Hurt and dismayed by the hostile reception of his 1881 play Ghosts, Ibsen responded a year later with the dramatic story of Dr Thomas Stockmann, a man of principle holding out against social pressure and much the kinds of high-minded moralising criticism which he had endured.

Executive summary

A doctor discovers the newly-opened spa and public baths, which have been attracting visitors to the town and boosting the local economy, are seriously polluted, threatening disease and illness. When he tries to publicise this the town’s leading figures gang up to silence him and the townspeople as a whole declare him ‘an enemy of the people’.

Unlike most of Ibsen’s plays, whose successive acts are set in the same room and whose drama comes from the interplay of characters, ‘A Man of The People’ features a couple of locations (a newspaper office, a rowdy public meeting) which are much more colourful than usual and give the play a lot more surface vim and energy.

Cast

• Dr Thomas Stockmann, Medical Officer of the Municipal Baths
• Mrs Katherine Stockmann, his wife
• Petra their grown-up daughter) a teacher
• Ejlif and Morten Stockmann (their sons, aged 13 and 10 respectively)
• Peter Stockmann, the doctor’s elder brother, Mayor of the town and Chief Constable, Chairman of the Baths’ Committee and so on
• Morten Kiil, a tanner Mrs. Stockmann’s adoptive father)
• Hovstad, editor of the ‘People’s Messenger’ newspaper
• Billing, sub-editor on the Messenger
• Aslaksen, printer of the Messenger
• honest Captain Horster

Act 1. The news

Dr Stockmann is the physician attached to the newly opened spa baths in an (unnamed) Norwegian town (‘a dump like this where nothing really happens.’)

As the play opens he’s delighted to be back from a long period spent working as a doctor in the far north of the country, lonely and isolated, and for a pittance. He revels in his new income as physician to the baths, revels in luxuries like eating roast beef, buying a new table cloth and surrounding himself with representatives of the new younger generation such as Hovstad, the muck-raking editor of the town’s populist newspaper the Herald, and his deputy, Billing. Stockmann is excited, maybe over-excited, to be back in a decent-sized town.

And we also learn that he has a reputation for outspokenness. His brother pops by and wryly remarks that Thomas is prone to sending great screeds to the newspaper about any subject under the sun, sounding off intemperately without any consideration for the impact he has.

PETER STOCKMANN: You have a chronic disposition to take things into your own hands…In a well-ordered community…the individual must be ready to subordinate himself to the community as a whole; or, more precisely, to the authorities charged with the welfare of that community.

This is a succinct expression of the view the doctor will, of course, come to completely oppose.

After grumpy Peter leaves, Dr Stockmann encourages his guests – Hovstad the editor, Billing his deputy and the sea captain Horster – to eat their fill of the roast beef, then pull up chairs in the living room for a chat. Most notable fact is that Horster is due to sail to America in a week. Hovstad is surprised that Horster doesn’t even know there’s a municipal election pending, he doesn’t care about politics.

Dr Stockmann’s daughter Petra arrives. She’s a young schoolteacher. She loathes having to teach her pupils lies:

PETRA: 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.

So Petra represents the young generation irked at having to trot out the same old beliefs (presumably, in Christianity).

Anyway Petra brings with her the letter Sr Stockmann has been waiting for. When he reads it he announces the news to the characters onstage (his wife, Petra, Hovstad, Billing and Horster) that hte famous baths they’re so proud of are in fact a sink of pollution. ‘Filth’, presumably sewage, from ‘up at Mölledal’ has been leaking into the pipes which take water to the pump room. This explains why tourists to the spa the previous summer fell ill with typhoid and gastric fever. The spa which has so recently contributed to the town’s new-found prosperity is, in fact, a stew of pollution and disease. Stockmann sent some water samples to the university laboratories and the letter he’s just read contains the conclusive, and damning, results.

Stockmann mistakenly thinks that what he’s discovered is a great contribution to his community. Admittedly they will have to build the water pipes so they go higher into the mountains and extract purer water, but he has found the source of the disease and ensured the spa’s future.

