“The Great Imitator”: Staging Syphilis in <i>A Doll House</i> and <i>Ghosts</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While critical attention has focused on Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts and its controversial reception at its various European premieres, little attention has been paid to Ibsen’s use of syphilis or to the challenge that Ghosts and A Doll House pose for late-nineteenth-century theories of venereal disease. Reading these plays against contemporary medical literature, this essay argues that, rather than settling for a comforting conservatism (those who acquire syphilis have somehow deserved it), Ibsen, instead, condemns the constraining social practices that have led to its spread. By exploiting syphilis’s symptomatic confusion – it can imitate a host of other diseases – and introducing an aetiological conundrum, Ibsen does not condemn a sole person or a single circumstance but, instead, implicates a myriad of restrictive beliefs and customs; not least, the deleterious and condemnatory assumptions surrounding the disease itself. He may even intend Ghosts to function prophylactically. Far from desiring to contaminate spectators, Ibsen stages syphilis in order to protect audiences from more harmful societal ills.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".