Arthur Miller’s haunted stage

A reading of The Enemy of the People (1951)

Abstract

Arthur Miller writes The Enemy of the People (1951), based on the homonymous play by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, commissioned by Robert Lewis at the height of McCarthyism. This article aims to consider how the ghost of Henrik Ibsen haunts Arthur Miller’s rewriting of the play in a conversation amongts Antonio Negri, in his essay “Specter’s Smile” (2008), when he refers to the presence of the Unheimlich in late postmodernity and how we are embedded in it; Freddie Rokem, in Philosophers and Thespians (2010), when the Israeli philosopher places the appearance of the ghost on stage pointing to a past ambivalently conceived as failed and nostalgic and to an uncertain and inconsequential future, and how the question of morality, widely addressed by Friedrich Nietzsche, affects this encounter in time. The ephemeral learning from the past, the misunderstanding of the present, and the anxiety about the future make the dead return to claim, through words, the present and the future. Miller, in rewriting Ibsen’s play, denounces the horrors inherent to the investigations presided over by the House Un-American Activities Committee, bringing to the stage the ghost of memory that haunts the United States.