In this he is backed up by family – his wife Katherine and schoolteacher daughter Petra and by his guests – Hovstad, Billing and Horster. In fact they all congratulate Stockmann and Billing wonders if the town oughtn’t to make him some special award, ‘You’ll be the leading light of the town, doctor’ and Stockmann himself wonders if they might increase his salary.

His family and guests shout three cheers, toast him as a hero, and the act ends with him taking his wife round the waist and dancing a joyful, laughing dance of celebration.

All this is very obviously setting him up for the fall which the rest of the play describes. For what Stockmann doesn’t grasp, in his naivete, is how this revelation is going to set the entire town against him. Above all, Stockmann doesn’t understand that his news will put him in bitter opposition to his brother, the town’s mayor, Peter Stockmann, as we will see in Act 2.

Act 2. A visit from the mayor

In Act 1 Thomas sent his brother, by hand messenger, a copy of the article he plans to write about the pollution for the Herald. At the start of Act 2 it is returned with a note telling him Peter will visit at midday.

Katherine’s step-father, Morten Kiil visits. He is a wily old man who doesn’t understand the first thing about biology, doesn’t know the germ theory of disease and so thinks Dr Stockmann’s story about lots of tiny animals in the water is a kind of elaborate joke. Mind you, he’d like it if the town was taught a lesson as he is still smarting from being kicked off the town council for being too old. (You can begin to see how all the characters adopt positions vis-a-vis the town council / authorities. You could draw a mind map with ‘town council’ at the centre and lines going off in all directions with a description of each character’s relation with ‘the centre’.)

As Kiil goes out, enters Hovstad. He’s been thinking about the doctor’s discovery and wants to broaden the issue out from attacking the swamp (or cistern or sewage farm) up at Mölledal, to make it into an an attack on the entire administration, on the authorities, on the town council, run by the wealthy and their cronies, a ‘ring of obstinate old buffers who’ve got hold of all the power’. Hovstad says things will only change when the working class have a say in the running of town affairs.

Enter Aslaksen who, as well as being the printer of the People’s Herald is also chair of the Ratepayers’ Association. He’s heard the story about the Baths and has come as a representative of ‘the compact’ majority to give his support. He’s considering writing a formal ‘address’ to be made to the doctor. Not, obviously, to offend the authorities, that would never do. In this he is, timidly, miles away from Hovstad who wants to offend as many people as possible and proceeds to lambast him when the old man has exited.

Since Stockmann has the article he’d drafted and sent to h is brother in  his hand, he now gives it to Hovstad and tells the delighted editor to publish it, at which he leaves.

Obviously plays and dramas move forwards in the sense that things happen, events lead to crises and climaxes etc. But Ibsen’s plays also work backwards, if that makes sense. What I mean is that, as the action moves forward, Ibsen deploys a schedule of revelations which open up the past and shed light on all the characters’s backstories and motivation.

In this case, Peter the mayor arrives and the brothers have an extended set-piece argument. In this we find out that 1) it was Dr Thomas’s original idea to funnel water to the town baths and establish them as a health cure but that 2) it was Peter, in charge of the town council, who made the foolish decision to lay the pipes for the water shorter and lower than pure mountain streams, so that muck from the Mölledal swamp leaks into them.

In fact early in Act 1 it is explained that the brothers compete about who had the idea in the first place: Peter tells Hovstad that even if the basic ideas was his brother’s, you need a practical man to get things done so it was he, Peter, who actually had the Baths built. But that explains why now, in the argument in Act 2, Thomas tells Peter that the positioning of the pipes was an epic blunder and all Peter’s fault.

In other words, the whole situation was created by these two brothers, it’s a family affair

All this comes out when Peter the mayor delivers some bitter home truths. The doctor naively thinks the town will now have to relay the pipes but the mayor says this will cost a fortune and may take years. During that time the baths will have to be closed, the tourist trade for health spa visitors will collapse and all the newfound wealth and confidence the town was enjoying will come to an end. Meanwhile other neighbouring towns have seen the wealth it brings so they’ll all copy the town’s idea and they’ll permanently lose their place as the innovators.

