Heredity a Revisited Theme in Henrik Ibsen’s ‘A Doll House’ & ‘Ghosts’

The aim of this paper is mainly focused through the quotation ‘sins of the father are visited upon the son’ the researchers used the critical analytical method to highlight the theme of heredity in Ibsen selected plays. The analysis of the theme showed that the heredity is not only portrayed in the plays but it has traces from his personal life. The fear of becoming like his father very much influences the theme of heredity in the plays. The paper also attempts to link the inheritance theme to the Ibsen’s life. The researchers focused on the Naturalism movement as ground for the reading of the influence it had on the author and its clear significance into the following events of the plays. Light is shed upon the saying ‘sins of the father’s’ for its clear relation to Oswald state. KeywordsHeredity; Ibsen; Naturalism; Sins of the father’s


INTRODUCTION
The infatuation with this 'saying' was how this paper came to be conceptualized.
The search on the theme's ramification led to Ibsen's 'Ghosts'. Through reading it other discoveries were made. The first one was that the play itself is a second part of a sequence. The second and most important was that theme of inheritance or heredity was a recurrent one in his authorship. Henrik Ibsen, [born March 20, 1828, Skien, -died May 23, 1906, Oslo], is a major Norwegian playwright of the late 19th century. "Ibsen's influential career is full of enigmas and contradictions. He began with historical dramas, looking to the past, and yet he would become the herald of modern drama." (N A, V2, unit 1) Ibsen developing from the historical romantic playwright became one of the founders of modern drama. Through his strict meticulous thought he introduced to the European stage a new order of moral analysis. Ibsen naturalistic method of presentation shocked the spectator/reader. He was relentlessly scathingly blatantly targeting the bourgeois society with his work. His problem plays and unique character creation made him versatile and popular. Ibsen's genius worked in a strange manner. Rejected and violently resented, upon introduction, Ibsen's work stood the test of time. One hundred fifty years later its performance is still running. He ranks second only to Shakespeare.

AIM OF THE PAPER
This paper proclaims that Ibsen was fleeing from his own inherited 'ghosts'. Through the analysis we will look at the recurrent theme of heredity in Ibsen's writings and try to link with his life. The researcher looks at his early years to configure the reason behind such obsession.
Bearing in mind the Poet's own admission that everything he wrote about he had lived through.

QUESTIONS OF THE STUDY
The paper will attempt to answer the following questions:  What is the impact of Ibsen paternal relationship on the theme?  How did Ibsen portray the theme of heredity in his plays?  What are the connotations of the saying 'sins of the fathers'?

METHODOLOGY
The researcher adopted a close-reading method to achieve a complete comprehension of the texts to further enable a good analytical disclosure. The focus is on the saying 'sins of the fathers are visited on the sons' and its place on the social map at the times of Ibsen's 'A Doll House' and 'Ghosts'. The researcher started with a search on the origin of the saying and usage to ground for a comprehensive analysis. Then a thorough reading of the two plays plus the author's comprehensive life and works. Plus a reading through on the literary criticism theories venturing for a linkage; Naturalism approach fitted perfectly. Hence, it's a qualitative research with an analytical descriptive approach. The subjects of the study are Ibsen's characters from "A Doll House" and "Ghosts".

IMPORTANCE OF THE STUDY
In spite the Norwegian's place in the literary world and his achievements as a great playwright he seems to lack recognition in Sudan. Which means a noticeable absence of studies about him is detected. Although that acted as encouragement for the researcher it foreshadowed deficiency in resources. Two factors aided in the progress of the study; an opportunity to spent significant amount of time at International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) library and Google Books.

