. Setting The action takes place in the late 19th Century in a small town on the southern coast of Norway. The town expects to prosper as a health resort, thanks to its new municipal baths. Characters Protagonist: Dr. Thomas Stockmann Antagonist: His Brother, Peter Stockmann, and the Townspeople Who Support His Unethical Position Dr. Thomas Stockmann: Medical officer of the municipal baths, which the town plans to use to attract tourists and bolster the economy. Stockmann discovers that the baths are contaminated with leachate from a local tannery. Mrs. Stockmann: Dr. Stockmann's his wife. Petra: Daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Stockmann. Petra is a schoolteacher. Ejlif and Morten: Sons of Dr. and Mrs. Stockman. Ejlif is 13 and Morten, 10. Peter Stockmann: Dr. Stockmann's older brother. He is the mayor (burgomaster) of the town and its chief constable. He also serves as chairman of the baths' committee. He opposes his brother’s attempt to close the baths to forestall the spread of disease. Morten Kiil: Operator of the tannery and Mrs. Stockmann's adoptive father. Hovstad: Editor of the local newspaper, the People's Messenger. Billing: An assistant editor. Captain Horster: A seafarer who provides Aslaksen, a printer. Various townspeople
Type of Work and Year of Publication An Enemy of the People is a realistic stage drama in five acts. It depicts ordinary life as it is, not as one would like it to be. An Enemy of the People is one of several Ibsen dramas that are sometimes referred to as problem plays because they center on social problems and controversial community issues. Examples of other problem plays by Ibsen are The Wild Duck, A Doll's House, and Ghosts. An Enemy of the People was published in 1882, when realism was just beginning to take root, and staged for the first time in Kristiania, Norway, in 1883. (Kristiania changed its named to Oslo in 1925.) Language: Dano-Norwegian Ibsen wrote An Enemy of the People in Dano-Norwegian, a mixture of the Danish language and Norwegian dialects. Dano-Norwegian evolved from Danish while Norway was a province of Denmark. Although Norway gained its independence in 1814, Norwegians continued to speak and write in Dano-Norwegian, also known as Riksmål. Beginning in the middle of the 19th Century, Norway began developing a new Norwegian language, Landsmål (the language of the land or country), free of Danish influence. Meanwhile, Riksmål developed further and eventually became known as Bokmål, the language of books. Today both varieties of Norwegian are written and spoken in Norway. The Dano-Norwegian of Ibsen is simple, concise, to the point. However, it takes a talented translator to capture the subtleties of the language and the nuances written into the dialogue of An Enemy of the People. Therefore, English-speaking students of Ibsen should choose their translations carefully. One highly respected Ibsen translator was William Archer (1856-1924), a Scottish-born London journalist, drama critic, and playwright who translated many of Ibsen's works. .
Style Because Ibsen wanted to make his plays uncompromisingly realistic, he wrote the dialogue in simple, everday, middle-class language rather than elegant, lofty, or trope-laden language characteristic of romantic plays. But in mimicking vernacular speech, he chose and arranged his words carefully; every word and every sentence counted. An Enemy of the People is not without weaknesses, however--at least in my opinion. On the one hand, the play is often transparently didactic in presenting its message, the importance of accepting the truth. In addition, Dr. Stockmann is so idealistic, so zealous, so triumphal in his campaign to proclaim the truth that he becomes a caricature rather than a real person. Ibsen's realism thus becomes less real. The Ibsen Stage In keeping with his realistic plots and dialogue, Ibsen's stage sets resembled the furnishings of everyday life. There were no elegant foyers or salons with exotic plants or oriental rugs; there were only ordinary rooms of ordinary middle-class folk. In his stage directions for An Enemy of the People, Ibsen describes the set for the first act this way: Dr. Stockmann's sitting-room. It is evening. The room is plainly but neatly appointed and furnished. In the right-hand wall are two doors; the farther leads out to the hall, the nearer to the doctor's study. In the left-hand wall, opposite the door leading to the hall, is a door leading to the other rooms occupied by the family. In the middle of the same wall stands the stove, and, further forward, a couch with a looking-glass hanging over it and an oval table in front of it. On the table, a lighted lamp, with a lampshade. At the back of the room, an open door leads to the dining-room.(From a translation by R. Farquharson Sharp.) On the Ibsen stage, actors did not embellish their lines with broad flourishes of a hand or other exaggerated body movements. They became ordinary people going about their ordinary lives. The proscenium arch was important, however. This arch, from the sides of which a curtain opens and closes, acts in an Ibsen drama as a frame for the realistic portrait painted by Ibsen, a portrait that moves. The proscenium arch became a doorway or window through which the audience--peeping through the arch--could eavesdrop on people in quiet turmoil. The arch helped Ibsen create the illusion of reality. .
Symbolism The spa represents the town's leading citizens and their followers. Although it appears wholesome and healthful, it contains unseen contaminants. Mayor Stockmann and his followers pass themselves off as upright citizens but are really corrupt at heart. The spa water undergoes a test that reveals it polluted. In reporting the results of the test, Dr. Stockmann says, "The whole Bath establishment is a whited, poisoned sepulchre, I tell you--the gravest possible danger to the public health!" The citizens also undergo a test--the crisis precipitated by the report--that reveals them unethical and unscrupulous, just as "poisoned" as the baths. Foreshadowing Dr. Stockmann's daughter, Petra, a schoolteacher, foreshadows the direction of the plot and the theme during a conversation at the dinner table in Act 1. Dining with the Stockmanns are Hovstad, Billing, and Horster. Petra, an idealist like her father, says, "There is so much falsehood both at home and at school. At home one must not speak, and at school we have to stand and tell lies to the children." The school thus is what the community is revealed as later: false. As the conversation progresses, Petra says, "If only I had the means, I would start a school of my own; and it would be conducted on very different lines." Captain Horster then tells her that he has an old house standing empty and that he would be happy to provide her a room in it for the school. It is Horster, of course, who provides space later on for the town meeting. His goodwill gesture results in his dismissal from his job. .
