A Gift for His Wife: A Bored Housewives Story

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My dining set will arrive on Monday, and we got a Samsung washer and dryer (hooray!) that plays a musical tune when it’s finished; my new vacuum also shipped. Now we just need a living room set… and something for the sunroom, which I decided to make into my “sewing room” (mostly for my crafts and crocheting). I think my husband is so wonderful to basically let me have all the say in the home space, he’s definitely very accommodating. In both these novels, the lead characters want to break away from their families but are bound by the times they live in. Trina is overcome by guilt, and finds it difficult to differentiate between love and sin. “Love was one thing, sin was another — and although it was difficult to differentiate love from sin, Trina had learnt to identify some of the signs,” writes Mukhopadhyay. Yet at the same time there is a craving for something new. T. J. Clark, Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 18. [ ⤒] During the current restrictions, our priorities are around safeguarding and not enforcement, however, should we need to take enforcement action, we will do so." In Akerman's study of stasis, the camera never moves: the film consists of long static takes in which Jeanne moves in and out of frame, smoothing down the bed, washing dishes, breading veal. Many shots begin in media res, with Jeanne engrossed in a new task. Activities such as eating or bathing or brushing her hair are treated as continuous with the chores, and so these tasks of self-maintenance come to seem like labor. A scene in which the son attempts to memorize a Baudelaire poem and recites it twice, making different mistakes each time, underscores the film's sense of life lived by rote with only minute variation.

Jeanne Dielmanrecalls Picasso's Cubism in its discovery of infinite complexity within a mundane bourgeois interior, its reliance on still-life compositions of objects on a table, and the rewards it offers to sustained looking. Unlike Picasso, however, the film commits itself to the bare representation of reality. There are no montages or zoom shots or expressionist bursts of color; any disclosure of personality is conveyed through external objects alone. We infer Jeanne's dissatisfaction, for example, when she makes coffee, tastes it, pours it out, grinds beans for a new batch, and then watches the coffee seep slowly through the hourglass-shaped filter in one of the film's most poignant images of time passing. 11 The novel is set on a Sunday, when Debashish has asked Trina to meet her at a bus stop in south Calcutta. Trina is all confused about what to do. And so is Debashish. But despite the confusion, they both go to Debashish’s house, and the inevitable happens. Trina wants to walk out on her family and move in with Debashish, and so does Debashish. Debashish and Trina, who had been neighbours when they were kids, meet years later, when Debashish is hired by Sachin, Trina’s husband, to redo their ancestral home. Even as the interiors of the house get renovated, Debashish and Trina duly He said: “I’ve certainly noticed a significant increase in responses and replies – overwhelmingly they are down to the financial strains many people are currently under. Hedda is newly married to Jörgen Tesman, an affable but oblivious scholar who is gushed over so effusively by his aunt in the play's first moments that when Hedda enters the drawing room at last, her deflationary attitude is felt as a needed corrective. She refuses to feign interest, for example, in the pair of old slippers his aunt has lovingly delivered. Nor does she pretend to be anything but bored by the book project for which Tesman spent their honeymoon compiling notes. Ibsen takes pains to establish Hedda's palpable boredom as reasonable. He aligns the reader/viewer with Hedda by emphasizing Tesman's slowness of uptake in conversation, and by selecting for Tesman's research a topic so sterile and soporific — domestic crafts in Brabant in the Middle Ages — that it seems designed to make us yawn.There are also policies on Craigslist and users can be reported if they are caught breaking the rules. Although cinephiles think of Jeanne as an archetypal housewife, as a widow she is, strictly speaking, not a housewife at all. She is, rather, a house-wife: married, in effect, to her home, absorbed in the domestic space which she looks after so dutifully. Yet if her housekeeping is a labor of love, it is a non-reciprocal romance. The effect of making Jeanne a widow is to reduce her to her labor functions while isolating her. As prostitute, she plays the role of "wife," responsible for male sexual gratification in addition to cooking and cleaning. Although her son is well into his teenage years, she occasionally looks after a neighbor's howling infant. Thus, in her small flat, she undergoes every familiar trial of housewifery. Ashim leaves for Pune on official work, leaving his wife in Calcutta. Taking advantage of his absence, Jeena and Partha go to a resort near Puri for the time Ashim is in Pune. And there Jeena finds sexual fulfillment of a kind she hadn’t found with Ashim, who is 11 years her senior. She is so much into Partha that she even wears a bikini for him on an isolated beach, where he makes love to her. My anxiety went through the roof on Saturday and I spent most of the day crying. I was very emotional and thought perhaps I was ovulating. My baby app predicted this week to be my fertile week, so we shall see in two weeks whether or not the stork is bringing us a baby!

