An Enemy of the People 

By Henrik Johan Ibsen (1828-1906) 

A Study Guide

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Plot Summary Setting Characters Type of Work

Language: Dano-
Style The Ibsen Stage Symbolism
Norwegian

Cain and Abel

Climax Themes Foreshadowing
Motif

Ibsen and Questions and Essay Biography of Complete Free

Spielberg's  Jaws Topics Ibsen Text
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Plot Summary 
By Michael J. Cummings...© 2003
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.........A coastal town in Norway is on its way to becoming a major health resort thanks to its new municipal baths. In anticipation of an influx of tourists
in the coming summer season, property values are rising, business is picking up, and unemployment is decreasing. 
.........At the modest home of Thomas Stockmann, an idealistic physician, the spa and its benefits make for lively conversation between Mayor Peter
Stockmann, the brother of Dr. Stockmann, and Hovstad, editor of the local newspaper, both of whom arrived for a visit just after the Stockmanns
finished supper. With Hovstad is an assistant named Billing. Dr. Stockmann is out for a walk with his sons, Ejlif and Morten. 
.........“Mark my words, Mr. Hovstad—the baths will become the focus of our municipal life!" the mayor says. "Think how extraordinarily the place has
developed within the last year or two! Money has been flowing in, and there is some life and some business doing in the town. Houses and landed
property are rising in value every day."
.........Hovstad mentions that he plans to run an article about the health resort—written by Dr. Stockmann, the medical director of the baths—in the
spring, the right time to generate interest in the new community asset. The doctor, who came up with the idea for the baths, has been an untiring
promoter of their potential benefits.
.........Peter Stockmann reminds Hovstad that he, as mayor, played a “modest" part (really meaning the most important part) in making the baths
a reality. It was the mayor’s practicality and business sense, he hints, that were the driving forces behind the project. 
.........When Dr. Stockmann returns from his walk with Captain Horster, a seafarer, he is in a cheerful mood. Everything is going right for him and
his family, he says, and he now has enough money to afford a few little luxuries, like the roast beef they had for dinner. When the mayor inquires about
the article his brother wrote, Dr. Stockmann says he has decided to withhold it for the time being, but does not say why. Suspecting that his brother is
keeping something from him—possibly something about the spa—the mayor accuses the doctor of withholding important information, then says:
.........“You have an ingrained tendency to take your own way, at all events; and, that is almost equally inadmissible in a well ordered community, The
individual ought undoubtedly to acquiesce in subordinating himself to the community—or, to speak more accurately, to the authorities who have the
care of the community's welfare."
.........After Mayor Stockmann leaves, Dr. Stockmann's daughter, Petra, a schoolteacher, arrives and joins in the conversation. An idealist like her father,
Petra says, "There is so much falsehood both at home and at school. At home one must not speak, and at school we have to stand and tell lies to the
children." Captain Horster offers to provide a room for the school in an old house he owns. 
.........Dr. Stockmann then opens a letter he received, then waves it before Hovstad and his wife, announcing a remarkable discovery: The baths are
contaminated. The doctor speaks in a triumphant, jubilant tone, for he believes he has done a great service for the public welfare. He says several cases
of typhoid fever and gastric fever the previous year aroused his suspicion about the spa water, so he took samples of it and sent them to a university for
analysis. The letter he holds contains the results of the analysis: The spa is a cesspool of disease. It seems that tanneries in the town leached impurities
into the water. Hovstad—seemingly idealistic, like Dr. Stockmann—promises to publish news of the discovery and says his printer, Aslaksen, a prominent
citizen, will back the decision, as will a homeowner’s association.
.........In the days immediately following the discovery, Mayor Peter Stockmann discovers it will cost an enormous sum in tax dollars to make
improvements, including laying new pipes to handle the leachate, which his brother says are necessary to eliminate the pollution. So he decides to
challenge his brother’s findings as faulty and asks him to renounce them. The doctor—viewing himself as the guardian of the common weal, a savior—
refuses. 
.........Meanwhile, Hovstad, fearing the wrath of the taxpayers, decides not to publish Dr. Stockmann’s article. At a town meeting in a large room
provided as a goodwill gesture by Captain Horster, almost everyone lines up against Dr. Stockmann—Mayor Stockmann, Hovstad, Aslaksen, the
homeowners, ordinary citizens—and shout him down when he attempts to explain the problem and alert the town to the danger. One citizen wonders
whether he has an alcohol problem. Another suggests insanity runs in his family. Still another thinks he is getting even for not receiving a salary increase
as the spa’s medical director. All agree that he should be labeled “an enemy of the people," one bent on destroying the town. When Stockmann and his
family leave the meeting, the crowd hisses and boos, then begins chanting “enemy of the people," “enemy of the people."
.........The next morning, the Stockmanns discover broken windows and rocks littering the floor. The doctor piles the rocks on a table, saying he will save
them as heirlooms for his children. A letter arrives in which the landlord gives Dr. Stockmann notice of eviction. It doesn’t matter, Stockmann tells his
wife, for he and his family will cross the sea and resettle in the New World. Then Captain Horster arrives and announces his employer has fired him. The
mayor enters and announces that the citizens are circulating a petition pledging that they will no longer seek the medical services of Dr. Stockmann. The
mayor advises his brother to leave town for a while, then return and confess his error in writing. Such a move might earn him reinstatement as medical
director of the spa. Dr. Stockmann says he will never admit that he was wrong—never, never—under any circumstances.
.........After the mayor leaves, another visitor arrives. He is Morton Kiil, the father of Dr. Stockmann's wife, Katherine. Kiil is the owner of polluting
tanneries. In his will, he had stipulated that a handsome sum be bequeathed to Katherine and the Stockmanns’ children. However, he tells the doctor
that he invested the bequest in stock in the baths. Furthermore, he is going around town buying up all the remaining stock in the baths. Thus, if Dr.
Stockmann sticks to his story—that is, if he refuses to recant—the stock will become worthless and his wife and children will inherit nothing. Kiil tells the
doctor that he has until 2 p.m. to change his position.
.........When Kiil leaves, Hovstad and Aslaksen arrive. They think Dr. Stockmann is involved in a scheme to inflate the value of the stocks and want in on
the scheme. But Stockmann dismisses them, raising an umbrella as if to strike them. They hurry out. Captain Horster invites the Stockmanns to board at
his house during the winter. The doctor expresses his gratitude, then says he will focus his medical practice on the poor and educate his children himself.
In fact, he says, he will start a school of his own to teach the town’s guttersnipes. He is feeling upbeat, cheerful as he looks ahead.
.........“I am the strongest man in this town," he says.
.........Then he announces he has made another important discovery. Gathering everyone close to him, he says “The strongest man in the world is he who
stands alone."
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Setting

