A Gift for His Wife: A Bored Housewives Story

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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. [ ⤒] 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. 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.”

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. There are also policies on Craigslist and users can be reported if they are caught breaking the rules. Elizabeth Goodstein, Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 98. [ ⤒] 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." 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. [ ⤒]

Desperate housewives selling sex to survive coronavirus lockdown

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. 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. 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. T. J. Clark, Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 18. [ ⤒]

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 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. 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.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. 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. Oxford East and Abingdon MP Layla Moran said it was disappointing that people had turned to sex work during the crisis. During the current restrictions, our priorities are around safeguarding and not enforcement, however, should we need to take enforcement action, we will do so."

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. 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. 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!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.