The town's new baths have a splendid public face and a poisoned supply. In Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, Dr Thomas Stockmann sends water samples for analysis and comes home with a report that should change the pipes beneath the celebrated building. At first he expects congratulations. By the last act, stones have broken his windows, the newspaper has withdrawn its support, and the room in which the townspeople condemned him stands empty. Stockmann decides to use that same room as a school. The distance between the baths and the school is the play's real course: a discovery must find people willing to hear it, and Stockmann keeps changing the shape of that hearing.
I read Stockmann as an EIE. In the site's Model A, EIE has Fe, Emotions, as Base and Ni, Intuition of Time, as Creative. Model L names their particular forms Fe(N.) Sentiment and Ni(F.) Reverie. Sentiment concerns the force of shared feeling and public expression; Reverie gives a felt direction to what is happening across time. Stockmann's report begins as a fact about a water system. What occupies him, almost at once, is the coming life of the town: the visitors who will bathe, the citizens who will have to choose, the future that a grand civic opening has already promised. He tries to turn knowledge into a public event. The attempt is energetic, generous in places, vain and ugly in others. All of it belongs to the reading.
The town above the pipes
At the start, the baths are more than a municipal investment. Stockmann's brother Peter, the mayor, calls them the centre around which the town will grow. The doctor had himself argued for the project. His discovery therefore damages something he helped bring into being. The laboratory report gives him a way to name the trouble: filth from upstream enters the conduits and reaches the baths. His proposed repair is costly and would delay the season. Peter asks what the town can bear and who will pay. The doctor hears an effort to preserve the baths by letting their visitors become ill.
The staging lets a literal hidden structure disclose a public one. The handsome baths depend on pipes that the visitor never sees; the town's prosperity depends on owners, householders, newspaper subscribers and taxpayers who will resist being told that the foundation is unsound. Hovstad, editor of the People's Messenger, eagerly turns the water into a political metaphor. He tells Stockmann that the physical morass points to another morass in civic life. Stockmann is slower to accept that argument than a simple portrait of him as an agitator would suggest. He wants the contaminated supply repaired. Yet once the editor offers him a public stage, the doctor's imagination of what his discovery can accomplish expands.
This distinguishes him from the site's Lydgate reading. Eliot's doctor discovers how a proposed medical future must pass through votes, household debts and trust. Stockmann also meets the town that supports his work, but Ibsen gives his conflict a theatrical centre: who will address the citizens, under what name, and with whose backing? The baths are the subject; the public hearing becomes the action. Stockmann's Fe(N.) makes the public life of the report an urgent part of the report itself. He wants an answer from the town, not merely an amended engineering plan.
A report looking for an audience
The early supporters offer Stockmann exactly what he thinks he needs. Hovstad will print his article; Aslaksen speaks for the householders; the paper's staff imagine a campaign. Stockmann, excited by this chorus, begins to speak as if a popular movement already exists. He borrows the mayor's hat and stick in the printing office and plays at taking his brother's place. It is funny because he has mistaken a room full of conditional allies for the town itself. The others have motives of their own. The newspaper wants a political advantage; the householders want the baths to keep earning. When Peter makes the cost of rebuilding and the possible tax burden plain, those allies retreat.
The press room changes before our eyes. The blank sheet that was to carry his report is withheld. Hovstad will not print it; Aslaksen says the subscribers, rather than the editor, finally govern the paper. Stockmann offers to pay for pamphlets and is refused use of the press. Then he proposes a meeting. The town's organisations will lend him no hall. The practical means of making a discovery public pass from his hands one after another. Yet his response is still directed toward listeners. He imagines reading at street corners if he must, even using a drum to gather them. His wife Katherine offers the boys as companions. The family, often treated as the cost of his campaign, is already becoming its first audience.