The action takes place in the late 19th Century in a small town on the southern coast of Norway. The town expects to prosper as a health resort, thanks
to its new municipal baths.

Characters

Protagonist: Dr. Thomas Stockmann 

Antagonist: His Brother, Peter Stockmann, and the Townspeople Who Support His Unethical Position

Dr. Thomas Stockmann: Medical officer of the municipal baths, which the town plans to use to attract tourists and bolster the economy. Stockmann
discovers that the baths are contaminated with leachate from a local tannery. 
Mrs. Stockmann: Dr. Stockmann's his wife. 
Petra: Daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Stockmann. Petra is a schoolteacher. 
Ejlif and Morten: Sons of Dr. and Mrs. Stockman. Ejlif is 13 and Morten, 10. 
Peter Stockmann: Dr. Stockmann's older brother. He is the mayor (burgomaster) of the town and its chief constable. He also serves as chairman of the
baths' committee. He opposes his brother’s attempt to close the baths to forestall the spread of disease. 
Morten Kiil: Operator of the tannery and Mrs. Stockmann's adoptive father. 
Hovstad: Editor of the local newspaper, the People's Messenger. 
Billing: An assistant editor. 
Captain Horster: A seafarer who provides 
Aslaksen, a printer. 
Various townspeople

Type of Work and Year of Publication

.......An Enemy of the People is a realistic stage drama in five acts. It depicts ordinary life as it is, not as one would like it to be. An Enemy of the People is
one of several Ibsen dramas that are sometimes referred to as problem plays because they center on social problems and controversial community
issues. Examples of other problem plays by Ibsen are The Wild Duck, A Doll's House,  and Ghosts. An Enemy of the People was published in 1882, when
realism was just beginning to take root, and staged for the first time in Kristiania, Norway, in 1883. (Kristiania changed its named to Oslo in 1925.) 

