It was an essential part of Ibsen’s dramatic talent that he embodied the problems and conflicts of his own personality in the characters of his plays. He did not often attempt a solution of the problems raised. But we can often perceive by the way in which he distributed light and shade in his plays where his sympathies must have lain. His personal indignation at all forms of compromise and hypocrisy breathes through his plays.
“An Enemy of the People” was published in Copenhagen in November, 1882 and became Ibsen’s most personal confession. His old aversion for liberal politicians, for the party press, for the plebeian ways of public life combines with his contempt for the “stagnationists.” His own efforts to clean up the evils of society had only earned him a campaign of abuse and nasty insinuations. So he let Stockmann fling out his wild paradoxes, asserting that the minority is always right, not the stagnant minority, but the advance guard, the radical intellectuals, who stand at a point which “the damned, compact, liberal majority” (Ibsen 311) has not yet reached.
In this play Ibsen borrowed traits from his birthplace Skien, and his hero was modeled not only on Bjørnson but also on his friend Jonas Lie. But the opinions Stockmann expressed were his own, as he wrote in a letter to his publisher: “Doctor Stockmann and I get along so splendidly; we agree in many respects, though the doctor has a somewhat more muddled head than I.” (Ibsen 68). An Enemy of the People was the last play in which Ibsen spoke in the first person. (Nazar 3)
Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” reiterated with an abundance of legalistic set-speeches his belief that public antipathy can provide a grueling test for a nonconformist who dares question social standards. The issue is almost allegorical in its polarization of good and evil: Honesty, personified by brave Dr. Stockmann, debates with Evil, personified by smug middle-class materialists—the “people.” During the debate, Stockmann exposes the bourgeois immorality, self-interest, and blindness that had masqueraded as communal justice, enterprise, and wisdom. “The majority,” he declares, “is never right until it does right.” (Ibsen 185).
The fact that Stockmann is forced to look beyond juridical criteria for a tenable standard of justice calls into question the social order founded upon those criteria. Where the law is superfluous or malign, the trial process becomes an ironic metaphor for the pursuit of self-respect. (Nazar 3)
This play takes literal pollution as symbolic of the “swamp” in which the people’s conscience had sunk. The noted health baths of a south Norway town, Doctor’ Stockmann discovers, are polluted; when he wishes to proclaim this fact, the “responsible” folk of the town denounce Stockmann as an enemy of the people for desiring to destroy their profits. Against the politicians and the press, Stockmann is powerless; he can console himself only with thoughts of the future and with the closing reflection — an individual consolation out of a social defeat -that “the strongest man in the world is he that stands most alone.” (Ibsen 90). Ibsen himself found consolation in the lonely rebel. Speaking of Dr. Stockmann in a letter to Georg Brandes, he declared:
“The majority, the mass, the multitude, can never overtake him; he can never have the majority with him… At the point where I stood when I wrote each of my books, there now stands a fairly compact multitude; but I myself am there no longer; I am elsewhere and, I hope, farther ahead.” (Ibsen xi).
Going down to defeat, Stockmann nevertheless refuses to be
“beaten off the field by public opinion, by the compact majority, and all that sort of devilry… I want to drive it into the heads of these curs that the Liberals are the craftiest foes free men have to face; that party programs wring the necks of all young and living truths; that considerations of expediency turn justice and morality upside down until life becomes simply unlivable.” (Ibsen 184)
The battle of the baths has been lost, but the battle against hypocrisy goes on.
In spite of the personal indignation that spurred the drama, Ibsen is by no means one-sided in his presentation. He stirs in Dr. Stockmann a surge of energy and genial humor; the aristocratic idealism of the man is beyond the grasp of the townsfolk. At the same time, he rouses in the good doctor a zealot’s insistence, an uncompromising failure to grasp the other issues involved. Where a more moderate person might have won the town to take effective steps against the pollution of the baths, Dr. Stockmann by his insistence on instant public action, which would wipe out the town’s income from the baths, succeeds only in turning every leading citizen against him. (Meyer-Dinkgräfe 118).
“An Enemy of the People”, though was, indeed, quite popular. Within three months of its publication, it was played in Christiania, Bergen, Stockholm, and Copenhagen. Holland saw the play in 1884; Berlin, not until March 5, 1887, but frequently thereafter. In Paris, it was presented in 1895; on March 29, 1898, and in 1899; in 1895 and 1899 anarchist demonstrations accompanied the productions. In England, Beerbohm Tree, playing Dr. Stockmann first on June 14, 1893, appeared frequently in the part up to 1905. Its New York premiere was in 1895. Walter Hampden acted Dr. Stockmann first in 1927 and then revived the play frequently until 1937.