No, the mayor insists that Dr Thomas makes a public announcement denying the truth of the report i.e. publicly lie to save the town’s economy. Further, he wants Thomas to make a public statement saying he has every confidence in the Board to manage things. When Stockmann is outraged the mayor says he can have him sacked from his job as medical supervisor of the baths; after all, he’s the one who got him the job in the first place.

Peter asks Thomas to consider what impact his role in ruining the town will have on his wife, on his family, daughter and two school-age sons.

At which point Petra bursts in. She’s been eavesdropping from outside the room, followed by Mrs Stockmann. They’re just in time to stop the brothers coming to blows.

This could all be a one-way street with the doctor carrying Ibsen’s message about individualism, but Ibsen makes some effort to balance the argument. The mayor is definitely wrong to want to hush up a serious public health emergency. But on the other hand his criticism of Thomas for being headstrong, over-reacting, writing to the press to express every whim and opinion without pausing to consider the consequences for others – all of this is not only plausible but we see it onstage in Thomas’s (over)excitable character.

This is demonstrated in the act’s last few moments, after Peter has stormed out, when Stockmann’s wife and daughter present different arguments. Wife Katherine begs Thomas to stop and consider the wellbeing of his family, his sons and her. Idealistic Petra says the opposite, criticises her mother for being a coward and tells her father to plough on, concluding that he is fine! He will never give in!

Act 3. In the newspaper office

In the office of the Herald, Billing finishes reading Stockmann’s article and comes to discuss it with Hovstad. They both agree it’s not just a statement of the facts but a damning indictment which rains hammerblows down on the administration. They both talk about it causing a ‘revolution’ although, in practice, this appears simply chucking out the present council and getting them replaced by the Liberal party.

Dr Stockmann

Stockmann arrives still fuming from his row with his brother. He tells them ‘this is war’, to print the article and promises it’s only the first of many. He’ll write many more devastating the administration, bombarding them, crushing them, bettering them, smashing their defences! (On the face of it this is exhilarating, but it’s also done in such a way that you see the justice of brother Peter’s criticism that Thomas is always headstrong and never thinks of the consequences, the bigger picture.)

They call the older printer, Asleksen into the office, who disapproves of all this wild talk and urges moderation but is swept away by the wild-eyed enthusiasm of the other three:

DR STOCKMANN: All those dodderers have got to be chucked out! Wherever they are!…my friends, what we must look for is young and vigorous men to be our standard bearers. We must have new men in command in all our forward positions.

Billing declares Stockmann should be acclaimed the people’s friend and they all toast and cheer him, till he says he has to go and see a patient now, but can’t wait to see his article in print…

When he leaves, though, this united front crumbles a bit. Hovstad makes it clear he wants to use the doctor for his own political agenda, i.e. changing the council for a Liberal one. Aslaksen doesn’t like all this talk of revolution and embarrasses Billing by revealing the latter has applied to become secretary to the council – to Hovstad’s amazement.

Petra

When Asleksen goes back into the print room the other two wonder how long they have to put up with the timid old so-and-so i.e. revealing the extent to which they’re using each other. When Billing goes back to his office enter Petra. She had been commissioned to translate a short story in to English for the paper but has come to say she refuses to do it. When Hovstad asks why she explains that it’s one of those old stories which talk about a big daddy in the sky who will make everything well and punish ill-doers (presumably Ibsen didn’t dare simply write ‘Christian’) and she doesn’t believe in such stuff any more and she hopes he, Hovstad, the apostle of Truth and Enlightenment won’t either.

Hovstad reveals his practical/cynical side by explaining that if you want to persuade people of the Truth and New Thinking on the front pages, you have to offer them something reassuring and familiar on the back pages…

Then he goes a bit further, in fact too far, and reveals that he’s only championing her father because…well, because of her. He doesn’t have to say much more but he’s implying he fancies her, has an eye for her etc.