She said: “It is such a shame that people have felt pressured to turn to this way of making money because they are not getting enough support from the Government. The film tells us several times that Jeanne is missing a double, that she is one half of a pair. There is her dead husband, of whom the empty chair reminds us. There is also her sister, who has emigrated to Canada, where her situation curiously parallels Jeanne's: "I hardly get out," she reports in a letter; "I'm at home most of the time." In the kitchen where Jeanne spends countless hours, there is sometimes one chair, sometimes two. There is, at last, a doubling within Jeanne herself: the frenetic Jeanne of the film's first half and the catatonic Jeanne of the late scenes, in which she succumbs to the emptiness of her existence. The first days of the pandemic were sharp with a sense of danger. Boredom seemed impossible. I felt as if my actions counted, as if my choices during this moment of historical fissure were freighted with significance. The feeling soon wore off. The long hours in my apartment turned flat and stale. Clinical, even ethological, in its precision, Jeanne Dielmanobserves these menial rituals at such great length — the film runs 3 hours, 18 minutes — that we grow attuned to the most minor deviations from the heroine's established patterns. By the film's second half, when errors introduce themselves into her routine — a fork falls, a shoe drops, her typical seat in the café is taken — our attention has been so enlarged, the details so magnified, that we are able to detect the breakdown of the machine. The film "demands total attention," a New York Timesreviewer commented. "If one gives it anything less its revenge will be a boredom so complete it might be fatal." 10 Indeed, fatal boredom is the film's true subject: the climax is Jeanne's murder of a client with a pair of scissors. I owe this observation about the coffee filter as hourglass to Ivone Margulies, who in turn credits the insight to the Belgian art critic Thierry de Duve. Margulies, Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman's Hyperrealist Everyday(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 78. [ ⤒]Sonya tells Yelena: "boredom and idleness are catching" — a reflection of Chekhov's understanding of boredom as a pathology requiring diagnosis (203). See Elizabeth M. Phillips, "Chekhov, Boredom, and Pathology as Dramatic Technique," Modern Drama63, no. 1 (Spring 2020): 39-62. [ ⤒]

But Debashish does not pursue Trina as both are married and have children of their own. As Debashish puts it, “It would have been wonderful if we’d met at the right age and at the right time.” Beautiful Yelena stalks through Uncle Vanya (1898) like a wraith, agonized by her boredom — "too indolent to live," Vanya remarks. 2 She is married to an old professor who spends his days burrowing into scholarship. His labors are pointless, the play suggests; but at least he has his work. Yelena understands there is noble work to be done, but she cannot imagine doing it. "Only in idealistic novels," she says, "do people teach and doctor the peasants" (203). Swaying with indolence, she is the most conspicuous figure in Chekhov's parade of empty lives. We got mostly money from our guests at our wedding, but some bought us things from our registry. (I am still waiting for my flatware to ship, those will be my fancy flatware… it’ll go with my fancy plates that I’ll use only during the holidays, ha!) Since I don’t have any of my cooking utensils, we have been eating out every day (or eating Cup O’Noodles… it’s like college all over again), so I have not been grocery shopping, and am a bit depress waiting for the furniture because of all the empty space. Chandana, in the meantime, commits suicide following a nervous breakdown. The blame for it, of course, falls on Debashish, who, now free of any commitments, pursues Trina vigorously.Sex sells and always has, but at times like these there are more women, and of a broader range, who are offering to partake for a given fee." Elizabeth Goodstein, Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 98. [ ⤒] Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler, in Hedda Gabler and Other Plays, translated by Una Ellis-Fermor (London: Penguin, 1961), 263. All further references come from this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text. [ ⤒] Of late, a lot of modern Bengali fiction has been getting translated into English. The latest ones to hit the market is Dibyendu Palit’s Illicit, titled Aboidho when it was released in Bengali in 1989, and Sireshendu Mukhopadhyay’s There Was No One At The Bus Stop, originally Bus Stop-e Keu Ni when it was first published in 1974.

Anyone reading these books today would feel what’s the big deal. People do have feelings for one another even after they are married and do act on it. But the point to remember is the stories were set in the pre-liberalisation India, and the Bengali bhadralok audience wouldn’t have been ready for a ‘bold’ end. Boredom is a state of detachment. It involves an inability, or an unwillingness, to engage with the objects in one's immediate reality and find them interesting or meaningful. Why detach? In certain cases, boredom could arise if the bored person has not received the appropriate training to appreciate the object or situation they find boring. (Imagine my stuttering dismay when a class of students informed me that they found Middlemarchdull.) Such boredom is, in theory, correctible. Nothing is boring to the mind of God: a supremely cultivated intelligence can find interest and value in any phenomenon, no matter how minor. A Witney man who admitted to trying to procure women for explicit exchanges online, said he had noticed a sharp increase in the amount of adverts offering sex for sale.

Oxford East and Abingdon MP Layla Moran said it was disappointing that people had turned to sex work during the crisis. He said: “I’ve been amazed at the response I’ve had. I’ve not advertised anywhere else – no need to. I’m struggling to handle any more responses from women and the occasional male. Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya, in The Major Plays, translated by Ann Dunigan (New York: Signet, 1964), 184. All further references come from this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text. [ ⤒]