Cain and Abel Motif The central conflict in the play centers on the clash between Peter Stockmann and his younger brother, Dr. Thomas Stockman. In the Old Testament of the Bible (Genesis 4:1-16), Cain--the first-born son of Adam and Eve--murders his younger brother, Abel. Cain, a farmer, was envious of Abel, a shepherd, because God had accepted Abel's offering over Cain's. Motifs pitting one family member against another continued to appear in literature down through the ages. In Sophocles's Oedipus at Colonus and the Greek myth on which it is based, brothers--Polynices and Eteocles--vie for the kingship of Thebes and kill each other. In Shakespeare's Hamlet, Claudius kills his brother, the king, in order to succeed him as king and marry his wife. In the play Inherit the Wind and in films based on it, a fundamentalist preacher, the Rev. Jeremiah Brown, condemns his own daughter, Rachel, to hell because of her relationship with Bertram Cates, who is on trial for teaching Darwin's Theory of Evolution in a local school. The authors of the play, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, based their work on the 1925 Scopes trail in Dayton, Tenn., in which a teacher violated the Butler Law by teaching evolution. Themes 1. Truth must not be hidden, diluted, or altered even when it goes counter to the wishes of the majority. 2. Shiny apples are sometimes rotten at the core. The baths appear safe and salubrious, but poison befouls their waters. In like the manner, the town's leading citizens are outwardly attractive but inwardly repulsive. 3. It doesn’t matter what everyone thinks or wants; what matters is what is right–even when only one person is willing to defend what is right. In Act I, Mayor Stockmann frowns on assertion of the individual will in society, saying, "The individual ought undoubtedly to acquiesce in subordinating himself to the community--or, to speak more accurately, to the authorities who have the care of the community's welfare." In so doing, he sets up the clash later in the play with his brother, who indeed asserts his will. 4. Seemingly upright citizens will compromise their morals when their wallets and livelihood are threatened. In other words, the love of money is the root of all evil.
Ibsen and Spielberg's Jaws Supposedly, Steven Spielberg's highly successful 1975 film, Jaws, was based in part on Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People. Instead of polluting the water with a toxic agent, Spielberg polluted it with a gigantic shark. In Jaws, the residents of Amity Island on the Atlantic coast, who are dependent on the tourist trade for their livelihood, keep their beaches open in spite of warnings from Police Chief Martin Brody and ichthyologist Matt Hooper that a gigantic great white shark roams the waters. In Ibsen's play, the townspeople attempt to keep the spa open in spite of warnings that a danger of another kind, disease, infests the waters. Study Questions and Essay Topics 1. Because Dr. Stockmann's discovery of contamination in the town spa threatens to undermine the town's economic future, the mayor and his supporters attempt to silence the doctor and keep his discovery secret. In your own community, do you recall any instance in which a local government, business, factory, school district, hospital, day-care center, newspaper, or another entity attempted to withhold vital information from the public? 2. Under what circumstances does a government have a right to withhold information from the public? 3. In their attempt to refute Dr. Stockmann at a town meeting, citizens suggest that he has an alcohol or a mental problem or may be seeking revenge for not receiving a pay raise as the spa's medical director. In a good dictionary, look up the Latin term ad hominem (referring to a rhetorical tactic used in an argument to discredit an opponent). Next, decide whether the citizens' accusations are ad hominem attacks. If you believe they are, explain why they can be categorized as such. In addition, decide whether these attacks are fair or whether they are simply ruses to condemn Dr. Stockmann while obscuring the truth. 4. Newspapers today pride themselves on their willingness to print the truth. But do they always print the truth? Or do they sometimes bow to the same forces that pressured Hovstad to abandon publication of Dr. Stockmann's story? 5. What about you--do you frequently change your opinion after yielding to pressure from your peers? 6. Which of the following is most responsible for what goes wrong in the spa town: (1) capitalism, which fosters economic competition and a desire to make money; (2) democracy, which allows citizens to elect leaders, such as Mayor Stockmann; (3) propaganda, which often uses unscrupulous tactics in attempts to persuade people to accept a particular viewpoint; (4) unethical and dangerous environmental policies of the tannery operation; (5) spineless citizenry; (6) inability of Dr. Stockmann to communicate the seriousness of the problem the town faces. 7. If you were an attorney arguing to close the town spa, you would need evidence that the spa water is indeed contaminated. How would you obtain this evidence?
Climax The climax of the play occurs when people of the town declare Dr. Stockmann an enemy of the people. Biographies of Ibsen Biographies of Henrik Ibsen are available at the following web sites: Wikipedia Infoplease Project Bartleby: Columbia Encyclopedia
• عنوان المشاركة: Ibsen's Public Ememy ........Exclusive Art-En
مرسل: السبت آذار 22, 2008 3:40 ص
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اشترك في: 20 تشرين الأول 2007
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