On one level, Ghosts is an entirely appropriate title for the play, as the spirits of the departed continue to exercise a malign influence from beyond the grave.

A prime example is Captain Alving. Though long-dead, his reckless and irresponsible behavior while alive still has serious consequences. For instance, the very presence of his illegitimate offspring Regina acts as a constant reminder to his daughter Helen of her father's infidelity. Indeed, one could say that Regina's presence haunts her.

Captain Alving's baneful influence also extends to his son Osvald. Osvald regards his late father as something of a hero, blissfully unaware of what he was really like. Osvald sets out to be just like Captain Alving; according to Pastor Manders, he even looks like him. But as the real-life Captain Alving was a dissolute drunk and philanderer, Osvald has unwittingly dedicated himself to living a lie. In that sense, one could say that he's pursuing a chimera—a spirit, if you will—in trying to live up to the standards that his father never actually set.

But in any case, Osvald is unable to live up to these standards, not least because the ghost of his late father continues to haunt him in another way: through the transmission of hereditary syphilis. Once Osvald is in the grip of this terrible disease, he will become a shadow of his former self, more a living ghost than a man.

The story "Ghosts" by Henrik Ibsen deals greatly with death, which is part of the significance of the title. More prominently, however, are the metaphorical ghosts of the past. Many characters have secrets of dark pasts that "haunt" them even to the present or are haunted by the pasts of their families.

Mr. Alving is riddled with syphilis because he had engaged in many affairs in his younger life, and he passed the disease to his son, who is dying from it. This is one of the ghosts of Mr. Alving's past that haunts him and his son. Additionally, Oswald's secret love is the maid, Regina. Unbeknownst to him, because of his father's affairs, Regina is his sister, corrupting their love. The family past acts as a ghost and haunts Oswald as it destroys his life.

The significance of the title lies in the way the characters of the play are affected by the deeds of the father, Mr. Alving. The actual Danish title is "Gengangere," a word that means both "ghost" and "events that repeat themselves."

Both senses of the word are apt, as in the play, Mr. Alving's sexual promiscuity continues to destroy the lives of his wife and son even after he is dead. Not only does the son suffer from a sexually transmitted disease passed to him by his father, but the woman he loves, Regina, is his father's illegitimate daughter and hence his half-sister.

The "Ghosts" title is significant also in its supernatural or horrific connotations in that Mr. Alving's serial adultery is something to be feared. The fact that social norms pressure Mrs. Alving to stay with her husband, rather than leave him, suggests that another "ghost" Ibsen has in mind is social conformity and bourgeois morality.

The title has two different meanings in this play. The first meaning relates to the expression "skeletons in the closet." Everyone in the play has a closet filled with skeletons, ghosts of things that they did or were done to them in the past and that haunt them now. Mrs. Alving is haunted by her husband's infidelities. Oswald, too, is haunted by his father's past and by the "legacy" his father left him. Regina, unknown to her at first, is the third victim of Captain Alving's haunting. All three must cope with what being related to that man has done to them.

Another meaning for the title is that, like Oswald, we are ourselves ghosts, just waiting for our deaths. He knows he is going to die, and waiting for death nearly makes him commit suicide.

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What is the significance of the title of Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen?

The significance of the title of Ghosts is that the dead haunt the living. Mrs. Alving and her son, Oswald, are both haunted by the ghost of Captain Alving, who is dead when the play begins but whose presence permeates the action. The public face of Alving's legacy is respectable and philanthropic: the endowment of an orphanage. However, it is his infidelities that haunt his wife psychologically and haunt his son in more tangible ways.

Oswald Alving suffers from syphilis, which his mother believes he inherited from Captain Alving. She feels that her efforts to shield him from his father's influence were therefore absurdly ineffective. Oswald is in love with Regina Engstrand, whom he believes to be the daughter of the carpenter, Joseph Engstrand. In fact, however, she is the product of one of his father's affairs and is therefore his own half-sister. The result of his father's conduct is that Oswald becomes something like a ghost himself, failing to live as he waits to die.

In Ibsen's Ghosts, what is the significance of the title?

Let us remember that this play is above all else about the way in which society invades personal lives, and the tragic consequences of such a fact. Mrs. Alving's famous speech in Act II of the play establishes the key metaphor that gives the play its title:

I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts, Mr. Manders. It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant, all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us.

Note the way that the "ghosts" of public opinion and duty are shown to be so powerful and to exert control over the living. These "ghosts" have the power to haunt, ruin and dominate generations of lives, as Mrs Alving's life and the way she is held captive by maintaining the fiction of her husband's life shows. Of course, this is something that comes to ruin her children's life as well as her own life. As people, we are not only tormented by our individual "inheritances" from people, but also by the various supersitions that are present in every community. In this play, the duty towards members of your family is such a ghost that is shown to be able to ruin lives. Mrs. Alving's morose speech points towards the tremendous power such "ghosts" exert and how hard it is to escape their influence.