Ghosts is an excellent play which provides a counterpoint to one of Henrik Ibsen’s other plays, A Doll’s House.  In that play, Nora leaves her family when she discovers her husband’s self-interested, superficial nature, to attempt to become a more complete person.  In Ghosts, Mrs. Alving does not leave her husband (at the behest of a clergyman with whom she is in love, who persuades her that her duty to family supersedes all things and that a man’s transgressions cannot possibly be as bad as a woman’s), though she discovers that his failings were much greater than Torvald’s pettiness.  The results are surely more horrible than any moral or social upset that might have resulted from a woman leaving her husband—when Alving fathers a child on a servant (whose willingness in the affair is questionable) and the servant is sent away, the man who was persuaded (likely through money, regardless of his claims) to marry her and pretend to be Regina’s biological father eventually uses the position this gains him to first persuade Pastor Manders that he is the cause of burning down the orphanage, and then to use this supposed fact to blackmail him into supporting the sailors’ home which he has already indicated to Regina will not be as wholesome as he portrays it to the pastor.  Oswald is infected with an hereditary disease from his father’s dissipation, which makes him ill enough to wish to force his mother to euthanize him.  Regina, growing up ignorant of her true parentage but under her natural father’s roof, discovers it would be incestuous to realize the servant-girl’s dream of marrying the master’s son, and so chooses to throw herself into a life of dissipation, which will likely cause her some worse ending even than her mother’s.  This play may be seen as an answer to those who seek to criticize or censor the end of A Doll’s House—for surely Ibsen’s characters in that play would have fared as badly as his characters in Ghosts do had Nora chosen not to leave Torvald.