Ibsen and the power of “vermoulu”
Note to the reader: This article contains spoilers, so if you haven’t read “Ghosts” by Henrik Ibsen you might consider coming back after you have. The play is really worth it.
How often are we aware that we are missing context? How often do we pause to ask ourselves if we are missing it? “Ibsen and the power of vermoulu” started as a reflection on this exact topic.
When I first read “Ghosts” I was deeply puzzled and at some point, felt like I got played all along. But it was not Ibsen’s fault. The issue was that I was reading it 136 years later, with zero knowledge of the historical context. There is so much subtext and metaphor in the play, that no reader of the 21st-century could ever possibly grasp all its subtleties by only reading the play by itself. I knew about “Ghosts” beforehand that it was very controversial at the time (in 1881) and people were harsh in their criticism of it. Nobody wanted to put it on stage, and as a result of the public’s reaction, Ibsen wrote “An Enemy of the People”. That sounded rather intense to me.
However, while reading it, I constantly wondered which part could have offended public opinion so deeply. Oswald’s proposal to Regina? Half-brothers marrying? That didn’t seem shocking enough. I felt I was missing something. But luckily I found the answer online. Turns out, the play had tons of references to congenital syphilis and I had missed them all. How did I not think of an STD while reading it? So I went back to the scene where Oswald tells his mother (Mrs Alving) what the doctor had told him: ““You have been more or less riddled from your birth.” The actual word he used was “vermoulu”.“. To be honest, it didn't make much more sense either. And then he said how the doctor finally explained it to him: “The sins of the fathers are visited on the children”. Imagine going to the doctor and getting that as your final diagnosis. So, it was clear that he had inherited something from his father, but I couldn’t figure out what. Until I found an online article: “Congenital neurosyphilis as portrayed in Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts” [1] which called the disease by its name. It seems that when Ibsen wrote the play, the disease was widespread, venereal diseases were taboo (obviously) and the general symptoms Oswald presented were typical for the contemporary understanding of syphilis (Treponema pallidum, the culprit bacterium for the disease, was first discovered in 1905 by Fritz Schaudinn and Erich Hoffmann at the Charité Berlin [2] and the mechanisms of infection were not fully understood). Reading that article felt like traveling back in time. What an eye-opener. I would've liked the play either way for the characters, the dialogue and the topics that it addresses (we’ll get to that later on), but I most certainly couldn’t have fully appreciated it without knowing the context.
It made me think that, no matter how hard we try to grasp the meaning of something, there is always some form of ignorance historical, contextual, or otherwise that can alter our understanding or appreciation of things.
Now, going back to some other topics that Ibsen addresses in “Ghosts”: marriage and fidelity, and women’s role in society. If you’ve heard about Ibsen, it was probably thanks to “A Doll’s House” and “Hedda Gabler”. These are the plays that I’ve seen staged the most in theatres since I became interested in theatre, and a quick google search reflected that they are probably the best known too. I fell in love with Ibsen because it seemed amazing to me that a man would portray women’s condition in his work as much as he did and in the way that he did. He gave women a voice when they didn’t have one. And sometimes, when I think of women’s history and the collective, generational trauma that we carry (which is a topic that I want to explore more in future posts) and argue to myself that the men of the past didn’t know better, the devil’s advocate steps in and whispers “but there was Henrik Ibsen in the 19th century” (and he was not the only one). Ibsen was not afraid to create male characters that reflected the general male’s view of women (sadly, little has changed since the 19th century). From Engstrand’s plans for Regina, to Pastor Manders’s vomited ideas of a wife’s duty, (which revolted me the most when I first read the play), to Oswald’s selfishness and sudden infatuation with Regina (which I found, reading the play now recently, the most repulsive). He wanted to marry her while keeping away from her that he was sick, because he saw her as his salvation and the only way to feel alive in his dying process…Also, he wanted to have her around just in case the disease got too terrible for him and needed someone to give him morphine. I suppose, I had more compassion for him the first time I read the play.
For me, the beauty and the essence of “Ghosts” is Mrs Alving. Not only does she connect all the other characters with each other, but she is the one who takes things to an introspective level. I relished how she kept her composure when the pastor started his tirade, how elegantly she responded and how he sheepishly changed his tone afterwards. And then there is the eeriness of this passage: “I’m haunted by ghosts […]. But I’m inclined to think that we’re all ghosts, Pastor Manders; it’s not only the things that we’ve inherited from our fathers and mothers that live on in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and old dead beliefs, and things of that sort. They're not actually alive in us, but they're rooted there all the same and we cannot rid ourselves of them”. You look in the mirror differently after reading that part. We are all haunted by ghosts whether we want/see it or not, whether we have chosen to ignore them, assimilate them or fight them.
PS. One last thought, in case you were curious, on the beauty of the word “vermoulu” and the power of context. This French word translates to “worm-eaten”, but its connection to syphilis is not immediately obvious. In his article [3] Dr. Hoenig explains that vermoulu was the term 19th-century French doctors used for the shallow skin ulceration patients first developed when infected, which deepened over time, like a “small pit”.
[1] Ornaverum. (n.d.). Ghosts (Henrik Ibsen, L. J. Hoenig). Retrieved August 16, 2025, from https://ornaverum.org/family/waddell-james/ghosts-henrik-ibsen-l-j-hoenig.html
[2] Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Treponema pallidum. In Wikipedia. Retrieved August 16, 2025, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treponema_pallidum
[3] Hoenig, L. J. (2018). The meaning of vermoulu in Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts. The American Journal of Medicine, 131(12), 1524–1525. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amjmed.2018.07.031
