[In the following excerpt, Leavy explores thematic parallels between The Normal Heart and Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People.]

An Enemy of the People belongs to the literature of civil disobedience, harking back at least as far as Sophocles's Antigone and carrying forward to, among other dramas, Bolt's portrayal of his "hero of selfhood," Thomas More [in A Man for All Seasons]. As in Ghosts, Ibsen continues to attack outmoded ideas, doctrines inherited from forefathers, the most dangerous among them, according to Stock-mann, being the idea that the ignorant masses "are the very essence of the people"—that they "are the people" and "have the same right to criticize and to approve, to govern and to counsel as the few intellectually distinguished people." The play was written after the public's outraged response to Ghosts, with its treatment of the still-taboo subject of syphilis. As Arno K. Lepke has written, "the first draft of An Enemy of the People was written by an irate man rising spontaneously to defend his authentic self. … Yet, after two revisions of the original draft, the final version of the play presents Doctor Stockmann as a highly questionable, blundering, paradoxical, and almost foolish rebel." Perhaps another way to put this is to say that An Enemy of the People more fully explores the contradictions surrounding heroes and heroines of selfhood, who are deliberately or unwittingly transformed in literature into illiberal aristocrats, such contradictions being not always apprehended or appreciated by a would-be liberal audience.

An Enemy of the People may therefore not be as "straightforwardly polemical" as Robert Brustein claims it is. Looked at this way, moreover, the play appears less anachronistic in the Ibsen canon. For example, Michael Meyer's biography separates "The Critic of Society" from the succeeding "Explorer of the Unconscious," the chronology of Ibsen's plays locating An Enemy of the People in the latter category. It does not, of course, explore the unconscious in the way that its predecessor, Ghosts, does, but it does investigate the problem of personal identity that is deeply implicated in the idea of an unconscious. An Enemy of the People reveals how difficult it is to separate the communal being, the social critic, from the individual whose conscience cannot be neatly disentangled from unconscious motivation.

The ambiguities surrounding Stockmann emerge, again, from the extension of the law of nature, or self-preservation, to social and economic survival, and beyond that to the inner realm of a defended self-esteem. A telling example is Stockmann's father-in-law, Morten Kill, probably the most repellent character in the play. It is his factory that has polluted the town's water supply; and when rumors of the pollution spread, he buys up the baths' stock very cheaply, effectively blackmailing Stockmann because it is then Mrs. Stockmann's inheritance that will be lost or will appreciate depending upon what her husband decides to do in his fight with the town. But in his opposition to Stockmann and his determination to stifle the truth about the pollution, Morten Kill is also concerned to preserve his good "name," his reputation in the town upon which his sense of his own personal identity and standing in posterity rest.

To depict so many levels of self-interest in his characters Ibsen had to have contemplated how tenuous the line is between conscience and sheer egotism. …

The centrality of Stockmann's individualism in the play minimizes the theme of pestilence, which is less central to An Enemy of the People than syphilis is to Ghosts. Stock-mann might have taken on his town concerning many is-sues, and his regular contributions to the liberal press suggest that he did. But although Ibsen's creation of an intellectual aristocrat was not intrinsically connected to the disease motif, one way to describe aristocracy is by its ever-constant attempt to ward off the contamination of the crowd. In a century that began with a romantic exaltation of the folk and concluded with artists inhabiting ivory towers, this nobility belongs as much to the artistic as to the political realm. As Stockmann says, "If only I knew where there was a primeval forest or a little South Sea island going cheap," he seems unaware of the ironic ring to his own words: even the primitivistic dream of the earthly paradise is tied to private property.

By portraying his embattlement with society over Ghosts in An Enemy of the People, Ibsen has in part shifted the later drama away from its social problem towards an allegory of the artist's plight. The play reveals how the individual's self-definition parallels the artist's. Ibsen's play, that is, is not entirely focused on how a community deals with a plague and the extent to which self-esteem becomes another manifestation of self-preservation: it also asks implicit questions about who the writer's audience is perceived to be. The matter is thus more complex than indicated by the theater reviewer who perceived the parallels between Thomas Stockmann and Ned Weeks in Larry Kramer's play The Normal Heart: each is "meant to appear two-sided, correct in his analysis of the crisis and the need for radical action" but "also shrill, intolerant and unbearable." Ibsen's and Kramer's plays have a great deal in common, but no theme unites them as significantly as the perplexing dilemma concerning how to separate the reformer's zeal on behalf of humanity from the necessity of preserving an ego that must defend itself against hostile others. Inevitably, this problem becomes implicated in the playwright's relationship to those who view and review plays.