Language: Dano-Norwegian

.......Ibsen wrote An Enemy of the People in Dano-Norwegian, a mixture of the Danish language and Norwegian dialects. Dano-Norwegian evolved from
Danish while Norway was a province of Denmark. Although Norway gained its independence in 1814, Norwegians continued to speak and write in Dano-
Norwegian, also known as Riksmål. Beginning in the middle of the 19th Century, Norway began developing a new Norwegian language, Landsmål (the
language of the land or country), free of Danish influence. .......Meanwhile, Riksmål developed further and eventually became known as Bokmål, the
language of books. Today both varieties of Norwegian are written and spoken in Norway. The Dano-Norwegian of Ibsen is simple, concise, to the point.
However, it takes a talented translator to capture the subtleties of the language and the nuances written into the dialogue of An Enemy of the People.
Therefore, English-speaking students of Ibsen should choose their translations carefully. One highly respected Ibsen translator was William Archer
(1856-1924), a Scottish-born London journalist, drama critic, and playwright who translated many of Ibsen's works. 
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Style

.......Because Ibsen wanted to make his plays uncompromisingly realistic, he wrote the dialogue in simple, everyday, middle-class language rather than
elegant, lofty, or trope-laden language characteristic of romantic plays. But in mimicking vernacular speech, he chose and arranged his words carefully;
every word and every sentence counted. An Enemy of the People is not without weaknesses, however. On the one hand, the play is often transparently
didactic in presenting its message, the importance of accepting the truth. In addition, Dr. Stockmann is so idealistic, so zealous, so triumphal in his
campaign to proclaim the truth that he becomes a caricature rather than a real person. Ibsen's realism thus becomes less real. 

The Ibsen Stage

.......In keeping with his realistic plots and dialogue, Ibsen's stage sets resembled the furnishings of everyday life. There were no elegant foyers or salons
with exotic plants or oriental rugs; there were only ordinary rooms of ordinary middle-class folk. In his stage directions for An Enemy of the People, Ibsen
describes the set for the first act this way:

Dr. Stockmann's sitting-room. It is evening. The room is plainly but neatly appointed and furnished. In the right-hand wall are two doors; the
farther leads out to the hall, the nearer to the doctor's study. In the left-hand wall, opposite the door leading to the hall, is a door leading to
the other rooms occupied by the family. In the middle of the same wall stands the stove, and, further forward, a couch with a looking-glass
hanging over it and an oval table in front of it. On the table, a lighted lamp, with a lampshade. At the back of the room, an open door leads to
the dining-room.(From a translation by R. Farquharson Sharp.)
.......On the Ibsen stage, actors did not embellish their lines with broad flourishes of a hand or other exaggerated body movements. They became
ordinary people going about their ordinary lives. The proscenium arch was important, however. This arch, from the sides of which a curtain opens and
closes, acts in an Ibsen drama as a frame for the realistic portrait painted by Ibsen, a portrait that moves. The proscenium arch became a doorway or
window through which the audience—peeping through the arch—could eavesdrop on people in quiet turmoil. The arch helped Ibsen create the illusion
of reality.
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Symbolism

.......The spa represents the town's leading citizens and their followers. Although it appears wholesome and healthful, it contains unseen contaminants.
Mayor Stockmann and his followers pass themselves off as upright citizens but are really corrupt at heart. The spa water undergoes a test that reveals it
polluted. In reporting the results of the test, Dr. Stockmann says, "The whole Bath establishment is a whited, poisoned sepulchre, I tell you—the gravest
possible danger to the public health!" The citizens also undergo a test—the crisis precipitated by the  report—that reveals them unethical and
unscrupulous, just as "poisoned" as the baths. 

Foreshadowing

.......Dr. Stockmann's daughter, Petra, a schoolteacher, foreshadows the direction of the plot and the theme during a conversation at the dinner table in
Act 1. Dining with the Stockmanns are Hovstad, Billing, and Horster. Petra, an idealist like her father, says, "There is so much falsehood both at home
and at school. At home one must not speak, and at school we have to stand and tell lies to the children." The school thus is what the community is
revealed as later: false.  
.......As the conversation progresses, Petra says, "If only I had the means, I would start a school of my own; and it would be conducted on very different
lines." Captain Horster then tells her that he has an old house standing empty and that he would be happy to provide her a room in it for the school. It is
Horster, of course, who provides space later on for the town meeting. His goodwill gesture results in his dismissal from his job.  
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Cain and Abel Motif

