Generic Complexity in Ibsen's An Enemy of the People

1 COMPARATIVE ? ama Volume 20Summer 1986Number 2 Generic Complexity in Ibsen's An Enemy of the People Thomas F. Van Laan An Enemy of the People has always been one of Ibsen's most popular plays with producers and audiences and would probably be produced even more frequently were it not for its large cast and multiple settings. Arthur Miller was moved to create an adaptation of it in 1950, and Steve McQueen, in one of his last ventures, chose it as an appropriate vehicle when he decided to try his hand at a serious drama without a chase scene. In remarkable contrast, the play has been far less popular with Ibsen critics and commentators. Few individual studies have been devoted to it, and it tends to receive anything approaching full-scope treatment only in editions that accord every included play a uniform introduction or in studies dedicated to thorough coverage of the entire Ibsen canon or to significant portions of it. Many such studies, moreover, pay it little attention, dismissing it with a few hasty general observations in order to hurry on to work that apparently engages the commentators' interest more deeply. THOMAS F. VAN LAAN is Professor of English and Chairperson of the English Department at Rutgers University. He has published widely on modern dramatic literature. 95 96Comparative Drama This relative paucity of attention is striking, especially given the vast amount of commentary the other prose dramas of modern middle-class life have prompted in recent years, but the reasons can be readily discerned. According to McFarlane, "An Enemy of the People generally ranks as one of the thinnest of Ibsen's maturer works."l It also generally ranks as one of his most straightforward plays ever, lacking almost entirely the hallmarks of complexity and ambiguity that help make Ibsen one of the world's foremost dramatists. From its appearance, commentators have been inclined to adhere to a single uncomplicated reading of the play which is perhaps best summed up by Robert Brustein, who called An Enemy of the People "the most straight-forwardly polemical work Ibsen ever wrote": "Ibsen has invested this play with the quality of a revolutionary pamphlet; and Stockmann, despite some perfunctory gestures towards giving him a life of his own, is very much like an author's sounding board, echoing Ibsen's private conversations about the filth and disease of modern municipal life, the tyranny of the compact majority, the mediocrity of parliamentary democracy , the cupidity of the Conservatives, and the hypocrisy of the Liberal Press."2 In this reading, An Enemy of the People dramatizes its protagonist's struggles against a mob of "crooks and fools"3 and his ultimate spiritual triumph in the midst of practical and material defeat. Without a doubt, there would seem to be ample warrant for this reading, for Dr. Stockmann's adversaries are mercilessly exposed, he himself is in many respects a very appealing figure, and his views generally coincide , often verbatim, with those Ibsen had been expressing in letters and conversations as early as 1872 and with particular vehemence during the time he wrote the play. In any event, whether warranted or not, this standard view continues to gain adherents; as recently as 1980, Bernard F. Dukore concluded his analysis of the play by coming down four-square as a staunch advocate of the prevailing view: "Clearly, Dr. Stockmann's interpretation of events is Ibsen's."4 This is not to say that those who adhere to the standard view have not been aware of certain qualities of the play's protagonist that might seem to call this view into question. From the beginning, they have noticed Dr. Stockmann's rashness, his lack of self-criticism and self-irony, his childish egotism, his naive ignorance of the complexity of human motivation, his Thomas F. Van Loan97 inability to see more than one side of a question, the "illiberal note" he strikes "in modern ears,"5 and his apparent animus against his far more successful brother. For Brian Downs, he is "a figure of fun"; for Ronald Gray, he often "sounds like an opinionated ranter"; and for William Archer, who saw the play as "a straightforward...