In Kramer's play, Ned Weeks is one of the organizers of what The Normal Heart does not name but that critics and audience recognize as the Gay Men's Health Crisis, created to fight AIDS in many ways, one of which is to force public officials to confront the reality of the disease on all fronts, medical, social, and political. Ned, however, is a very strident activist, offending not only those outside but also those within the organization. Moreover, he has joined with a polio-crippled physician, Emma, to spread the word to the gay community that they must refrain from sex, which Emma is convinced is the way the disease is being spread. Thus Ned threatens not only the pleasure-seeking aspect of gay life but also its very ideology, an ideology in which sexual freedom—that is, promiscuity—has come to equal freedom per se—that is, the freedom for gay men to be homosexual without the censure or prejudice of their families, their employers, or the society at large. This equation and its implications for gay identity is one that Ned resists, with the result that in the end he is expelled from the organization he had helped to found. Parallel to this social theme in The Normal Heart is Ned's love for Felix, who has AIDS, their relationship being similar to that between Rich and Saul in As Is.

In his foreword to The Normal Heart, Joseph Papp writes that in his "moralistic fervor, Larry Kramer is a first cousin to nineteenth-century Ibsen." An Enemy of the People and The Normal Heart might be better described, however, as fraternal twins, the similarities between them striking, and the differences noteworthy. In both plays brothers play an important part, although the mayor and Thomas Stockmann are essentially antagonists, whereas Ned and Ben Weeks deeply love each other. The sibling relationships nonetheless sustain the parallels between Ibsen's and Kramer's works. In each play one brother is an important person in the established society, a mayor or partner in a large law firm. In contrast, his rebellious brother is judged deviant by the society epitomized by that establishment, either because of a refusal to conform to the majority will, sexual preference, or both. To differing degrees, the conventional brother helps financially to sustain the other one, but the emotional support that Stock-mann and Ned seek is either denied or only ambivalently granted. It is the mayor who joins with the town in designating Stockmann an enemy of the people; Ben and Ned Weeks, because their mutual love does not bridge the gap between straight and gay identity (at least, not until the symbolic end of the play), also disagree over which one is the antagonist:

Ben: YOU make me sound like I'm the enemy.

Ned: I'm beginning to think that you and your straight world are our enemy.

At this moment what is implicit in Ibsen's play is articulated in Kramer's: it is the conventional brother rather than the rebellious one who is the enemy of the people, and in each play it is a real or threatened plague that brings this reality to the surface.

Whereas Stockmann's brother, a government official, represents authority per se, so that only the aristocracy of the intellect advocated by Ibsen might depose him, Ben Weeks's very liberalism pushes Ned towards a similar position. Ben says that he cannot commit his law firm to support the organization Ned is helping to found to battle AIDS because he alone cannot speak for a democratic institution with an elected board of directors, a claim to which Ned replies, "I think I like elitism better." But what Ned really needs from Ben is positive mirroring, which would necessitate Ben's retreating from his long-held position that homosexuality is an illness. And when Ben protests that his acceptance of Ned as a psychological equal will not help to save Ned's dying friends, Ned responds, "Funny—that's exactly what I think will help save my dying friends." More perhaps than in any other literary work treated in this book, the social construction of a disease is held to be directly implicated in its epidemiology. It will be remembered that Defoe's H. F. had painted a pragmatic but nonetheless chilling portrait of a natural selection by which plague killed off in largest numbers those persons, the poor, who during the pestilence constituted the greatest potential threat to London's stability. So does AIDS promise to reduce substantially a large segment of the population perceived to be made up of deviant others by those who view it from the outside, and The Normal Heart confronts this issue directly, highlighting it when Ben resists admitting his atleast-partial connection with those who think in such terms.

In An Enemy of the People, plague is more potential than actual despite the outbreak of gastric disorders and typhoid the year before the action actually begins. But in The Normal Heart, the increasing incidence of AIDS is marked by the statistics that were kept track of during the play's run and painted on the theater wall: Kramer writes, as "the Center for Disease Control revised all figures regularly, so did we, crossing out old numbers and placing the new figure just beneath it." In both dramas pestilential baths figure as the locus of infection, and in both, the threat to the city's tourism if the infectious disease receives widespread publicity has a significant impact on public policy. In The Normal Heart, this aspect of the problem is muted, since the mayor of New York is depicted as having varying motives for downplaying AIDS, and, in any event, the city's denial that it is experiencing what the play deems a "plague" extends to many groups, the most noteworthy, ironically, being the very people most afflicted at the time the play appeared in 1985. In contrast, tourism is of course the aggravating element in what appears to have been Stockmann's almost chronic conflict with his town.

