An Enemy of the People Rules and Order Quotes

Here we see the contradictory natures of the two brothers. The Doctor is all about progress and change, where as the Mayor is for keeping everything just the way it is. The Mayor sees the Doctor's progressive tendencies as dangerous, because they challenge the established order of things.

To the Mayor, rules are everything. They give him power as well as a personal identity. These rules are so important to him that he becomes symbolic of the traditional order, which Dr. Stockmann comes to believe is corrupting all of society.

Pagan is the overall term for a person who is not Christian. When Billing encourages the child in this notion, he's being pretty scandalous. In Ibsen's time, Europe and pretty much the entire Western world was strictly Christian. Systems of morality, social conduct, and even government were based on Christian ideals. Many of Ibsen's plays express a longing for Norway's pagan Viking past and harshly critique the strict moral values of the Christian establishment.

The Doctor is under the false impression that he is about to lead a revolution. He hopes that by revealing the truth of the Baths' contamination he'll also reveal the contamination of his brother's regime. Unfortunately for Dr. Stockmann, the established order proves to be too powerful to easily overturn.

Notice how skillfully the Mayor manipulates the procedures of the meeting to his advantage. Without much effort he's able to use the established order to keep his brother from reading the article he's come to read. What makes it so absurd, it that the reading of the article was the whole purpose of the meeting to begin with. This is just one of many examples in the play where you can see the established order of things being used to silence the truth.

Here the Doctor expresses a longing to escape society altogether. He wants to find a way to live without any rules but his own. Throughout much of Ibsen's work, natural settings are depicted as places of liberation.

Dr. Stockmann isn't the only rebel in the family. Petra's bucking of social norms, especially when it comes to religion, has caught up with her. Once again we see how defying the accepted rules of behavior can have major consequences.

Now we have a different kind of order being brought up in the play. It's expanded beyond the laws of man and into the laws of nature, the law of the jungle, survival of the fittest. Could it be that Ibsen is trying to show that no matter how removed we as humans think we are from nature, that we're still subject to the natural order? This isn't the first time there's been allusions to this either. Earlier in the play, during the Doctor's big speech, he talks about how humans are simply animals – pretty amazing animals, but the animals just the same. He also goes on about how only the best animals should rule the others. Hmmm, sounds like survival of the fittest to us.

Here again, there's a connection between the laws of man and the laws of nature. All the political maneuverings of the party leaders are compared to vicious wolves, the creatures at the top of the food chain. We have some questions, though, for the Doctor: what happens when the party leaders are eliminated? Will he be the new leader? Won't he end up preying on people as well? Isn't that just the way the food chain works?

This is one of Ibsen's more famous quotes. You can find this sentiment in almost all of his plays. His work almost always tells the story of an individual attempting to establish a distinct identity in the face of tremendous societal pressure. Whether it's Brand, Hedda Gabler, or Nora Helmer of A Doll's House, almost all of Ibsen's protagonists are loners in some way. Ibsen's heroes and heroines tend to constantly seek a way break the rigid societal rules that bind them.