Summary
Act Three
It is still night in the same garden room. Mrs. Alving and Regina are standing together, stunned that the whole orphanage burned down. Mrs. Alving goes to look for Osvald and the Pastor comes in. He sighs to Regina that this is the most terrible night he’s lived through. He also begins to complain about Engstrand being after him to talk about something; then, Engstrand himself enters.
Gleefully and slyly, Engstrand states that it is a shame Pastor Manders is to blame for this, as he was the one responsible for the candles. He claims that he saw the Pastor take one, snuff the flame, and throw the wick into some shavings. The Pastor is uncertain and paces about in disbelief that he could have accidentally done something like that, even though he does not remember.
Engstrand continues, painting a picture of the press mistreating him. Mrs. Alving returns and says that Osvald will not be talked out of leaving the ruins. In a clipped tone, she says that maybe this is all for the best, and that the “Home” would not really have been that for anyone. She tells Manders, who is due to take the next steamer out, to take the papers so she can be done with it all. Engstrand jumps in and reminds the Pastor about the seamen’s home.
Pastor Manders begins to despair that he might have to resign because of the inquiry that will happen. Engstrand sidles up to him and says he will go with him because he cannot abandon his benefactor. In fact, he will take the blame for the fire if Manders will help him with the seamen’s home. Incredulous and grateful, Manders agrees.
The Pastor bids goodbye to Mrs. Alving. Engstrand tells Regina she’ll know where to find him; then, he announces to all that he plans to name his home “Captain Alving’s Home.” Manders and Engstrand exit.
Osvald returns and glumly says that Engstrand’s home will probably burn just like this one since nothing of Father’s memory gets to remain. He sits down, wet from the water used to extinguish the fire. Mrs. Alving fusses over him and asks if he wants to sleep; he fitfully says that he never sleeps anymore.
Regina asks if he is okay. Osvald simply calls for all the doors to be shut and begins to say how helpful Regina will be to him: she will give him a helping hand when he finally needs it. Confused, Mrs. Alving offers, but he smiles that she couldn’t do what he needs.
Mrs. Alving sighs, knowing that this is the moment to tell all. She begins by saying that she is going to relieve Osvald of a burden: his self-reproach and self-blame. She paints a picture of the Chamberlain, full of the joy of life. Osvald was born of this joy of life because his father could never find the outlet he needed, and Mrs. Alving never gave him the sunshine he needed either. She knew about duty, yes, but she did not make the house bearable for his father. She never wrote about it because she didn’t think it was proper to tell Osvald that his father was a broken man before he was born. Finally, she implies that Regina belongs here in this house just the same as he does.
The two young people are shocked as recognition dawns. Regina immediately asks for permission to leave, and Mrs. Alving sadly obliges. Regina claims boldly that she’s got her youth and also the joy of life and has to see to that now. She cannot stay with a sick man—and, now that she knows the truth, she definitely has to leave. She complains that she should have been brought up as a gentleman’s daughter, not subserviently. Mrs. Alving suggests that she is welcome to stay, but Regina waves her away and says that she can turn to Manders or another house (implying her father’s) where she knows she will always be welcome. Mrs. Alving shakes her head that Regina is heading for disaster, but Regina does not care and leaves.
Osvald shares his feelings about what he’s learned about his father, saying simply that it’s a surprise but it doesn’t much matter to him. All he remembers about his father is that he made him throw up. It is an old superstition that a child has to love their parent no matter what. He even suggests that he doesn’t love his mother, but that he does at least know her and how much she cares for him.
Mrs. Alving moans that she will try to make him love her, but he dismisses her, saying that he has no time to think about others. She assures him that she will be patient and calm. Osvald is comforted a bit, but he asks who will take away the dread. Mrs. Alving does not understand.
Osvald then asks if it is late, and Mrs. Alving replies that it is early morning, it looks to be a clear day, and he will be able to see the sun. He rallies a bit, saying that there can be things to live for even if he can’t work. He will feel better when he gets through the next thing too, and then the sun will rise and he will not have the dread.
Mrs. Alving asks what he means. He asks her if she really meant she’d do anything at all for him, and she says "Of course." He tries to prepare her, asking her not to react irrationally or emotionally. She agrees. He then says that his being tired and not working are the symptoms, not the illness. The illness is his inheritance from his father and it is in his brain; it is ready to break out at any time. This stuns her, but he presses on. He says that he had one attack and it subsided, but he dreads another. He is revolted, but it’s not that he is afraid of dying—rather, he hates the idea of being a helpless child, to have to be fed and have other things done for him.
Mrs. Alving interjects to say that she can care for him, but he swiftly leaps up and says he does not want that. He cannot fathom the idea of being a vegetable and just lying there. It is a softening of the brain and will not be fatal right away, but his next attack will probably put him beyond hope. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out what he identifies as morphine powder tablets.
