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    A Study Guide for Henrik Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People"
    A Study Guide for Henrik Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People"
    A Study Guide for Henrik Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People"
    Ebook45 pages47 minutes

    A Study Guide for Henrik Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Henrik Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 12, 2016
    ISBN9781535818186
    A Study Guide for Henrik Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People"

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      A Study Guide for Henrik Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People" - Gale

      08

      An Enemy of the People

      Henrik Ibsen

      1882

      Introduction

      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 could find no theater to produce it. Ghosts was first performed by a touring company in Chicago and, when Ghosts opened in London, according to Peter Watts, writing in the Introduction to the Penguin edition of the play, reviewers called it putrid and an open sewer. A reviewer in the Daily Telegraph is cited by George Bernard Shaw in The Quintessence of Ibsenism as calling Ibsen an egotist and a bungler … A crazy cranky being. Thus, Dr. Stockmann, the protagonist of An Enemy of the People is a version of Ibsen himself. The playwright who uncovers social disease and corruption is represented as a physician who uncovers diseased water and social corruption, is vilified and yet persists in his mission to expose lies and corruption just as Ibsen continued to write probing dramas.

      Although its plot so perfectly parallels Ibsen's own experience as the author of Ghosts, the plot of An Enemy of the People was actually based on several real and similar events. A Dr. Meissner was the Medical Officer at a health spa at Teplitz in Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic, in the 1830s. When cholera broke out there, he issued a public warning and the guests, of course, all left. Rather than drawing praise, his action aroused the wrath of the townspeople. As in An Enemy of the People, they threw stones at his house. Meissner left the town. In 1880, a chemist in Norway's capitol, Oslo, then called Christiania, challenged the sanitary conditions of a steam kitchen, causing a public uproar and a meeting like the one in the fourth act of An Enemy of the People.

      Ironically, unlike Ghosts, An Enemy of the People was a popular and critical success. An Enemy of the People is concerned not only with the problems of corruption and pollution but also with the problem of the relation between the individual and society; the tendency of a democracy to deteriorate into a mobocracy; and the likelihood for moral ideals to be pushed aside by the pressures of self-interest.

      While there are several accurate standard translations of An Enemy of the People, many are somewhat stilted. In the edition referred to here, the play in a translation by Peter Watts is called A Public Enemy. It appears in Ibsen: Ghosts and Other Plays, published by Penguin Books in 1964. An adaptation by Arthur Miller can be found in Arthur Miller: Collected Plays 1944-1961, published by the Library of America in 2006.

      Author Biography

      Norwegian playwright Henrik Johan Ibsen was born on March

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