A Gift for His Wife: A Bored Housewives Story

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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. 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. [ ⤒] Elizabeth Goodstein, Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 98. [ ⤒]

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.During the current restrictions, our priorities are around safeguarding and not enforcement, however, should we need to take enforcement action, we will do so."

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. 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. 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. [ ⤒]

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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. 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 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.