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Henrik IbsenAn Enemy of the People
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1882A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Act IAct Summaries & Analyses
Act I Summary
Act I opens in the Stockmann family house shortly after supper time. Billing, the sub-editor of the local paper People’s Messenger, is eating roast beef with Mrs. Katherine Stockmann. He was supposed to eat with Dr. Thomas Stockmann, but Billing was late, and the doctor did not wait for him. Instead, Thomas ate at the planned time and left with their sons Morten and Ejlif. As Billing eats his meal, two other guests arrive at the house. The first is Thomas’s brother Peter Stockmann, the local mayor. Next comes Hovstad, the People’s Messenger editor. Katherine offers the men some roast beef. Hovstad accepts, but Peter says that eating meat in the evening will upset his stomach.
Billing and Hovstad have come to the house to talk to Thomas about the Baths, a recently built medicinal spa that everyone hopes will make their small town famous. Thomas and Peter are both instrumental in running the Baths; Thomas is the medical director and Peter is the chairman. Since summer is approaching, the editors hope to publish a piece that Thomas wrote a few months earlier about the Baths, which they hope will entice potential clients will be to visit the town. Peter is upset that Billing and Hovstad are specifically interested in Thomas’s input. He says that although the Baths were Thomas’s idea, the facility never would have been built without his leadership and initiative. Although everyone agrees that Peter played an important role, he continues to be frustrated, especially when Thomas and the boys return home.
Thomas is accompanied by Horster, a local ship captain. Katherine makes toddy for the adults, which leads Peter to remark on what he sees as his brother’s excessive lifestyle. Thomas counters that after being poor for years he feels the right to some minor luxuries, such as entertaining his friends. Eventually, Peter leaves, clearly in a bad mood.
Throughout the gathering, Thomas is eagerly awaiting the mail delivery. He is expecting an important letter but will not discuss what it is about with his brother present. Soon after Peter leaves, his daughter Petra returns from her teaching job with the letter in hand. The letter, which comes from a scientific lab, confirms Thomas’s suspicion that runoff from the local tannery has seeped into the water at the Baths. Anyone who touches or drinks the water will be at risk of poisoning.
Thomas is disturbed by the letter but is happy that his fears are officially confirmed. He explains that he was skeptical about the Baths project from the beginning, and that now he has the evidence he needs to shut it down before anyone is harmed. Katherine, Petra, Hovstad and Billing share his relief, and the newspaper men agree to publish the findings as soon as possible. Thomas hurries to send a report to the Baths Committee. He was so certain there was an issue that he already has a letter prepared. Although Thomas is confident that the committee will listen to him and take the appropriate action, the others worry that Peter, the mayor and committee leader, will not like what his brother has to say.
Act I Analysis
Act I establishes most major characters of An Enemy of the People, most of whom are important public figures in an unnamed, small Norwegian town. Before the conflict surrounding the Baths is revealed, it is clear that town politics are extremely important to most of the major characters, although each has a very different opinion about both how the town should function and what their particular role should be within it. Although the play is set in a single small town, Henrik Ibsen intended the story to be a microcosm of the problems he saw in Norwegian society more broadly at the time. Each character or group of characters can be viewed as a symbol for a different major societal force. In Act I, before the play’s central conflict begins, the reader sees how the characters act on a surface level—the outward motivations that they want other people to believe they hold.
Hovstad and Billing, who represent the media, are depicted as politically progressive and willing to take on everything that they find problematic with the old-fashioned leadership in their town. They speak openly about revolution, and instantly view the pollution at the Baths as a tool for radical change. Petra shares these views, but from a somewhat different perspective. As a teacher, she expresses a concern for how misinformation is being spread from older generations to young people, and she hopes to instill a spirit of free-thinking and independence among her students. Katherine can be viewed as a symbol for the traditional way of life; she is primarily motivated by keeping her family safe, taking care of the house, and fulfilling the role of a traditional wife. She functions as a contrast to people like Petra, Hovstad, and Billing; she views tradition as equivalent to safety and is uncomfortable with things like paganism being discussed freely in her living room.
Peter, meanwhile, is a symbol for the government. He is the only character to be portrayed in a negative light from the very beginning; he is in a terrible mood throughout his time at the Stockmann house, continuously finding ways to put down his brother and assert his authority. This can be seen through his criticism of their belongings and meal; he brags that he is healthier and thriftier than his brother because he eats only bread and tea for dinner and does not own useless items like a tablecloth.
This act sets the groundwork for the major themes that will arise within the play, particularly the issues of Truth, Self-Respect, and Resilience and Majority Rule in Democratic Society. Although the contaminated Baths do not become a major issue until Act II, Ibsen sows the seeds of what will become the play’s central conflict very early. This can be seen in Petra’s complaints about her teaching job. When she returns from the school, she laments that she is forced to teach the children things that aren’t true. Although she never gives a specific example, it is clear that she believes that many of the commonly held values in their society are incorrect, and that the future of the community is in peril if widespread opinions are valued over concrete facts.
Thomas’s naïveté, which will ultimately contribute to his downfall, is obvious even in Act I. When he reads the letter confirming that the Baths are poisonous, he celebrates, convinced that the community will listen to them and that he has saved them from an inevitable crisis. His words at the end of Act I become ironic by the end of the play; he envisions celebrations in his honor and warns the other characters against treating him as a hero as he is only doing his duty as chief medical officer. The upcoming turmoil is foreshadowed when the characters discuss how important the Baths are for the community’s economy, but Thomas remains blissfully ignorant, assuming that the everyone agrees that safety is more important than financial gain.
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By Henrik Ibsen