When she realises what he means, Petra is staggered, appalled, the scales fall from her eyes, she is bitterly disillusioned, she will never forgive him etc. Hovstad then makes it a lot worse by saying she shouldn’t be like that because her father is going to need his help…which sounds creepily like blackmail. Petra hands him the book and stalks out without another word…

The mayor

At which point enter the mayor. Hovstad is fairly obsequious to him, he is the local boss. Peter confirms the Hovstad is planning to publish his brother’s article, although Hovstad weasels out of full responsibility. When Aslaksen enters again, the mayor goes to work on him, He silkily explains to them both what the doctor’s article means. The baths will close for several years putting people out of work. The new piping will costs 200,000 kroner which will have to be raised from the ratepayers i.e. the petit bourgeoisie Aslaksen represents.

This news is a thunderbolt to Aslaksen and shakes Hovstad. Peter cannily gives them a way out of their predicament by suggesting that the entire thing is a story, a fiction or exaggeration cooked up by Dr Stockmann who is well known for being impetuous and rash. Aslaksen and Hovstad are only too willing to fall in behind this interpretation.

At which the mayor announces that he just happens to have a short factual article which puts a completely different spin on things, addresses the ‘rumours’ but claims it’s nothing the current Board can’t easily deal with. Seeing which way the wind is blowing, Hovstad (rather easily) agrees not to print the Stockmann article but to print the mayor’s short report instead.

At this delicate moment Dr Stockmann returns. They quickly bustle Peter into a side room, Billing’s office, then Hovstad is all formality when the doctor enters. Amusingly, the doctor in his pomposity begins to explain to Hovstad that it’s occurred to him that the grateful people of the town might wish to honour him, with a banquet, say, or a procession and he really thinks…as he burbles on Hovstad tries to get a word in edgeways to tell him the lie of the land, but they’re both interrupted when Mrs Stockmann (Katherine) enters.

Katherine

Katherine has been looking for her husband and now confronts him with a more vehement appeal to consider the plight of his family. She incidentally upbraids Hovstad for encouraging her husband in his ruinous decision to publish the article, heavily ironic seeing as Hovstad is struggling to announce that that is just what he isn’t going to do.

Stockmann’s pomposity goes into overdrive as he marches up and down the stage declaring he won’t be put off, even by his wife, declaring that Truth and the People will prevail, imagining the massed ranks of a citizen army marching to victory!!

It’s at this moment he notices the mayor’s hat and stick which he left on Hovstad’s desk in his hurry to nip into the side room. Instantly grasping the situation, Dr Stockmann puts on the hat and marches up and down swaggering the stick till he opens the door to Billing’s office and calls his brother out. All this amply demonstrates Stockmann’s character as a bit unhinged, a bit crazy.

In a nutshell the mayor reveals that Hovstad and Aslaksen have come over to his side. Astonished Dr Stockmann asks them if it’s true, and Aslaksen in particular says yes, the reading public, the ratepayers, the whole population will be against him.

Suddenly, at a stroke, in his mind’s eye, Stockmann goes from being the leader of a people’s army to being a rebel against the people. Suddenly it’s precisely the people who are the problem.

As a last thought he asks Aslaksen to publish his article as a pamphlet but Aslaksen refuses and says no-one else in town will either. ‘I daren’t offend public opinion.’

Stockmann says if he can’t get the article printed, he’ll call a public meeting. Aslaksen assures him no-one will hire him a hall, so Stockmann wildly claims he will hire a man with a drum to accompany him round town as he declaims it.

Outraged at the turncoats Mrs Stockmann changes her tune and declares she’ll stick by her husband.

DR STOCKMANN (puts his arms round her and kisses her): Thank you, my dear! And now, gentlemen, the gloves are off! We’ll see whether you and your shabby tricks can stop an honest citizen who wants to clean up the town.