In that year (February 16) Richard Watts remarked that the play “continues to strike out with sardonic power, while its implications remain inescapably modern.” (Meyer-Dinkgräfe 118). Calling it a “mighty provocative play,” Brooks Atkinson satirically observed: “Now that we have arrived at the golden age when governments and society welcome the truth in all things and never put convenience ahead of scientific enlightenment, An Enemy of the People is less pertinent.” (Meyer-Dinkgräfe 119)
An adaptation by Arthur Miller was produced in New York in 1950 with Frederic March, Morris Carnovsky, and Florence Eldridge. Miller “pepped up” the dialogue with many a “Damn!” and with current slang, but turned Dr. Stockmann, as Howard Barnes saw him, into a figure “part Galileo, part a man who refuses to testify whether he is or is not a Communist. The form and context of the original drama were far better than they are in the present reworking of the plot.” (Meyer-Dinkgräfe 123)
It would be a gross distortion to predict a tragic destiny for all men devoted to ideas, although perhaps it is true that no man of any ideas can be properly tragic. Yet the outcome of these reflections on Dr. Stockmann is this. An idea is tragic if it is no more than an idea torn off from its foundations in being and presumed to subsist as such. Then in a man’s fixed contemplation of it, it shines with a purely reflected light yet of unchanging radiance, it is forever set in terms borrowed but invested imaginatively with splendor unseen in the fleeting flow; and it can effectively contradict whatever human time has to offer.
The contradiction enters the man’s existence and tears him apart, making it impossible for him to find himself whole in the world and yet impossible to be without the world. His protest draws him against and into a battling within, in which there is no enemy but himself and hence no victor ever. This windmill fight is tragic. (Lambert 626-628)
Thomas Stockmann is determined to serve duty if it costs him his life. But he will never attain his duty in his existence since there is no such fixed star within it; although many deeds, intentions, thoughts are “due” to his world, his partners in living, and to himself. He wages a campaign in the name of truth, as if the truth were a goddess or an idol and he the select defender as if it were above and not within his own being there; and so he despises the “false” altars of truth erected by other men.
He complains that men make a “hodge-podge of right and wrong,” without realizing that if right and wrong were not for men commingled in their task and pressing through their time if they were laid out in clear patterns of super-temporal order, then life would be a fatal play of puppets pulled on strings, then risk, commitment, choice, would be out of the human question, then men could not stand out and exist. Such is the limited outline of Stockmann’s vision, a vision alluring for him and yielding the temptation of superhuman purity and static perfection, but a vision which dazzlingly envelops his character and appropriates for him the label of the people’s enemy. That he becomes the enemy of the people without whom he cannot exist, this is the tragedy of Thomas Stockmann. (Lambert 626-628)
Yet An Enemy of the People takes a high place in the second rank of the Ibsen works, in virtue of its buoyant vitality, its great technical excellence, and the geniality of its humor. It seems odd, at first sight, that a distinctly polemical play, which took its rise in a mood of exasperation, should be perhaps the most amiable of all the poet’s productions. But the reason is fairly obvious. Ibsen’s nature was far too complex, and far too specifically dramatic, to permit his giving anything like direct expression to a personal mood. The very fact that Dr. Stockmann was to utter much of his own indignation and many of his own ideas forced him to make the worthy Doctor in temperament and manner as unlike himself as possible.
Now boisterous geniality, loquacity, irrepressible rashness of utterance, and a total absence of self-criticism and self-irony were the very contradiction of the poet’s own characteristics–at any rate after he had entered upon middle life. He doubtless looked around for models that should be his own antipodes in these respects. Be this as it may, the very effort to disguise himself naturally led him to attribute to his protagonist and mouthpiece a great superficial amiability. But his amiability was not superficial, effusive, and exuberant; it seldom reached that boiling-point which we call geniality; and for that very reason, Thomas Stockmann became the most genial of his characters. He may be called Ibsen’s Colonel Newcome. (Lambert 626-628)
In technical quality, An Enemy of the People is wholly admirable. In one point only can it be said that Ibsen has allowed a touch of artificiality to creep in. In order to render the peripeteia of the third act more striking, he has made Hovstad, Billing, and Aslaksen, in the earlier scenes, unnaturally inapprehensive of the sacrifices implied in Stockmann’s scheme of reform. It is scarcely credible that they should be so free and emphatic in their offers of support to the Doctor’s agitation before they have made the smallest inquiry as to what it is likely to cost the town. They think, it may be said, that the shareholders of the Baths will have to bear the whole expense; but surely some misgivings could not but cross their mind as to whether the shareholders would be prepared to do so. (Templeton 13-15)
Thus Ibsen wields his two-edged sword of satire. On one side, it cuts at the unreal pretensions of those who profess allegiance to a religious ideal in accordance with which they dare not act. On the other side, it attacks the ideal itself, by exhibiting the unhappy consequences of putting it into practice. Brand, however, is a hero, though mistaken, whereas his parishioners are only hypocrites. It is nobler to follow your ideal than to profess it, says Ibsen; but, first, be sure that your ideal is worthy to be followed. (Templeton 13-15)
In “An Enemy of the People,” the ideal satirized is social and political. Patriotism and the commonweal are glide passwords in politics; the cause of the people is a phrase ever upon the lips of the man who must look to the suffrages of the majority for success. But how sincere are such phrases? Is this talk of social well-being much more than a cloak to cover ambition for individual advancement? (Templeton 13-15)
Both Bernick and Stensgård are compromisers, but the hero of “An Enemy of the People” rejects compromise, and incidentally exposes the selfish inconsistency of his neighbors. Dr. Stockmann discovers contamination in the water supply of a town grown prosperous through his exploitation of its curative baths. Although he is chief physician of the baths when once he is assured that the tanneries of his father-in-law are infecting the water, he hastens to let the authorities know of his discovery. But his brother, the mayor, bids him hold his peace, for the scandal of the badly placed water pipes will reflect upon the administration.
