A Gift for His Wife: A Bored Housewives Story

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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."

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