When the mayor comments that he’s driven his wife mad as well, it’s not just an insult, you do see the force of his comment, that there is something unhinged in Dr Stockmann.

Act 4. The town meeting in Captain Horster’s house

The whole town assembles in Captain Horster’s house including all the main characters. The meeting is being held here because all the other venues refused Stockmann permission i.e. he has alienated the entire town whereas Captain Horster is an old friend who doesn’t understand politics of any kind.

The meeting scene is a combination of strident seriousness with some pretty low comedy. As they assemble various townsmen say they’ve brought their cow’s horn and whistles, hoping for a riotous evening out rather than a serious debate. There’s a drunk man at the back who keeps shouting comic misunderstandings of the main speeches and being thrown out by the men around him only to reappear and shout some more comic stuff. Critics have deprecated this but I thought it added to the general messiness and scrappiness of public discourse, of the ‘public’ as often little more than a disorderly mob, which is Ibsen’s serious point i.e. most people are stupid and misunderstand whatever you try to say. Brexit. Trump.

Earlier the same day the Herald printed the mayor’s factual notes about the Baths which calmly pointed out that all Dr Stockmann’s accusations are false, and most of the people attending the meeting have read that article and accept it as the truth.

Things are about to get started when the mayor floats the idea that the meeting needs a chairman which is quickly taken up and so, against Thomas’s wishes, Aslaksen the newspaper’s printer, is elected Chairman of the meeting.

This was a canny move because it allows Peter to then put it to a vote whether Dr Stockmann should even be allowed to speak, a move backed by Aslaksen in a speech which repeats his mantra of ‘moderation’ but also his petty bourgeois concern that the expense of the doctor’s proposed rebuild would fall entirely on the members of his ratepayers’ association.

Then Hovstad stands up to deliver a subtle character assassination of Stockmann, saying he (Hovstad) is an old friend and initially supported him until he learned that his account was based on errors. Now he laments that his friend’s heart is in the right place but he is often too headstrong.

Despite his wife’s attempts to calm him down, Thomas becomes so infuriated by all this prevarication and censorship that he announces he is going to speak on a different subject.

And it is now that he delivers what we imagine to be The Author’s Message. This is an impassioned denouncement of the stupidity and obtuseness of the majority in any community or society, a decryal of the ‘colossal stupidity of the authorities’ and the small-mindedness of ‘the compact liberal majority’. Stockmann laments how mediocre public opinion is always against anything new, how it opposes anything new and truthful, how the genuinely individual is always crushed and stifled by respectable society.

Hovstad shouts that the majority is always right to which Stockmann replies that the majority is stupid. No matter where you go in the world it’s the fools who make up the overwhelming majority.

He goes into a bit more theory, claiming that ‘truth’s have a fixed lifespan. After a while they become senile and need to be put out of their misery. But that’s precisely the moment when ‘the majority’ take them up and swear by them. Hovstad defends the tried and tested old truths but Stockmann says it is exactly that attitude which is holding society back. It is the masses who are polluting society’s spiritual life and infecting the ground they stand on. The greatest lie is that the common people, the most ignorant, uneducated and stupid sections of society, should have the final say. The handful of intelligent individuals in a society must always fight to be free, to escape from ‘the mass mind’. It is the triumph of the mass, of the liberal compact mind which Aslaksen and Hovstad promised him back at the start, which has ensured their entire town is built on a quagmire of lies and deceit.

Understandably, the townspeople feel roundly insulted by these accusations and become angry but Stockmann then goes way over the top. He says he loves the town so much he would rather see it razed to the ground then thrive on lies. And then that all the people who live this lie deserve to be ‘wiped out like vermin’, deserve to be ‘exterminated’.

Unsurprisingly this turns the entire audience against him, one man says it’s the talk of an ‘enemy of the people’ and the chant is taken up across the room. This is taken up by Aslaksen who proposes a motion that Stockmann formally be declared ‘an enemy of the people’.

