Ibsen wrote An Enemy of the People during 1882 in the aftermath of the dreadful reception he had experienced with his earlier play Ghosts. Through the person of the main character, Dr Tomas Stockmann, Ibsen was able to describe his views of a society he considered inadequate to receive new ideas and opinions. It was a society that Ibsen equated to a ‘swamp’. More than that, these views held that civilisation itself was deeply flawed from its original conception. What Ibsen desired was to ‘torpedo the Ark’. The prime targets considered by Ibsen to be the corrupting influence on civilisation were the politicians and by extension their hypocritical mouthpiece, the press.

Ibsen and realism

Ibsen is regarded as the father of the modern theatre. He introduced a new realism into his writing that was to influence the writing of plays with far-reaching effect. He dealt with contemporary issues in a realistic setting. Yet these contemporary issues attain a universal dimension by Ibsen’s use of a carefully thought-out and meaningful symbolism. Nora’s home in The Doll’s House is reflected on stage by the presence of a real doll’s house, and the symbolic allusions of a wild duck in the play of that name is represented by a real wild duck. In An Enemy of the People there is real pollution which becomes a comment on the moral corruption of society. After his great verse dramas, Brand and Peer Gynt, Ibsen wrote only in prose, giving his characters dialogue that was natural and psychologically accurate. There are moments when the melodramatic style, so popular in the nineteenth century, emerges in Ibsen’s work, but it is always subsumed into a meaningful and psychological truth that is compelling and profound.

Stockmann and Greek tragedy

The character of Dr Stockmann represents an intelligent and educated man of the late nineteenth century. He is versed in the techniques of contemporary science and technology. Yet his character is questionable when consideration of his personality is taken into account. This intelligent, educated man is also naive, strong-willed, egotistical and superior. Like a Greek tragic hero, Stockmann is full of noble intentions and moral rectitude, with a passionate desire to tell the truth; but when this truth is questioned, he refuses to listen to counter-arguments and allows those fatal flaws to intrude on his judgement. This hero does not bend; he shows no regret or remorse. What he fails to understand is the society with which he must work and which, in turn, is unwilling to listen to the scientific truths with which Stockmann confronts it.

Ibsen and the new thinking

An Enemy of the People contains a great deal of new nineteenth-century thinking. There are references to bacteria and animals that reflect the contemporary shock of Darwinism. Stockmann sees himself as some kind of superman reminiscent of a Nietzschean ideal. Not least are the references made to the ‘solid majority’. The idea that mass public opinion should take precedence over the truth of the expert is not confined to Ibsen’s thinking. The setting of the play reveals a society in which the new liberalism cannot be trusted in the hands of dangerous ‘free thinkers’. Stockmann would stand with the English philosopher John Stuart Mill who alluded to mass public opinion as ‘collective mediocrity’.

Ibsen and the twenty-first century

The prime motivator of the plot in An Enemy of the People is the discovery of the virus in the baths, an unpalatable truth that is met with scepticism and disbelief. The only remedy seems to be the closure of the baths and their reconstruction at great expense. Alternatively there is the hope that ‘surely science is going to be able to come up with some sort of antidote, I’d have thought; some sort of prophylactic’.

All this echoes recent concerns over salmonella in eggs, GM crops, SARS and even Cadbury’s chocolate. In each case ‘experts’ flag up the dangers to public health and this is immediately countered by ‘officials’ and politicians with the assurance that there is no real danger. The refusal of the government of the United States to endorse the Kyoto agreement was made, seemingly, in the belief that science will come up with ‘some sort of prophylactic’.

We are still subject to the whims of experts and officials.

Brian Ingram