On the other side, in An Enemy of the People the baths do not carry the same symbolic weight they have in The Normal Heart, where they are associated with the gay sexual ideology from which Ned Weeks dissents. He becomes a virtual pariah when he not only brings the bad news of the play's doctor, Emma Brookner, that the only way for gay men to protect themselves from the mysterious and fatal disease is to become sexually abstinent, but also challenges the gay community to decide whether sexual identity in general, and promiscuous sexual activity in particular is that by which they wish to be identified. If, then, the baths constitute a gay man's earthly paradise, then Kramer is able to make his point by the ironic twist that disease originates from the pseudoparadise, no longer a retreat from the literal and symbolic ills of the world. In both Ibsen and Kramer, baths intended to be physically and spiritually cleansing prove a source of infection: spas intended to be communal gathering places in both end as sources of contagion and, ultimately, human isolation. And in both plays, doubt concerning the validity of the claims made about the baths' infectiousness subvert the reforming efforts of the main character.

Like An Enemy of the People, written—at the beginning, at least—to assuage some of Ibsen's fury over the popular reception of Ghosts, The Normal Heart has its autobio-graphical roots in Larry Kramer's role in helping to create the Gay Men's Health Crisis as well as in his indignation at being expelled from it for ideological and tactical differences. The Normal Heart, however, is more precise in its treatment of disease than An Enemy of the People, less capable of being translated into an allegory of the private conscience or the artist's separation from society, because the historical moment is more central to Kramer's drama. AIDS is portrayed as having acted as a catalyst both inside and outside of the gay community, forcing into the open what had remained segregated from the general view. Ned describes a meeting with an old friend who screams at him, "You're giving away all our secrets, you're painting us as sick, you're destroying homosexuality"—and then tries to slug him, "right there in the subway. Under Bloomingdale's." This reference to upper-middle-class New York's shopping paradise is thematically significant. AIDS unites, both as victims and as fighters of the disease, groups that had earlier disclaimed each other, for example, transvestites and "Brooks Brothers" types. The latter remain skittish about their own visibility, worried, for example, that they might lose their jobs. The infighting that goes on in The Normal Heart is more complex than that in An Enemy of the People, in which Stockmann has the entire community against him, including those who at least in principle should have been on his own side. Of course, Ned Weeks will face the same outcome, in part because of the personality characteristics he shares with Stockmann, but the conflicts within Ned's activist organization are historically grounded.

Additionally, Kramer portrays how the severity of AIDS was forcing philanthropically inclined persons (such as Ben Weeks) to face their attitudes about gay life as they decided how far they would go to support the fight against a disease that was so far not immediately threatening mem. But the incipient epidemic was also forcing gays to concern themselves with their image in the straight world. They could not merely slough off as prejudice views that could influence the battle against AIDS. As a result—or so the play suggests—they had to deal with the extent to which others' perceptions of them affected their self-esteem. Again, another kind of survival was at issue. The confrontation between Ben and Ned on this point is a poignant one in which the development of the integrated self is depicted as requiring the affirmation of important others. When Ned lashes out at Ben—

You still think I'm sick, and I simply cannot allow that any longer. I will not speak to you again until you accept me as your equal. Your healthy equal. Your brother!—

the dramatic confrontation is not between two ideas but between two people who love each other and each of whose self is implicated in the other's. Ben is paradoxically both correct and significantly in error when he challenges Ned to define himself without his, Ben's, acquiescence to this self-definition.

To deal with the historical moment in which a private struggle for self-identity emerged because a plague forced it into the open, Kramer keeps most of his play in the public sphere. Unlike Ibsen's Dr. Stockmann, who works alone in his study until, with the help of a laboratory, he confirms his hypotheses about the infected baths, Kramer's Dr. Emma Brookner fights the disease and what she takes to be its source without needing to have her theories validated. Herself a survivor of polio, which crippled her only three months before the preventive vaccine was found, Emma has no reason to trust time. She diagnoses those who have AIDS, tells their friends and relatives that loved ones are going to die, and ferociously prods Ned into spreading her word about sexual infectiousness. Eventually, despite the conviction that activist physicians are derided as nuts, she agrees to testify before a governmental commission, confronting her peers with her fury and her frustration, literally throwing at them the records of her AIDS patients:

We are enduring an epidemic of death. Women have been discovered to have it in Africa—where it is clearly transmitted heterosexually. It is only a question of time. We could all be dead before you do anything. You want my patients? Take them! TAKE THEM! … Just do something for them!

