영어로 읽는 고전 _ 헨리크 입센의 유령
『유령』은 1881년에 쓰인 희곡이다. 이 문제작은 세상을 떠난 남편 ? 생전에 아내를 배신했던 인물 ? 을 기리는 고아원 헌정식을 앞둔 미망인 헬레네 알빙 부인의 이야기를 따라간다. 아들 오스발이 집으로 돌아오면서 오랫동안 묻혀 있던 가족의 비밀이 하나씩 떠오르고, 공들여 지켜온 체면의 외벽은 무너질 위기에 놓인다. 이 작품은 사회가 정한 도덕률에 순응한 대가가 얼마나 참혹할 수 있는지를 파고들며, 19세기 관객을 경악시킨 금기의 주제들을 정면으로 다루어 의무와 진실, 그리고 모성의 희생에 대한 통념에 도전한다.
Classics Read in English _ Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen
It is 1881, and Ibsen writes the play that will get him called obscene across half of Europe. Mrs Helen Alving is preparing to open an orphanage built in her late husband's name ? a monument to a man she has spent her adult life protecting the reputation of, and whose conduct she has never once been permitted to speak aloud. The building will absorb his money and, she hopes, the last of his memory. Then she will be free.
Her son Oswald comes home from Paris, and the past comes home with him. What has been buried does not stay buried: an old servant's parentage, a housemaid's resemblance to someone, an illness that has no name in polite conversation. Ibsen's cruellest stroke is that none of this is punishment for wrongdoing. Helen Alving did exactly what she was told to do ? she stayed, she endured, she preserved appearances, she sacrificed herself for duty ? and the play's argument is that the obedience itself is what destroyed her family. By the final scene, with the sun rising over the fjord and her son asking her for something no mother should be asked, Ibsen has made his point and offers no relief from it: the dead ideas we inherit and go on repeating are the ghosts, and they walk in every one of us.
Summary
REGINA. [In a low voice.] What do you want? Stop where you are. You're positively dripping.
ENGSTRAND. It's the Lord's own rain, my girl.
REGINA. It's the devil's rain, I say.
ENGSTRAND. Lord, how you talk, Regina. [Limps a step or two forward into the room.] It's just this as I wanted to say?
REGINA. Don't clatter so with that foot of yours, I tell you! The young master's asleep upstairs.
ENGSTRAND. Asleep? In the middle of the day?
REGINA. It's no business of yours.
ENGSTRAND. I was out on the loose last night?
REGINA. I can quite believe that.