Here Ni(F.) Reverie matters. Stockmann does not merely want present agreement; he sees the report as the beginning of a different civic future. In the heat of the press room he announces a revolution before he has counted its supporters. This is not long-range planning in the mayor's sense of budgets and pipes. It is a felt impending turn, strong enough to give his words momentum and strong enough to make a borrowed hat look, briefly, like a crown. When the supporters withdraw, he does not lose the sense that an event is coming. He changes where it will happen.
When the speech leaves the water behind
Captain Horster lends a room for the meeting. Before Stockmann can present the contamination report, his opponents move to control the event. Aslaksen is made chairman; Peter reads the financial and civic case against his brother. The doctor responds by announcing a more consequential discovery than the poisoned baths: the condition of the town's public life. His speech attacks the compact majority, the newspaper and the citizens who follow it. Its movement is unmistakably dramatic. The water has furnished an image through which he can speak about the whole community.
The enlargement is the play's hardest material for an admiring reading. Stockmann has a justified grievance against officials who want to suppress an unwelcome report. Then he speaks of ordinary people as lesser stock, comparing them to animals and reserving authority for supposedly superior individuals. Ibsen lets the audience hear why the meeting turns against him. His rhetoric has carried him away from the citizens whose health first moved him to act. Hovstad and Aslaksen exploit that turn, but they do not invent the words. Stockmann supplies them. The vote declaring him an enemy of the people is coercive; the speech it answers is also contemptuous.
The EIE reading earns its place here because it accounts for both the lift and the excess. Stockmann is able to sense the public meaning of a hidden pipe and make that meaning audible. He can also turn the future he fears into a sweeping judgment of the people in front of him. Fe(N.) Sentiment is not a guarantee of sympathy; it is an orientation toward the charged field between speaker and listeners. Ni(F.) Reverie gives that field a history and a threatened future. At the meeting, his sense of the future outruns the particular report. He addresses the town as though one afternoon can expose its entire moral life. The people who came to hear about the baths are made into actors in his larger drama, and many refuse the parts.
The earlier Collingwood and Fe essay
The room after the crowd
By the last act, public rejection has entered Stockmann's house. Windows are broken; his landlord wants the family out; his daughter Petra loses her position. Horster offers them a roof. Hovstad and Aslaksen then return, suddenly willing to use the newspaper after hearing that Stockmann's father-in-law has bought shares in the baths. The purchase is intended to force the doctor into silence: if he persists, the family's inheritance may vanish. The editors misread it as a chance for profit and offer their support on those terms. The same press that could not print the report now proposes to manage the scandal. Stockmann sends them away.
For a moment emigration is possible. Instead he decides to stay, and the scale of his ambition changes. Petra can teach with him; his own sons can join; he asks for other boys from the streets. He proposes using the very room where the town called him its enemy. This is no triumphal recovery of a majority. The building is damaged, the family needs lodging, and a school of a dozen pupils will not rebuild the bath conduits. Yet the choice has form. He can no longer summon a grateful public by declaration. He can gather actual learners and work on what they might become.
The ending keeps its barbs. Stockmann speaks of street children with the same animal-breeding language that disfigured his speech. He tells the family that the strongest person stands alone while Katherine and Petra are visibly beside him and Horster has offered help. Ibsen gives his last claim the rhythm of a heroic discovery and the stage picture of a contradiction. Stockmann is not alone. The people who will make his new work possible are present in the room. That is why the proposed school matters more than the aphorism: its seats must be occupied by persons who can answer him, including some he had insulted from the platform.
Stockmann's orientation runs through these apparently separate actions. He takes a water report to the editor, a rejected manuscript to a meeting, and a rejected speech back into a room he can remake. Each move tries to give an urgent discovery a future among people. The strongest reading of EIE here is neither the heroic truth teller nor the disastrous orator alone. It is the person whose work takes the form of public address, who mistakes the size of his audience and then, at the play's end, gives himself a smaller one with names, chairs and lessons ahead of it. The pipes still need repair. Stockmann has also found a place where the town's future can be spoken to, one child at a time.