During the chaotic voting Morten Kiil comes up to Stockmann to check he heard right something Stockmann said in his speech which is that his, Kiil’s tanneries, are the worst offenders in leaking impurity into the pipes. He warns that if this fact is printed anywhere it will be very costly for the doctor.

Separately, a Mr Vik goes up to Captain Horster and asks why he is loaning his house to an enemy of the people. When Horster says it’s his to do what he likes with, Vik says two can play at that game.

Back on the stage Aslaksen announces the result of the vote which has unanimously declared Stockmann an enemy of the people.

As the meeting breaks up Stockmann asks the captain if there’s room for his family on his ship going to America (as we learned in Act 1). Voices in the mob declare they should go and smash his windows or dunk him in the fjord and the scene ends with the mob chanting ‘enemy of the people’ over and over again.

Act 5. Repercussions

It’s the next morning and back in Dr Stockmann’s house after a night of rioting, which has seen crowds outside his house chanting slogans and throwing stones through his windows. He and his wife are clearing up. The maid brings a message that the glazier won’t be able to attend to fix the windows as he is scared what people will think, prompting a characteristic outburst from Stockmann: ‘they’re all cowards, the whole lot of them. Nobody dares to do anything for fear of all the others.’

The maid now presents another letter which has been handed in at the door. It’s from their landlord. He is serving them notice to quit. He’s evicting them.

Katherine asks if he’s thought through this sudden plan to leave for America. Stockmann is under no illusions that there won’t be public opinion and stupidity in America, too, but it’s bigger and a man can hide.

Petra comes home unexpectedly to announce that she’s been sacked from her school for her association with an enemy of the people. The head didn’t want to do it but had received letters accusing Petra of holding ‘advanced’ views. The letters were, of course, anonymous, making Stockmann curse the authors as cowards and announced ‘We are not going to live in this stinking hole a moment longer.’

Captain Horster enters to considerately ask how they are and if they got home safely last night before announcing that although his ship is still sailing to America he won’t be captaining it. He, too, has been sacked. His boss, like Petra’s is a decent sort but, like Petra’s, he daren’t do otherwise, afraid of public opinion.

His brother Peter the mayor arrives with an envelope containing his notice. Of course, he doesn’t himself want to sack him, but he daren’t do otherwise, afraid of public opinion. As to trying to find another job, he won’t. The Ratepayers Association is distributing a petition to all its members and nobody will dare not to sign it.

There’s a further twist. Peter now insinuates that Thomas was only brave to mount this whole campaign and attack the members of the council because he knew he was provided for in old Morten Kiil’s will. This is in fact complete news to Stockmann but when he rejoices that his wife and children will be looked after, Peter chooses to interpret this as meaning that the doctor and Kiil had been in a joint conspiracy, then extrapolates that maybe Thomas only launched the campaign in order to truckle to Kiil’s wish for vengeance against the council, for sacking him from his post on it and levying such high taxes.

Out of nowhere Peter has conjured this imaginary conspiracy and pretends to be shocked at Thomas’s deceitfulness while Thomas is astonished at Peter’s Machiavellian cynicism. These brother will never understand each other. Peter stalks out.

Enter the very same father-in-law Morten Kiil with an even more amazing revelation. He tells Dr Stockmann that he has just spent the entire large sum he had set aside to bequeath to Katherine and his boys buying up all the shares in the Baths. Last night Stockmann told him that his tanneries were the worst offenders so now he wants to make things right; he wants Stockmann to clean up the Baths and clear his name.

But to put it another way, if he doesn’t succeed then the shares are worthless and Katherine and the boys will inherit nothing. Persisting with his story about the pollution and disease will impoverish his wife and children. Stockmann walks up and down the room in a daze and berates his father-in-law for putting him in this ridiculous situation. Kiil then makes it even worse by saying he has until 2pm today to decide whether he can come up with a cover story, invent a way of cleaning the water, or just changing his story, or he’ll give the shares to charity and Katherine will inherit nothing. Until 2pm and he walks out.

