Following below I have excerpted an abstract of the play from the Daily Beast along with some of their comments (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/02/20/how-donald-trump-made-a-norwegian-playwright-the-most-important-man-of-the-moment.html?via=desktop&source=Reddit):
As the play opens, Thomas Stockmann, a doctor, is
anxiously awaiting a piece of mail. The envelope arrives, and inside it
is a lab report he’d ordered up from the university in Oslo on the
quality of the local water in Kirsten Springs. The town had opened a spa
and baths and was attracting visitors from across Norway and indeed
Europe, but Stockmann began to notice the previous summer that a lot of
people were getting sick.
The lab report
confirms that the water is toxic. Stockmann’s friends—including the
publisher, editor, and lead reporter of the local liberal-reformist
newspaper—drop by. He shares the news with them, and they thank him for
this act of civic gallantry and express confidence that the town will
bow to him in gratitude. “By God, doctor,” the editor exclaims, “you’re
going to be a leading man in this town!”
Doktor
Stockmann’s brother, Peter, is the town mayor. Thomas excitedly shares
with him the news that he—and science—have gotten to the bottom of
things, and now the problem can be fixed. Peter is decidedly
unenthusiastic. Thomas is confused. Peter informs his brother that
fixing the problem—it is one of the play’s most remarkable contemporary
echoes that the pollution is caused by an upstream tannery, certainly
unregulated in 1882—will require redoing the water system root and
branch. This will necessitate a tax increase. On top of that, of course,
once word spreads, tourists will stop coming to the insalubrious baths,
which have been the great source of the town’s income and pride.
Well, you can see where things go from there. For a
time, Thomas is convinced he will triumph. I have the press and the
majority on my side, he proclaims, to say nothing of the science. How
could I lose? “The liberal press will stand up and do its duty!”, he
proclaims.
Then, slowly, the screws
tighten. Peter offers Thomas the chance to go before the townspeople and
announce that it was all a mistake, he’d vastly overstated the problem.
Thomas refuses. The liberal newspaper, which was all set to publish his
article, reverses course and deserts him. In desperation, Thomas rents
out a lecture hall to explain his findings to the people, but Peter
takes the floor before Thomas and riles up the mob. The newspaper
publisher—who, just like small-town newspaper proprietors today, comes
from and represents the local business community—stands up and declares
Thomas “an enemy of the people.”
He
loses his job and his home. His wife stands beside him but his two
young boys are beaten up at school, and his grown daughter, known about
town before all this for her radical ideas, loses her job as a teacher.
The schoolmistress received three anonymous letters denouncing her, she
tells her father, and Thomas’s reaction to them could be said almost to
the word today of abusive pro-Trump tweeters who hide behind their
Twitter handles: “The big patriots with their anonymous indignation,
scrawling out the darkness of their minds on dirty little strips of
paper. That’s morality, and I’m the traitor!”
.....................................................................
For Ibsen and his audiences, all that was needed
was that the science was on the doctor’s side. He and they didn’t live
in an age when corporations were spending billions of dollars trying to
persuade the public that science was “fake science.”
So
that’s where “enemy of the people” comes from. The enemy was unpopular,
and undoubtedly an “elitist”; but he trafficked in fact, and he was
right.
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