An Enemy of the People

Katherine, Thomas’s wife, is a much more pragmatic person than her husband, and she often pleads with him to be reasonable and moderate. In the opening acts, she is shown to be more traditional than many of those around her, such as when she objects to Billing, Hovstad, and Petra’s discussing paganism in front of her younger children. As the town turns against Thomas, she keeps their children at the forefront of her mind and often asks him to back down from his fight in order to protect the family. Thomas typically brushes off her worries, calling her a silly woman, but the play does not present Katherine’s pragmatism as a moral failing. Unlike the powerful men Thomas interacts with, Katherine is not greedy or venally self-interested. She foresees the personal consequences of Thomas’s actions when he does not, and she consistently prioritizes her family’s well-being. In this way, she serves as a foil for Thomas, whose single-minded devotion to truth often causes him to misconstrue other people’s motivations. Despite disagreeing with her husband, Katherine remains by his side throughout his trials, and in the end approves of his choice to stay in town and continue to fight.

Petra, Thomas and Katherine’s adult daughter, works as a teacher at the local school. She is a hard worker and enjoys her job, although she expresses frustration in the first act as she is forced to teach the children things that she doesn’t believe. Her name—a feminized version of “Peter”—signals the closeness of her character to her father’s. Like him, she believes in standing up for the truth no matter what. Early in the play, she expresses a desire to set up her own school to teach the children whatever she wants. Captain Horster immediately offers her the use of his dining room as a schoolroom, but at the time she believes it will do no good. When the opportunity arises again at the end of the play, she accepts it gladly. Having seen her father’s livelihood destroyed by conformist thinking, she is no longer willing to compromise in her work.

Petra is her father’s main supporter throughout the play. She encourages his resistance when his brother and other leaders demand that he lie about the safety of the Baths. She is also the first to stand up to Hovstad and Billing when she goes to the newspaper office to tell them she will not translate the English story. While her father still views them as allies, she realizes that they are only concerned with their own interests.

Ejlif and Morten are the two younger Stockmann children. They embody their father’s independent spirit in a childlike form, getting into trouble at school, stealing their father’s cigars, and ultimately getting suspended for fighting in defense of their father’s honor. Throughout the play, Katherine attempts to correct the boys’ behavior in order to protect them from the consequences of their wildness, but Thomas believes that they should see the world for what it really is. By the end of the play, Thomas recognizes the boys’ rebellious attitude as a moral advantage: If true education means teaching students to think for themselves, then disobedient children are in fact more rather than less educable than their more compliant peers. He asks them to recruit others like themselves, saying, “I’m going to experiment with curs, just for once; there may be some exceptional heads among them” (82). Though they have little understanding of the play’s central political conflict, Ejlif and Morten become symbols of a new, enlightened generation that Thomas hopes to create through his new school, which will consist of Ejlif, Morten, and their “street urchin” friends.

Peter is Thomas’s brother and the mayor of their small Norwegian town. Despite his illustrious job, he appears immensely jealous of the social prestige his brother Enjoys as the creator of the Baths that drive the town’s economy. Before learning about the polluted water, he demands equal credit for the project, repeatedly stating that the Baths would never have existed without his social influence.

Peter is ultimately the play’s central villain, as he is the first to decide that the community’s economy is more important than the safety of its residents and visitors. At first, Katherine believes that he will come around if Thomas tells people that Peter was the first to recognize the problem. Thomas is willing to do so, as he values public safety above his own reputation, but Peter ultimately reveals himself to be more conniving than they believed, spreading rumors first that Thomas’s report is exaggerated and later that it is entirely false. Peter’s status as the mayor makes people like Hovstad, Billing, and Aslaksen believe him instantly. At the end of the play, it is unclear whether Peter actually believes that the Baths are dangerous. Like the industrialist Morten Kiil, Peter’s beliefs are inextricable from his political and economic interest, and he struggles to understand that anyone else might act according to any principle other than their own advantage. When he offers Thomas his job back in exchange for signing a statement declaring the Baths safe, it suggests that he sees his brother’s actions as a move to gain power over him, rather than a legitimate concern for human health.

