‘Seeing ghosts’

This paper argues for the presence of the Gothic in the conventions, motifs and images in Henrik Ibsen's plays, which exists without compromising the realist mode of the works. It further argues that, in writing through this estranged engagement with spectrality, Ibsen is drawing from a rationalist, secular tradition that eschews the supernatural even while assigning spectrality a great deal of psychological importance.  Hedda Gabler , A Doll's House , Ghosts and The Master Builder are plays that deploy a narrative mode that provides a convergence of two parallel modes into the hybrid form of Gothic realism. The paper proposes an examination of the Gothic beyond the initial and most immediate criterion of the supernatural, and shall investigate the ways in which Ibsen's primarily realist plays are populated by Gothic narrative logic that manifests itself through the conventions of unheimlich , violent deaths and dysfunctional, claustrophobic domestic space.