Just as Hovstad and Aslaksen arrive at the front door. Blimey, it’s like Piccadilly Circus at the Stockmann house this morning!

Hovstad and Aslaksen note old Kiil leaving which confirms their suspicions. They’re heard the rumour that old Kiil has been buying up shares in the Baths and they now believe that the entire thing was a collaboration and a sting. They offer to put their services and the newspaper at his command when he’s taken over control of the Baths and to back whatever plans he has to expand or renovate them.

Stockmann the naive at first doesn’t understand what they’re driving at but when the penny drops he decides to play along a bit in order to ask what they’re expecting to get out of it. Oh nothing much, replies Hovstad, it’s just that the Herald is undergoing a bit of a financial crisis at the moment, so a bit of funding or support would be very welcome.

When he says what if he doesn’t give them a penny, both men strongly imply that they’ll blackmail him, threatening to expose his conspiracy. In other words (as in Hovstad’s tacky propositioning of Petra) both men, so quick to sound off about Truth and Independence, turn out to be as corrupt as the establishment they seek to overthrow.

Once he’s heard them out, Stockmann goes bananas, grabs his umbrella, chases them round the stage brandishing it (for some reason I suddenly saw him as Captain Haddock and imagined him chasing the two creeps round and round the table shouting, ‘Ten thousand blistering barnacles in a thundering typhoon’).

He threatens to make Hovstad climb out the window but is interrupted by the entry of Katherine which allows Hovstad and Aslaksen to escape through the door.

The play winds up quickly. Goaded beyond endurance, Stockmann sends a message to Kiil saying No no no. Screw the inheritance. Screw his job. Screw America. He tells Katherine they’re not going to leave, they’re going to stay here, scrimp and save as best they can, and Stockmann is going to devote himself to being an enemy of the people and excoriating the people in power with all his might.

At that moment his sons, Ejlif and Morten come in. When Stockmann asks them if they have a holiday they say, no, they got into a fight about him at school so their teacher told them to stay away for a few days.

At which moment Stockmann has another brainwave. Oh God, not another one, moans his long-suffering wife. Yes, he will home school his sons and to do so he will set up a small school. He’ll educate the children of the very poor. Katherine asks why on earth he wants to stay and Stockmann replies because he is the strongest man in town. And when Katherine asks what he means, he replies that he has made yet another discovery (oh no):

STOCKMANN: The thing is, you see, the strongest man in the world is the man who stands alone.

Ibsen and Allegory

Liberal criticism insists that all art and literature be about something, an attitude I loathe. One of the things I loved about Samuel Beckett’s plays is they’re not really about anything. There are people and they might say things but the real thing going on is the patterns and the repetitions, the counting and the calibrated movements.

Well, Ibsen is a great genius but the thing I like least about his plays is how they offer themselves up to the deadening clichés of liberal criticism and interpretation. Thus it is bleeding obvious that Dr Stockmann represents a certain type of integrity and honesty and is then set against a little set of opponents who each represent other types. You could make a mind-map with Stockmann at the centre representing INTEGRITY and then lines leading off to each of the secondary characters, each with their own allegorical title. In fact despite his vaunted realism and father of modern theatre reputation, in the highly schematic conception of his dramas Ibsen reminds me of medieval allegory, The Faerie Queene or the Pilgrim’s Progress.

Thus his brother the mayor is Mr Worldly Wise, clever at deploying arguments personal and political, and managing meetings, bureaucracy, and the crowd, in favour of his position.

The printer Asleksen is the Voice of Moderation, only ever opening his mouth to council caution and moderation which, Ibsen shows, is really a form of moral cowardice.

Hovstad is Mr Slimy Corruption, who makes a huge song and dance about his independence and free speech and integrity but turns out a) happy to publish bollock old stories about Christianity purely to butter up his conservative readers, b) in a gruesome scene, tries to hit on Petra, and c) once he realises the doctor’s revelations will be ruinous for the town and his paper, completely abandons the doctor only at the end to 4) reveal he thinks the whole thing is a scam, worthy of his own corrupt view of the world.