Morten Kiil, also called “The Badger,” is Katherine Stockmann’s adoptive father and the owner of the local tannery. He is very wealthy, but does not admit it until late in the play, when he attempts to use the promise of Katherine’s large inheritance to manipulate Thomas. Kiil does not believe Thomas when he first learns about the pollution at the Baths. His insistence on referring to the bacteria in the water dismissively as “little animals” displays his resistance to new scientific knowledge, especially when that knowledge threatens his reputation and source of wealth. As with other characters in the play—especially Thomas’s brother Peter Stockmann—his judgment of truth and falsehood is subordinate to his interests: He believes what is advantageous to him, and he disbelieves what is disadvantageous. He can be viewed as a symbol for the wealthy citizens of the town, who wield considerable power within the confines of their small community and are chiefly concerned with preserving that power.

By the end of the play, Kiil reveals himself to be somewhat of a villain. He cares only that the public believes the Baths are safe—and thus the tanneries blameless. Whether these things are true is irrelevant to him. He invests all of Katherine’s inheritance into the Baths in an attempt to entrap Thomas into declaring them safe, as continuing to promote the pollution story will cause the Baths to plummet in value and therefore cause his family financial ruin. His belief that this plan will work reveals his inability to comprehend Thomas’s altruistic motivations. It is implied that Kiil does this for his own reputation; he cares more about the public believing that the tanneries are safe than about them actually being so.

Hovstad is the editor of the People’s Messenger, the town’s primary news source. He is characterized as a political radical; after the pollution is discovered, he immediately sees it as a way to bring down the political establishment as a whole. At first, he is one of Thomas’s primary supporters, allowing him to use the paper to say whatever he wants about the Baths and encouraging him toward a more aggressive position against the town’s leadership. However, Thomas’s idealism prevents him from seeing the reality of Hovstad’s character. Though he is not obviously driven by greed like Peter Stockmann and Morten Kiil, in a subtler way he is just like them: He is less interested in the truth than he is in his own ambitions. He supports Thomas’s claim that the Baths are unsafe because he sees an advantage in it. As soon as that advantage disappears, so does his support.

Hovstad’s corruption becomes evident by the middle of the play, when Peter tells him that fixing the Baths will be hugely expensive and destructive to the town’s economy. Although Hovstad sees his paper as a way to share his own political views with the public, he knows that maintaining a strong subscriber base is essential for the paper to continue to exist. As the town begins to resist Thomas’s claims, Hovstad pulls away from the truth and joins forces with Peter to discredit Thomas entirely.

Like Hovstad, Billing sees himself as an independent thinker and political activist. He loves to take performatively radical stances in theoretical debates, as seen in Act I when he claims to the Stockmann children that he is a pagan and that “soon we shall all be pagans” (11), taking delight in the discomfort this causes their mother. In Act III he is shown to be somewhat calculating: When Petra refuses to translate for the paper an English-language story whose message she finds simplistic and false, Hovstad defends the story (which Billing has chosen to publish) as a way to secure the trust of a readership he implicitly characterizes as simple-minded and conventional.

Also in Act III, Billing reveals that he is running for a position with the local government. He assures Hovstad and Aslaksen that he is doing so facetiously as a way to undermine the government’s authority, but the claim makes little sense, and neither man appears to believe it. The conversation turns to the three men’s collective hope that Dr. Stockmann will inherit some of Morten Kiil’s wealth and my use it to support the paper. It becomes clear that, despite the paper’s revolutionary pretensions (embodied even in its title, The People’s Messenger) its editors are as susceptible to the lure of money and power as anyone else in the play. By the time of Thomas’s speech, Billing too has joined the fight against the doctor, although he is less outspoken than Hovstad, Peter, or Aslaksen. Like most other characters, he appears to be most concerned with his own needs despite his outward insistence that he is passionate about the community.