In her strident urgency she mirrors Ned; together, as physician and writer, they play the parts combined in Dr. Stockmann.

Equally public are the scenes in The Normal Heart that take place in newspaper and governmental offices. Ned and his eventual lover and AIDS patient, Felix, first meet in the offices of the Times. Felix cannot write about AIDS in a newspaper that chooses to relegate the new disease to back pages, and only occasionally at that; his sphere is, he self-deprecatingly admits, fashion and entertainment. Like Ibsen's Hovstad … , he keeps his job by keeping his readers amused and informed on matters particularly trivial in the face of plague; and like Hovstad—if far more sympathetic—he experiences little conflict between the potential power of the pen and the way he actually uses his.

For Ned, the newspaper is hostile to gays and to his own crusade against AIDS, but nowhere near as antagonistic as the mayor's office. The scene that takes place in a "meeting room in City Hall," a "basement room that hasn't been used in years," parallels Stockmann's failed attempt in a similar environment to persuade the town to adopt his position with regard to the baths. Similarly, Ned cannot convince the mayor's assistant, Hiram, that there is "an epidemic going on." The verbal melee that takes place in The Normal Heart differs from that in An Enemy of the People mainly in that the in-group fighting in the former is so pronounced that Hiram is able to demand, "If so many of you are so upset about what's happening, why do I only hear from this loudmouth?"—to which Ned replies, "That's a very good question." After more furious exchanges, Ned yells imprecations after all of them, the mayor's representative and his own fellow fighters against AIDS.

The scene ends with the stage direction, "He is all alone," possibly echoing the end of An Enemy of the People and Stockmann's proclamation about those who must fight by themselves. But The Normal Heart does not, in fact, conclude with Ned alone. In addition to what is played out in public space, Ned's private drama reinforces some of the play's major and sometimes only implied themes concerning the relationship of self-identity to human bonding. In both [The Normal Heart and William M. Hoffman's As Is], the main character is able to make a genuine commitment to another, entering a one-on-one relationship that negates the sexual ideology of promiscuity that had emotionally separated men before the contagiousness of AIDS literally did so.

But here the two playwrights skirt a dangerous area that Camus avowedly eschews when the narrator of The Plague admits … that what is "true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves. All the same, when you see the misery it brings, you'd need to be a madman, or a coward, or stone blind, to give in tamely to the plague." One way to give in tamely is to romanticize pestilence, and both Hoffman and Kramer come perilously close to doing so when their lovers are drawn closer together because one of the pair has AIDS. But when at Felix's deathbed appear both Ben and Emma, a larger and more symbolic hope seems to find expression, that the marriage between Ned and Felix prefigures a union between seemingly disparate worlds—the straight and the gay, the scientifically medical, and the compassionately human.

The Normal Heart draws not only its title but also an essential theme from W. H. Auden's poem, "September 1, 1939," two stanzas of which preface Kramer's play. The verses contrast the abstract—universal love, the state, the citizen, the sensual man in the street—with concrete persons, the "we," the first person plural selves, who must "love one another or die." In The Normal Heart, a plea that AIDS patients be treated as more than diseased bodies emerges from Emma Brookner's rehearsing the variations on hospital care, from the research institutions for whom the patient is a statistic to the liberal "square, righteous, superior" staff of the hospital "embarrassed by this disease and this entire epidemic." She thinks that medical expertise joined to human compassion is almost entirely lacking in her profession, and part of her tirade concerning the scientist's quest for personal glory points back, once again, at the contradictions in Ibsen's play. According to the mayor, his brother, Dr. Stockmann, is reluctant to share the honor attached to developing the baths, and this basking in self-love extends, as was seen, to his pleasure in being the one to discover the pollution in them. Similarly, according to Kramer's Emma, researchers who reduce human sufferers to laboratory animals in the first place will not in the end make their results public until they are guaranteed personal renown.

Here, the private ego is displayed in a more ominous light than in Ibsen's play. AIDS is a real and deadly disease, not Kramer's literary invention, and any secrecy concerning medical discoveries will result in people dying. Emma may be plagued with a suspicion that the three months that elapsed between her being struck with polio and the appearance of a vaccine had to do with such a quest for personal recognition. The irony here is that the theme concerning the private ego is not restricted by The Normal Heart to the medical profession, which, aside from Emma's example, is portrayed unfavorably, but extends to the play's protagonist.