Billing is Hovstad’s Mini-Me, a loudmouth about ‘the revolution’ who turns out to have applied for a job as secretary to the very council he claims to want to overthrow.

And then The Mob, the townspeople, the populace, possessors of Public Opinion which turns out to be the only force in this wretched society. Not Christian belief, not even traditional morality, rule this society but fear, the fear which leads their landlord to evict them, Petra’s headmistress to sack her, the boys’ teacher to send them home, and old Captain Horsley to be relieved of his command. Fear of supposed Public Opinion is all that drives this society.

And his daughter is Miss Pure-in-Heart, supportive of what is clearly a not completely accurate image of her embattled, sometimes hesitant father, holding him to the Path of Righteousness.

James McFarlane’s introduction

I like James McFarlane’s translations. They’re surprisingly clear and modern considering they were done in the late 1950s. I also like his introduction which makes the following useful points:

‘An Enemy of the People’ is generally considered the thinnest of Ibsen’s mature plays. It was written in half the time he usually spent on a play. It was a quick angry response to the criticism of ‘Ghosts’.

Some critics see ‘An Enemy’ as the end of a series which began with ‘Pillars of Society’ (1877) with ‘Rosmersholm’ inaugurating a new mode of composition that characterised his final seven plays, with ‘The Wild Duck’ playing the role of swing position, the switch between middle style to final style.

Part of the pace of ‘An Enemy’ is due to the way it dramatises extremely well-worn opinions of Ibsen’s. His correspondence amply proves Ibsen’s profound hatred of any party or association or grouping of any sort which based itself on the ‘majority’, majority decisions or majority rule. As long ago as 1872 he talked enthusiastically about undermining the whole concept of the state for the state is the curse of the individual.

Rather amazingly, his politics veered towards anarchism and the extreme left because they, at least, cared about the important things in life while he thought the large organised political parties traded in nothing but lies and sham. He considered freedom’s worst enemy to be organised Liberalism.

Well the harsh reaction to ‘Ghosts’ drove these opinions into overdrive and added a new vitriolic loathing of the press, especially the Liberal press, which spouts bombast about freedom but turns out to be the craven slave to ‘public opinion’ and organised pressure groups and its own circulation figures. He thought the press (in McFarlane’s words) ‘a parasite on the grotesque and deformed body politic’ (Introduction page xi).

When he comes to look at the details of the play McFarlane makes the point that both Dr Stockmann and Gregers (from ‘The Wild Duck’) have only recently returned from a long period up north or in isolation from society. This (not very subtly) explains why they fail to understand even the basic realities of the societies they try to reform. Their ideas are abstract, untempered. They lack knowledge of what is socially possible.

Individualism

To quote McFarlane, Ibsen was at pains in the play to stress:

the need for individual decision, the necessity for individual responsibility and the value of individual courage… (Introduction p.xii)

which is interesting because I’ve just been reading the essays of Oscar Wilde from a few years later, from the late 1880s, in which he bases an entire creed on the cult of individualism, for example The Soul of Man under Socialism which is a hymn to the paramount importance of the Individual. On the face of it you could hardly have two authors more unlike in subject matter and style than Ibsen and Wilde and yet here they are, sharing the same underlying ideology – why? Why do two such dissimilar writers both evince the same horror and revulsion at the way late-Victorian bourgeois society sets out to crush individuality and spirit?

Credit

I read ‘An Enemy of the People’ in the 1960 translation by James McFarlane which was packaged up, along with his translations of ‘The Wild Duck’ and ‘Rosmersholm’ into a World’s Classics paperback in 1988. I read the 2009 reprint.

Related links

• Enemy of The People online

Ibsen reviews

• The Doll’s House (1879)
• Ghosts (1881)
• An Enemy of the People (1882)
• The Wild Duck (1884)
• Rosmersholm (1886)
• Hedda Gabler (1890)
• The Master Builder (1892)

Drama reviews

• Play reviews