Enemy of the People :: essays papers

Enemy of the People An Enemy of the People, a play written by Henrik Ibsen, is about a sm all(prenominal) town on the southern coast of Norway and how it perceives and accepts truth. The town is governed by Peter Stockmann and doctored by his younger brother, Thomas. The main conflict flares up between these two siblings and then spreads throughout the town as they both try to do best by the community. Dr. Thomas Stockmann is a public-minded doctor in a small town famous for its public baths. He discovers that the water supply for the baths is contaminated and has probably been the cause of some illness among the tourists who are the towns economic lifeblood. In his effort to clean up the water supply, Dr. Stockmann runs into governmental cowards, sold-out journalists, shortsighted armchair economists, and a benightedCitizenry. His own principled idealism exacerbates the conflict. The well-meaning doctor is publicly labeled an enemy of the people, and he and his family are all but driven out of the town he was trying to save. This is an early dramatization of something we know better a century later the difficulty of translating medical scientific knowledge into political action. Ibsens well-intenti atomic number 53d blustery doctor heroically fails. This is partly because the local democratic processes are quite cynical (powerful people interdict him from getting his information to the citizens). Dr. Stockmann also suffers from a professional blindness that keeps him from understanding how anyone could possibly disagree that his scientific truth (he uses the world frequently) requires rebuilding the towns waterworks. He is a classic case of virtue-based ethics sacrificing outcome for principle.This play addresses many social issues. It ties in family, truth, righteousness, community, and politics. It really demonstrates how one issue can have many truths to it and how diametrical people, even within ones own family, can see the same thing in total different perspectives and in doing that act out against one other in an attempt to prove that ones own perspective is the right or only one. In human nature, we are not one to compromise. We see so many things as one way or another, right or wrong rarely do we seek to find the cat valium ground between the two. In this play, common ground is never found, and in the end leaves a family broken up and a society left to wonder.