As both activist and egotist, Ned Weeks resembles and at the same time differs from Ibsen's Stockmann. Ned recognizes that his coworkers against AIDS believe he is using the fight to "make [himself] into a celebrity." On the face of it, this is an easy charge to refute; Ned passionately believes his own battle cry, that "every gay man who refuses to come forward now and fight to save his own life is truly helping to kill the rest of us." But he does not face up to this problematic connection between self-preservation and the common good; and by extension, he is on philosophically weaker grounds when confronting the accusation that he is "self-serving," an indictment that becomes particularly complex when taken literally. With love, not anger, Felix points out to Ned that he is a fighter who loves a fight, and therefore that he is enjoying the battles in which he is engaged. Felix's observation parallels Morten Kill's wry comment that Stockmann is enjoying the pleasure of his own conscience. Whether it then follows that Ned is "on a colossal ego trip," as charged in the accusing writ that virtually drums him out of the activist group he helped create, involves a question raised in both Ibsen's and Kramer's work.

Does self-gratification contaminate the fight for the right cause? And does this philosophical conundrum lead no-where but to the claim that unless the individual adapts to the general will, he does no more than stroke his own conscience for the pleasure that yields? In Kramer's play, it is Bruce, a handsome man who draws followers with his good looks and nonconfrontative personality rather than with his ideas, who reads out the indictment against Ned drawn up by the organization intent on ridding themselves of their rebel. That Bruce had once been a Green Beret is a point that had already been emphasized in the play: he was a fighter but also one who followed orders, who conformed for the sake of the group. Significantly, in his comeback to those ready to expel him from their ranks, Ned employs a military metaphor: "I want to be defined" as "one of the men who fought the war." But it is not true that he is willing to be a mere private in the army: he is adamant in defining the precise nature of the enemy, directing the battle, and at least verbally courtmartialing anyone who gets out of line. His sharp tongue and his inclination to burst into angry print at the slightest provocation (just as Stockmann writes for the People 's Tribune whenever he has a "truth" to convey) create tactical difficulties for himself and for others, and sometimes he seems to win battles at the expense of the war itself, which, on the other side, is escalating as ideological opponents fight among themselves. Ned pays the price of isolation, begging not to be "shut out" by the others but left, nonetheless, like Stockmann, "standing alone" in his fight.

The Normal Heart has been praised for transcending its own imperfections in "its sense of urgency, necessity, a cause." But it has also, with As Is, been faulted for "stumbling" on "the real issue now at stake for gay men—the question of who they are," while failing to take this subject anywhere significant. This chapter has suggested that for Ibsen, Hoffman, and Kramer, matters of personal identity are crucial, but that all three face the difficulty of defining the self in a modern world. When Ned Weeks pleads that gays who identify themselves with their sexuality commit a kind of self-genocide, he stops short of suggesting that AIDS is a symbol of that fate. For Ned, for Kramer, this modern plague is too real and devastating to be turned into a metaphor; moreover, such an analogy would smack of the fruits of sin. Yet it is also true that in few literary works is the urgency surrounding a disease linked so emphatically to questions concerning identity.

In creating a modern Dr. Stockmann in Ned Weeks, Kramer underscores the significant problem raised by a play whose intent is openly propagandistic, which is how to present its social concerns without falsifying larger, more abstract concerns about what it means to be human and what it means to be a particular kind of human being. If both Ibsen and Kramer wrote their plays to work out private indignation, they might still have come to recognize the full extent of the ego's stake in the battles undertaken by the individual, and this understanding may have resulted in plays that are part self-confession. At the end of each drama, the protagonist's semi-isolation points to an ultimate lack of resolution. The final curtain finds Stockmann basking in the indulgent love of Catherine and Petra; Ned is last seen embraced by his brother Ben, with whom he is personally reunited despite their differences. Finally, Kramer must take his solution from Auden's poem: there are no abstractions, only people who suffer, and some who love.

If The Normal Heart succeeds in rousing some of its audience to action, it is probably not only because of the well-handled propaganda cited by some reviewers, nor the old-fashioned aim of enlightening and informing as well as entertaining praised by others, but also because Ned Weeks's passionate attachments to real people may inspire where ideas themselves falter. But can any writer trust his rhetorical aims to such emotional engagement? When Felix confesses—

You know my fantasy has always been to go away and live by the ocean and write twenty-four novels, living with someone just like you with all these books who of course will be right there beside me writing your own twenty-four novels—

he is sharing with Ned an image of the artist's paradise in which writers have no need to ask such a question.