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1882 play by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen
- An Enemy of the People (original Norwegian title: En folkefiende) is an 1882 play by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen that delves into the conflict between personal integrity and societal norms.
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An Enemy of the People (original Norwegian title: En folkefiende) is an 1882 play by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen that delves into the conflict between personal integrity and societal norms.
An Enemy of the People, five-act drama by Henrik Ibsen, published in 1882 as En folkefiende and performed in 1883. An Enemy of the People concerns the actions of Doctor Thomas Stockmann, a medical officer charged with inspecting the public baths on which the prosperity of his native town depends.
- Henrik Ibsen
- 1882
- Introduction
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Media Adaptations
- Characters
- Themes
- Topics For Further Study
- Style
- Historical Context
- Compare & Contrast
An Enemy of the People, published in 1882, is Henrik Ibsen's response to the public reception of, and the critical assault upon, his preceding play, Ghosts (1881)—a play about sexual vice, moral corruption, and syphilis. Indeed, Ghosts turned Ibsen into a kind of enemy of the people. In Norway, the published edition of the play sold poorly and coul...
Norwegian playwright Henrik Johan Ibsen was born on March 20, 1828, in the small port town of Skien, Norway. His father, Knud Ibsen, was a prosperous merchant, his mother, Marichen Altenburg, a painter. The fortunes of the family took a downturn when Ibsen was around eight years old. Thus, Ibsen's childhood was marked by their poverty and the socia...
Act 1
Within the comfort of a prosperous bourgeois household, dinner has been eaten and Dr. Stockmann and his two boys are out for an after-dinner walk. The table has not yet been cleared. Mrs. Stockmann is serving some cold roast beef to Billing, a reporter for the People's Herald who has stopped by. Peter Stockmann, her husband's brother and the mayor of the town, enters. Peter refuses Mrs. Stockmann's invitation to have something to eat. Mr. Hovstad, the editor of the People's Heraldenters, hopi...
A 2005 screen adaptation of An Enemy of the Peoplewas produced in Norway by Aage Aaberge and Kaare Storemyr and directed by Erik Skjoldbjærg, with a screenplay by Nikolaj Frobenius. It was distribu...An Enemy of the Peoplewas adapted by Arthur Miller, directed by Jack O'Brien, and produced by David Griffiths for television in 1990.Ganashatru (1989) is a film adaptation of An Enemy of the People that was written and directed by the Indian filmmaker Satyajit Rayand released by the National Film Development Corporation of India.An Enemy of the Peoplewas adapted as a film in 1978, with a screenplay by Alexander Jacobs and Arthur Miller, directed by George Schaefer, and starring Steve McQueen and Bibi Andersson. It was prod...Aslaksen
Aslaksen prints the local newspaper, People's Herald. He considers himself to be progressive politically but believes that radicalism must be tempered by moderation in all his opinions and actions. Aslaksen views the matter of the baths as a political issue rather than as a matter of public health, and he frames it as one needing his sober backing against the authorities, whom he believes must be moved to cooperate but must not be offended. He is, above all, however, entirely self-interested;...
Billing
Billing is a reporter for the People's Herald. He is first a supporter of Dr. Stockmann but, like his colleagues on the newspaper, turns against Stockmann when his own self-interest is threatened. Billing presents himself as a disinterested outsider politically but he is actually positioning himself to secure a place on the town council.
Captain Horster
Horster is fired from his job as the captain of a ship after he provides Dr. Stockmann with his house to use as a meeting hall. Although he claims to be an unpolitical man, Horster is independent and is guided by a sense of right and wrong. After the Stockmann family is left homeless, he offers to let them live in his house and after Petra is fired as a teacher, he offers to let her use his house as a school.
Self-Interest
One thing that all Dr. Stockmann's opponents have in common is a firm dedication to their own self-interest even when it is at the expense of the common good, as it always is. The Mayor, Dr. Stockmann's brother Peter, is not the least bit civic-minded. He is concerned with his own reputation, with his power, and with his sense of his own virtue. The liberal newspapermen, Aslaksen, Billing, and Hovstad are all corrupt. What makes them corruptible is that their devotion to their own interests t...