Mrs. Alving cannot contain her horror, but her son presses on. He knows that if Regina had seen him like that, she would have helped him; now, however, she is gone, so his mother must give him a helping hand instead. She shakes her head, wondering how someone who gave him life could take it from him. He retorts that he did not ask for life and does not want it.
In a frenzy now, Mrs. Alving leaves the room, claiming that she will go to the doctor. Osvald begs her to accept that she would not want to see him this way. Finally, she turns to him, gives him her hand, and says she’ll do it if necessary, but she is convinced it won’t be necessary. He thanks her sadly and says that he hopes it won’t.
Osvald sits in the armchair in front of the window, his back turned to the outside. The lamp is still lit. but the day is beginning to break. His mother bends over him, telling him that he will be fine, that he will get better, that it is a beautiful day with brilliant sunshine, and that he can finally see his home. She puts out the lamp and admires the view.
In a dull tone, Osvald says that he wants to see the sun, repeating the words again and again. In terror, Mrs. Alving looks at him. His muscles are slack, his face expressionless. She screams, shakes him, and tells him to look at her. He simply repeats “the sun” over and over again.
She tears her hair and screams that this is unbearable, then she fumbles for the pills. She whispers "no" and "yes" to herself. She steps closer and stares at him. He repeats “the sun” twice more.
Analysis
All the “ghosts” alluded to in the prior acts reveal themselves by the end of the play, manifesting themselves in both tragedy and farce. Engstrand, true to his devilish nature, manipulates Manders and most likely Regina into doing what he wants them to do; Regina strikes out on her own, most likely headed to ruin; Manders, ever concerned with his reputation, ends up unwittingly supporting a brothel.
The real tragedy, though, is what happens to Osvald and Mrs. Alving. He loses everything, and, right when he thinks with a modicum of hope that there might be something to live for, his mind breaks. She has to tell her son the truth about his sickness, destroy the myth of his father that she’d been cultivating, learn that Osvald doesn’t even really love her very much, see him fall into obsolescence, and then grapple with whether or not to ease his suffering by administering him morphine.
Looking more deeply at Mrs. Alving, it is clear that she has spent her life in a state of silence and repression. She did not want to marry Alving but she did, repressing her own desires, and she then spent the rest of her life rejecting him and everything he stood for. Her son turned out to be just like his father, but as she started to come to terms with the fact that Osvald and her own (via the books she’d read) progressive ideas and espousal of the “joy of life” were perhaps worth lauding and even emulating, the legacies of she and her husband’s bad decisions reared their heads. Though she may have been at the point where she was wondering if she had done wrong in treating her husband as she did, hearing what has happened to Osvald precludes her from moving further into this conviction. She descends back into denial. As Joan Templeton writes, “All [Osvald’s] complaints of headaches, fatigue, and even attacks and near collapses only strengthen her powers of denial. Her consistent refusal to listen to her desperate son shows the force of her determination to succeed in her thirty-year campaign to think one life and live another.”
Ibsen’s sun/fire/light imagery comes to its apotheosis in this last act. In the transition from dark to light, Osvald reveals the truth about himself and Mrs. Alving does as well. The orphanage’s burning destroyed earlier illusions and hopes, and in its ashes, there is the potential for rebirth—or for continued desiccation. When the sun rises at the end of the play and Mrs. Alving extinguishes her paltry lamp, the reality of what has happened to Osvald and her household is clear and undeniable. Errol Durbach describes the scene thusly: “the denouement is essentially ambiguous in tone and vision, a revelation of tragedy as the paradoxical co-existence of exhilaration and catastrophe: the brilliant light of the sun and the desolation it reveals, the affirmation of an experience simultaneously creative and destructive.” Evert Sprinchorn deems it the “pagan sun of pleasure,” not the “sun of enlightenment,” whereas Robert Corrigan claims that “For Mrs. Alving the sun has risen and just as she cannot give Osvald the sun, so the light of the sun has not been able to enlighten her.” She still fumbles with the pills and does not want to administer them to her son, even though she should. The sunrise in this modern tragedy does not hold joy: rather, it is a “sunrise of futility” that “sheds its rays as an ironic and bitter joke on a demented boy asking his equally helpless mother: ‘Mother, give me the sun, The sun—the sun!’”
We want to believe that, in the light, “she will affirm the image that she has of herself as a liberated human being by an action that is expressive of that freedom, even if that action is the murder of her own son. We want to feel that the light and heat of the sun will have the power to cauterize the ghosts of her soul. But if we have been paying attention to the developing action…then we realize that there can be no resolution.” The power of ghosts, heredity, and the past is too strong.