The editor and the printer of the newspaper refuse to speak the truth, for the town will be ruined by the report of unsanitary conditions. Everywhere Dr. Stockmann is met, in his desire to remedy a shameful state of affairs, by the opposition of vested interests. Denied the freedom of the press, he secures the house of a friend in which to discuss the matter publicly, but he is commanded to avoid all reference to the baths, as prejudicial to the community.
When he launches into a stirring attack upon the tyranny of the majority, he is hooted and mobbed, and the meeting breaks up after voting him an enemy of the people. At first, he thinks of beating a retreat from the town, but, at length, despite his dismissal from the baths, despite the ostracism suffered by his family, and the imputation of low motives to himself, he concludes to remain so that he may battle for the regeneration of a society thoroughly corrupt. (Templeton 13-15)
In any democracy, Ibsen’s points call for pondering, lest the most well-meaning man finds himself “an enemy of the people.” “An Enemy of the People” is a manifesto for the petty-bourgeois, the petty snob, and the petty intellectual. The masses are ignorant, you are cultured, therefore you disbelieve in democracy, you believe in culture. What of it? You have not made it clear how you can attain power. In any case, as a leader you are self-appointed, and that is a game many can play: anyone can declare himself a leader, cultured or otherwise.
The whole play breathes the perennial self-complacency of the arrogant idealist— from the Pharisee of the first century to the Communist intellectual of today. It takes more than two one-sided plays to make a single two-sided masterpiece. And “An Enemy” is one-sided, a play of moral blacks and whites. To read it as a subtle study in self-righteousness would be to conceive another play. Stockman is an Alceste taken pretty much at his own valuation.
As a piece of thinking, “An Enemy of the People” is too superficial to be instructive. “However the play can be associated with the “literature and science” movement, insofar as it is a literary work about science in society. Ibsen’s play, however, is interesting in two respects: first, the play is not a warning about science out of control (which is the theme of much science fiction) and in need of social control, but is rather a warning about social control of science; second, because of the importance of science in law, both in the regulatory and in the litigation contexts, An Enemy of the People is a relevant text for both law-and-literature and literature-and-science projects – indeed, the play can be seen as part of the canon for a hybrid project that might be called law, literature, and science studies”. (Caudill 1).
Based on these facts, this play becomes an important part of the course outline in many schools and colleges below. In several schools and colleges, this play is included as a compulsory part of the course to be taught to the students due to the significant lesson it offers, which can play a significant part in a student’s life.
Some of the institutions that incorporated the play “An enemy of the people” for reading are UC Berkeley, University of Essex, Vanguard University, Stanford University, Yale University, St. Olaf College, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, Saginaw Valley State University, University of Nevada, Reno, Rutgers University, St. Catharine College, College of the Canyons, Mount St. Marys College, New York University, The Medical Humanities School of NYU and Brigham Young University.
Thus Henrik Ibsen’s play, “An Enemy of the People” proved to be very interesting as well as provoking when incorporated in the works of literature and science. However, as a piece of art, it is too feeble to be influential. In 1950 it would be as easy as it is wise to let Ibsen rest in peace.
Works Cited
Caudill, David S. “IBSEN’S AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE AND THE PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE IN LAW”. Georgetown International Environmental Law Review, 2003. Web.
Ibsen, Henrik. The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2009.
Lambert, Robert G. “An Enemy of the People: A Friend of the Teacher”. Urbana: The English Journal, Vol. 54, No. 7 (1965): 626-628.
Meyer-Dinkgräfe, Daniel. Who’s Who in Contemporary World Theatre. NEW YORK: Rutledge, 2002.
Nazar, Uchkun. “Play (A Short Story)”. World Literature Today, University of Oklahoma Vol. 70, (1996): 3.
Templeton, Joan. “Ibsen’s Legacy: Making the Theater Matter”. Scandinavian Review, Vol. 94, (2006): 13-15.