An Enemy of the People: A Key to Arthur Miller’s Art and Ethics

An Enemy of the People: A Key to Arthur Miller’s Art and Ethics David Bronsen Arthur Miller has been generous in acknowledging his debt to his avowed master, Henrik Ibsen. It is the Ibsen of the middle period with whom he identifies, the author of The Pillars of Society, A Doll’s House, Ghosts, and An Enemy of the People. These are Ibsen’s real­ istic social dramas, all of them examples of the so-called well-made play in which the central character is observed in his relationship to society. In all but the first of these, a protagonist who is preoccupied with justice commits himself to an ideal which he refuses to relinquish, although his own life would be made easier if he accepted the alterna­ tive proffered him. By taking it upon himself to adapt the Norwegian playwright’s An Enemy of the People, Miller was in effect saying that his basic con­ cerns approximate those of Ibsen. By and large he is not wrong in his assumption, insofar as it pertains to the period in Ibsen’s career which saw the creation of the dramas mentioned. On the other hand, al­ though Miller was attracted to Enemy by what he looked upon as its message and by certain affinities he felt he shared with Ibsen, the fact of the matter is that his adaptation of the play is marked by a decided­ ly different bias. By comparing the work of the master with that of the disciple who is handling the same characters, plot material, and construction, the measure of the latter as a playwright will be taken. I The present study should be instructive in other ways. It will test, if only indirectly, the fault-finding of a number of critics who look upon Ibsen’s Enemy as a second-rate work.l In most instances, such commentators can arrive at their conclusions only by overlooking the complex ambivalence of the play. They insist on its straightforward­ ness, on its portrayal of a righteous hero at loggerheads with a cor­ rupt mob. In reality, however, it is a dubious and egotistical “hero” who stands accused by a “ sensible” and hypocritical assembly of citi­ zens. Enemy is a study in ambiguity in which the lines between good 229 230 Comparative Drama and evil are less clearly drawn than these critics would have us believe. Most of the detractors of Enemy see the play as an aggressive apologia written in response to the abuse heaped upon the author as a result of Ghosts, its controversial predecessor.2 According to this line of reasoning, Enemy is a weak play because the author uses Dr. Stockmann as his mouthpiece to express his contumely and exasper­ ation. Ibsen himself, to be sure, commented on certain similarities between his make-up and that of Dr. Stockmann.3 But he overdrew some of these similarities to the point of self-mockery. The excessive wrath and resentment of Dr. Stockmann, to the extent that they reflect Ibsen’s rancor over the reception of Ghosts, are transmuted into a satire Ibsen directs at himself for being carried away into the equiva­ lent of the overly emotional harangues of the fourth act. Ibsen as the author of Ghosts played the role of doctor in diag­ nosing a societal malady and was himself accused of spreading illness. In Enemy he dramatizes the situation of a doctor who discovers the source of infection in the community and is rewarded by being de­ nounced as “an enemy of the people.” But contrary to what these facts seem to suggest, Enemy does not constitute a clear-cut attempt on the part of the dramatist at self-vindication. The Dr. Stockmann that Ibsen has drawn and who is so eager to criticize is for his own part very much open to criticism. There is a leavening of comedy ex­ pressing itself in the form of irony and satire in Enemy, and that this was conscious is borne out by a letter the author wrote his publisher on completion of the play: “ I am still a little uncertain whether to call it a comedy or simply a play; it has...