BACKGROUND
To understand the theme of heredity at the time those plays were written it is important to have an understanding of the literary ambiance and ideology furbishing simultaneously specifically Naturalism. Naturalism is a movement in European drama and theatre that developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But it also maintain the Darwinian belief that a human character is formed by what they have inherited from their ancestors and their actual environment. It refers to theatre that attempts to create an illusion of reality through a range of dramatic and theatrical strategies. Interest in naturalism especially flourished in France. The French novelist Émile Zola was a pioneer; naturalism was first advocated explicitly by Zola in his 1880 essay entitled 'Naturalism on the Stage'. (BBC.com) Naturalistic writers were influenced by the theory of evolution of Charles Darwin. They believed that one's heredity and social environment determine one's character. Naturalism also attempts to determine 'scientifically' the underlying forces, i.e. the environment or heredity influencing the actions of its subjects. Zola's term for naturalism is 'la nouvelle formule'. The three primary principles of naturalism [faire vrai, faire grand and faire simple are first: that the play should be realistic, and the result of a careful study of human behavior and psychology. The characters should be flesh and blood, their motivations and actions should be grounded in their heredity and environment. The presentation of a naturalistic play, in terms of the setting and performances, should be realistic and not flamboyant or theatrical, i.e. the single setting of Ghosts as the Alving state reception. Second, the conflicts in the play should be issues of meaningful, life-altering significancenot small or petty. And third, the play should be simplenot cluttered with complicated sub-plots or lengthy expositions. (Wikipedia) Naturalistic works are opposed to romanticism, in which subjects may receive highly symbolic, idealistic, or even supernatural treatment. They often include uncouth or sordid subject matter; for example, Émile Zola's works had an overly frankness about sexuality along with a pervasive pessimism. Naturalistic works exposed the dark harshness of life, including poverty, racism, sex, prejudice, disease, prostitution, and filth. As a result, Naturalistic writers were frequently criticized for being too blunt. Naturalistic school of writing had a formula of its own. It emphasizes everyday speech forms with plausibility in the writing, no ghosts, spirits or gods intervening in the human action. Its choice of subjects is contemporary and reasonable; no exotic, otherworldly or fantastic locales, nor historical or mythic time-periods. An extension of the social range of characters portrayed, not only the aristocrats of classical drama, to include bourgeois and working-class protagonists and social conflicts. The style of acting attempts to recreate the impression of reality. Naturalistic works often include uncouth or sordid subject matter; exposed the harshness of life, including poverty, racism, sex, prejudice, disease, prostitution and filth. As a result, Naturalistic writers were frequently criticized for being too blunt. Those stipulations fit the texts at hand to the letter, so the study conducted on the plays has them as it is basic tool. Moreover, underlining the analysis is the Darwinian ideology which pervades the naturalistic thought; especially in the determining role of the environment on character, and as motivation for behavior. Understanding the term heredity is important for understanding the themes of the plays. Heredity is the process by which characteristics are given from a parent to their child through the genes. In biology it is the natural process by which parents pass on to their children through their genes the characteristics that make them related. (Cambridge Dictionary) In literary terms heredity is the inheritance of the sum of the characteristics and potentialities genetically derived from one's ancestors; the transmission of such qualities from ancestor to descendant through the genes. (Merriam-Webster) Heredity has special historical undertone. It is in the human nature when they come across unfathomable notion to fantasize and weave mythical tales about it. Since heredity was for a long time one of the mysterious phenomena of nature.
Until the invention of the microscope early in the 17th century and the subsequent discovery of the sex cells could the essentials of heredity be grasped. The ancient Greek philosopher and scientist Aristotle (4th century BC) speculated that the relative contributions of the female and the male parents were very unequal; the female was thought to supply what he called the "matter" and the male the "motion." Contrary to Aristotle conjecture, The Institutes of Manu, composed in India between 100 and 300 AD, regarded the female role like that of the field and the male like that of the seed; new bodies are formed "by the united operation of the seed and the field." Hence, in reality both parents transmit the heredity pattern equally, and, on average, children resemble their mothers as much as they do their fathers. (Robinson, Dobzhansky, Griffiths, 2018) There is a strong connection between heredity and environment. All traits depend both on genetic and environmental factors. Heredity and environment interact to produce their effects. This means that the way genes act depends on the environment in which they act. 'The concept of heredity encompasses two seemingly paradoxical observations about organisms: the constancy of a species from generation to generation and the variation among individuals within a species.' (Encyclopaedia Britannica) Both aspects (variation and constancy) of heredity can be explained by genes-the functional units of heritable material that are found within all living cells. Scientist established that every member of a species has a set of genes specific to that species. It is this set of genes that provides the constancy of the species. Among individuals within a species, however, variations can occur in the form each gene takes, providing the genetic basis for the fact that no two individuals (except identical twins though debatable) have exactly the same traits.