Social Responsibility
Dr. Stockmann embodies the social responsibility that his opponents have replaced with self-interest. He is in some ways a vain man. He relishes the esteem he believes his discovery that the water is deadly will bring him. But vanity like that is different from self-interest. Dr. Stockmann's allegiance is to truth and right action. His pride is the result of the success he has in making a discovery. His daughter, Petra, is also motivated in all her actions and reactions by an unshakeable sens...
In An Enemy of the People, the issue that provokes the central conflict in the play is the quality of the water at the Baths. Today, climate change is a major political and ecological issue, and ma...With several members of your class, organize a debate around the following topic: The majority is always wrong. Cite historical examples and examples from the play.At the conclusion of An Enemy of the People, following the belief that education will contribute to social improvement, Dr. Stockmann decides to open a school. Focusing either on Western European c...Dr. Stockmann is at first blind to the nature of his society. When he realizes its power to condemn him, rather than being weakened by this revelation, he is strengthened. Write a short storyor a b...The Fourth Wall
An Enemy of the Peopleis a realistic play. That means that in it, Ibsen creates the illusion of realism, that what is happening on the stage looks like life as it really happens. The play proceeds as if it were happening in a room in which the fourth wall of the room has been removed and the audience, unknown to the persons of the play, is peering into their private spaces.
Prose Plays
Ibsen thought of himself as a poet and he began his career writing in verse. His first great successes, plays that are still staged, such as Brand and Peer Gynt, were verse dramas. But with Pillars of Societyin 1877, Ibsen abandoned verse and wrote plays only in prose, attempting to find the language of the middle-class of his time. Ibsen's poetry, once he began to write in prose, can be found in the rhythms of his plays and the depth of his imagination. Readers of Ibsen's plays in English ar...
Reversal and Recognition
The kind of dramatic plot that Aristotle favored in the Poeticsinvolves a reversal of fortune and a recognition of something that had until then been hidden but that is of primary importance for the fate of the hero and in the creation of his heroism. Until the moment of the reversal's occurrence, the hero of the drama believes in both his good fortune and his clarity of vision. Once reversal and recognition occur, the hero realizes he has been blind to what really is and that his sense of hi...
Reaction to Ghosts
An Enemy of the People was written as Ibsen's response to the acrimony with which Ghosts was met. Ghosts uses the biblical theme that the sins of the fathers will be visited on the sons to explore issues like sexual immorality and venereal diseases, which were shocking topics in 1881. Beyond that, however, Ghosts challenges the predominant Weltanschauung or world view prevalent when Ibsen wrote it. As offensive as writing about promiscuity and syphilis, the real offense in Ghosts resides in t...
The Emergence of the Era of the "Little Man"
Serious plays, such as the great Greek plays or those by William Shakespeare, were in general about members of the nobility. But Ibsen wrote during the second half of the nineteenth century when the social emphasis had been moved away from the nobility to the people, particularly the bourgeoisie—merchants, entrepreneurs, learned professionals. This shift stemmed from the American and the French Revolutions that occurred at the end of the eighteenth century. Thusly, Ibsen took his heroes and v...
The Development of Science
The danger Dr. Stockmann discovers is the result of microscopic organisms, single cell creatures invisible to the naked eye. The existence of such life forms is hard to believe for people who can only believe what they can see, but lack the sophistication to deduce causes from effects. The 1880s, when An Enemy of the People was written, were a time of great advances in science, particularly in the realm of microscopy. In 1880, work with microscopes led to the discovery of the bacillus that is...
1880s: Social observers like Ibsen are concerned about the power that newspapers have to shape public opinion and influence political action.Today:The power of the mass media to influence opinion i...1880s: Pollution occurs following the industrial revolution. Social reformers write about how seriously the air and water are being polluted and how the quality of life and man's relationship with...1880s: Like Dr. Stockmann, who considers leaving Norway, many Norwegians are in fact emigrating. Most move to the United States to find work.Today:Norway attracts immigrants because it has one of t...An Enemy of the People is a play published in 1882 by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. It tells the story of Dr. Thomas Stockmann, who discovers that the water in the public baths of his small Norwegian town is contaminated.
A short summary of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People. This free synopsis covers all the crucial plot points of An Enemy of the People.
- Henrik Ibsen
- 1882
While Henrik Ibsen is a Norwegian playwright, he wrote in Danish, which during his era was the shared language of Denmark and Norway.
Get all the key plot points of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People on one page. From the creators of SparkNotes.
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