By Jack Beckman

August Strindberg wrote The Ghost Sonata during the shift from Romanticism to Realism in the theater, and revolted against the latter, writing in the midst of the Symbolist and Expressionist movements. During the Romantic Era, tuberculosis ran rampant, and the art of the time reflected the life experience of authors, poets, and other artists as it so often does. Consumption, as it was known at the time, left the victim pale and prone to fainting. Spread through indirect means of bacteria in the air, it made for a “beautiful” disease. Syphilis, on the other hand, does not have such a “pretty” reputation. It leaves the victim with rashes, sores, and lesions on the body, and is spread through more scandalous means. Thought to be hereditary for so long, the syphilitic pathogen was identified by microbiological researchers in 1905^[1], just two years before The Ghost Sonata was written. In his play, Strindberg subtextually explores the consequences of the disease.

Just as Realism appears to contrast the Romantic before it, syphilis seems to be the antithesis of consumption. It was not pretty, it was not tragic, it was the deserved manifestation of sin for the afflicted, a punishment for their moral corruption and/or sexual promiscuity. It was thought to be a sign of moral decay and societal decline. If a character themselves were not promiscuous, then it was a manifestation of their father’s sins, passed on to the next generation in a cycle; a sign that the character was doomed to follow in the corrupted life their father led. 

In The Ghost Sonata, Director Hummel, the Mummy, and the Young Lady could all be analyzed to have some disease eating away at them. The Mummy is the most visually syphilitic, with her decaying body and for the fact that she is the most explicitly promiscuous. Not only is she married to the Colonel with a baby by Hummel, but she is also stated to have taken the Baron as a lover. 

Hummel, the vampiric old man, has the most textual syphilitic references in the dialogue. When talking to the Student about his physical condition, Hummel says, “Some people say it’s my fault; others blame my parents.”^[2] With the context of Hummel being later revealed to be a “Don Juan” of sorts, “a horse thief, but with women”, Hummel’s syphilitic condition would be his fault by way of sleeping around, and/or the fault of his parents because the disease was thought to be hereditary for so long. 

The Young Lady, stuck in the hyacinth room, is withering away. The only explanation is that she is  surrounded by crime and secrets. The syphilitic reading of her condition would be: with the horrible nature of Hummel ( her father), his life of crime karmically affects her, leading to her death at the end of the play. His sins manifest in the poison consuming her, and she continues the cycle by poisoning the Student, who was also influenced by Hummel. The Student accuses The Young Lady of being poisoned, poisoning him, and claims that a child’s growth is stunted in the bedroom right before she accelerates in dying. If syphilis is hereditary, then the Student accusing her of being “sick at the very source of life”^[3] could be a reference to her parents’ illnesses being passed to her.

However, syphilis is not the only disease at play. Writing a few decades out of the peak of the Romantic period, there is no doubt the influence tuberculosis had. With the amount of references to things being devoured, consumed, or otherwise drained, vampirism (and by extension, tuberculosis) has its place in The Ghost Sonata as well. 

Hummel and the Cook are described as “vampires”, their very nature is to consume. They consume the food, the sustenance, the vitality from everyone around them. The Young Lady is the prime victim of consumption in The Ghost Sonata, pale and thin, drained of strength. Because syphilis is so associated with promiscuity and corruption, the Young Lady can not be afflicted with it if she is to be a symbol of purity. Tuberculosis, on the other hand, not only causes those symptoms, but is also closely associated with vampirism. 

Symbolic representations of disease are abundant in The Ghost Sonata, every line can be picked apart and interpreted to reveal another layer in these seemingly simple character’s lives. By analyzing the dialogue, Hummel is revealed to be a syphilitic vampire, infecting everyone he can for power. The Mummy and Young Lady have been infected by the old man, directly and indirectly, each withering in their own way. The Young Lady is suffering the physical manifestation of consequences for crimes committed before she was born, for she herself is the result of a crime, as the Mummy puts it. The Mummy, directly objectified and infected by the old man, is the most withered. She becomes cognizant enough to turn the tides on Hummel at the end of the Ghost Supper, and make him confront the disease eating away at him like it did to her for forty years. Solely based on character descriptions and a few lines of dialogue, entire histories, afflictions, and superstitions can be extrapolated from these characters, leaving the actors and audience able to imagine the full lives they’ve led, mistakes they’ve made, and consequences reaped away from the hour they’ve spent in the world of the play.
 

Sources Cited

Desmarais, Jane. "Syphilis in Victorian Literature and Culture." English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 63, no. 1 (2020): 115-118. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/743933.

Garner, Stanton B. “Artaud, Germ Theory, and the Theatre of Contagion.” Theatre Journal 58, no. 1 (2006): 1–14. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25069776.

Strindberg, August. The Ghost Sonata. (1907).