HENRIK IBSEN
Henrik Ibsen, born March 20, 1828, at Skien, a small lumbering town of southern Norway -died May 23, 1906, Kristiania; a major Norwegian playwright of the late 19th century who introduced to the European stage a new order of moral analysis that was placed against a severely realistic middle-class background and developed with economy of action, penetrating dialogue, and rigorous thought. His father was a respected general merchant in the community until 1836, when he suffered the permanent disgrace of going bankrupt. As a result, he sank into a querulous penury, which his wife's withdrawn and sombre religiosity did nothing to mitigate.
There was no redeeming the family misfortunes. Aged 15, Henrik was sent to Grimstad-a coast town. There he supported himself meagerly as an apothecary's apprentice while studying nights for admission to the university. During this period he used his few leisure moments to write a play. Ibsen was in the forefront of those early modern authors whom one could refer to as the great disturbers; he belongs with Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William Blake. Ibsen wrote plays about mostly prosaic and commonplace persons. But from them he elicited insights of devastating directness, great subtlety, and occasional flashes of rare beauty. His plots are not cleverly contrived games but deliberate acts of cognition, in which persons are stripped of their accumulated disguises and forced to acknowledge their true selves, for better or worse. Thus, he made his audiences reexamine with painful earnestness the moral foundation of their being. During the last half of the 19th century he turned the European stage back from what it had become-a plaything and a distraction for the bored-to make it what it had been long ago among the ancient Greeks, an instrument for passing doom-judgment on the soul. (Adams. 2018)

DISCUSSION
'Sins of the Father' or 'Sins of the Fathers' derives from Biblical references to the iniquities of one generation passing to another.
The idea has been conveyed paraphrastically into popular culture. (Wikipedia) So it has a Biblical reference, after all. However, its meaning was intended as retributive; this is wrong you have to stop it, for if you keep on, it will pass on as a tradition to your offspring and then you will bear their guilt as well as theirs. In this sense it is very much true. But  2) The above quote is an excerpt from a leading article written by Clement Scott (1891) in The Daily Telegraph. Ibsen anticipated such a reception. In 1881, he wrote a letter to his publisher Jacob Hegel in which he stated "Ghosts will probably cause alarm in some circles; but that can't be helped. If it didn't, there would have been no necessity for me to have written it." (ibid) The subject of the play was duty and freedom but it also touched on all the forbidden topics-syphilis, adultery, free love, incest and euthanasia. As a naturalistic writer Ibsen was defying all social conventions. 'Ghosts' displays the tragic story of a woman who has stayed in a horrific marriage. Abiding society's 'law and order' she has made some poor choices in her life. Choices she made but, regretfully, have caused her dearly. Only she came to that realization too late. Ibsen's contemporaries saw Ghosts as a play about a morbid and disgraceful physical illness and other 'taboo' subjects. They turned a 'blind eye' or perhaps they failed to see what it is really about. The play is truly about the devitalizing effect of a dumb acceptance of decayed convention and ancient traditions. Ten years after the Chamberlain passing till the opportunity presented itself. She has vowed Mrs. Alving told the Pastor that one day he shall know the kind of life he had thrown her into. Pastor Manders was blown away he had thought that she was living in bliss: "It almost makes me dizzy. Your whole married life, the seeming union of all these years, was nothing more than a hidden abyss!" (Ghosts, Act First) Mrs. Alving tragedy was neither in a life that has passed nor the phantoms haunting her. But upon the discovery of a planned future evaporating into thin air in front of her eyes. Mrs. Alving's character left the spectator/reader apprehended by wonder. Ibsen