.......The central conflict in the play centers on the clash between Peter Stockmann and his younger brother, Dr. Thomas Stockman. In the Old Testament
of the Bible (Genesis 4:1-16), Cain—the first-born son of Adam and Eve—murders his younger brother, Abel. Cain, a farmer, was envious of Abel, a
shepherd, because God had accepted Abel's offering over Cain's. Motifs pitting one family member against another continued to appear in literature
down through the ages. In Sophocles's Oedipus at Colonus and the Greek myth on which it is based, brothers—Polynices and Eteocles—vie for the
kingship of Thebes and kill each other. In Shakespeare's Hamlet, Claudius kills his brother, the king, in order to succeed him as king and marry his wife. In
the play Inherit the Wind and in films based on it, a fundamentalist preacher, the Rev. Jeremiah Brown, condemns his own daughter, Rachel, to hell
because of her relationship with Bertram Cates, who is on trial for teaching Darwin's Theory of Evolution in a local school. The authors of the play,
Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, based their work on the 1925 Scopes trail in Dayton, Tenn., in which a teacher violated the Butler Law by teaching
evolution. 

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Themes

1. Truth must not be hidden, diluted, or altered even when it goes counter to the wishes of the majority.  
2. Shiny apples are sometimes rotten at the core. The baths appear safe and salubrious, but poison befouls their waters. In like the
manner, the town's leading citizens are outwardly attractive but inwardly repulsive.  
3. It doesn’t matter what everyone thinks or wants; what matters is what is right—even when only one person is willing to defend what
is right. In Act I, Mayor Stockmann frowns on assertion of the individual will in society, saying, "The individual ought undoubtedly to acquiesce
in subordinating himself to the community—or, to speak more accurately, to the authorities who have the care of the

community's welfare." In so doing, he sets up the clash later in the play with his brother, who indeed asserts his will.

4. Seemingly upright citizens will compromise their morals when their wallets and livelihood are threatened. In other words, the love of
money is the root of all evil.  

Ibsen and Spielberg's Jaws

.......Supposedly, Steven Spielberg's highly successful 1975 film, Jaws, was based in part on Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People. Instead of polluting
the water with a toxic agent, Spielberg polluted it with a gigantic shark. In Jaws, the residents of Amity Island on the Atlantic coast, who are dependent
on the tourist trade for their livelihood, keep their beaches open in spite of warnings from Police Chief Martin Brody and ichthyologist Matt Hooper that
a gigantic great white shark roams the waters. In Ibsen's play, the townspeople attempt to keep the spa open in spite of warnings that a danger of
another kind, disease, infests the waters. 

Study Questions and Essay Topics

1. Because Dr. Stockmann's discovery of contamination in the town spa threatens to undermine the town's economic future, the mayor
and his supporters attempt to silence the doctor and keep his discovery secret. In your own community, do you recall any instance in which a
local government, business, factory, school district, hospital, day-care center, newspaper, or another entity attempted to withhold vital
information from the public? 
2. Under what circumstances does a government have a right to withhold information from the public?
3. In their attempt to refute Dr. Stockmann at a town meeting, citizens suggest that he has an alcohol or a mental problem or may be
seeking revenge for not receiving a pay raise as the spa's medical director. In a good dictionary, look up the Latin term ad hominem (referring
to a rhetorical tactic used in an argument to discredit an opponent). Next, decide whether the citizens' accusations are ad hominem attacks. If
you believe they are, explain why they can be categorized as such. In addition, decide whether these attacks are fair or whether they are
simply ruses to condemn Dr. Stockmann while obscuring the truth. 
4. Newspapers today pride themselves on their willingness to print the truth. But do they always print the truth? Or do they sometimes
bow to the same forces that pressured Hovstad to abandon publication of Dr. Stockmann's story? 
5. What about you—do you frequently change your opinion after yielding to pressure from your peers?
6. Which of the following is most responsible for what goes wrong in the spa town: (1) capitalism, which fosters economic competition
and a desire to make money; (2) democracy, which allows citizens to elect leaders, such as Mayor Stockmann; (3) propaganda, which often
uses unscrupulous tactics in attempts to persuade people to accept a particular viewpoint; (4) unethical and dangerous environmental policies
of the tannery operation; (5) spineless citizenry; (6) inability of Dr. Stockmann to communicate the seriousness of the problem the town faces. 
7. If you were an attorney arguing to close the town spa, you would need evidence that the spa water is indeed contaminated. How
would you obtain this evidence?

Climax

.......The climax of the play occurs when people of the town declare Dr. Stockmann an enemy of the people.