving's way of living is viewed as problematic—and it is possible to argue he is a victim, and that Mrs. Alving should have been more open-minded and less prudish—he is clearly not the person she wanted to marry, and he did not make her happy. He behaved in a way that disgusted her and made their marriage loathsome, yet according to patriarchal, religious, and general norms, she is supposed to remain loyal, faithful, and perhaps even loving to him. She is trapped in the gender role prescribed to her, and even though she considers herself a modern woman, she cannot see fit to try to break out of it.
"It's not just what we inherit from our fathers and mothers that walks again in us—it's all sorts of old ideas and dead beliefs and things like that."
These are some of the most famous lines in the play because they articulate the central thesis that humans are plagued by the past and have a difficult time excising those ghosts from their lives. What was once dead now walks again, but it does so in a more insidious way than traditional haunts: a person doesn't often know that the choices they are making stem from the ghosts that surround and fill them rather than from their own will. Ibsen's characters are victims of these ghosts, inheriting and passing down an undesirable heritage.
