ENC1102--Activity on "Yellow Woman" by Leslie Marmon Silko--for Class Discussion (to be done in class)
The play Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen opened on the London stage on March 13, 1881. Ghosts was considered a controversial play and had already been banned in St. Petersburg, Russia, on religious grounds, although Ibsen was Norwegian.
The first performance alone of Ghosts caused more than 500 printed articles to be written in response to it, and Ibsen became a household name even to people who had never seen the play or read a book. Henrik Ibsen died in 1906 when he was 79. He was given a state funeral, and King Haakon of Norway attended.
Henrik Ibsen wrote in Act 2:
"I
almost think we're all of us Ghosts. ... It's not only what we have
invited from our father and mother that walks in us. It's all sorts of
dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no
vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can't get rid of
them. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see Ghosts gliding
between the lines. There must be Ghosts all the country over, as thick
as the sand of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully
afraid of the light."
Consider the quotation above and brainstorm ways the ideas expressed by the playwright Ibsen relate to themes in Silko's story, "Yellow Woman."