Embittered wives

While Chris was away in Stuttgart, in October, I kept myself entertained by going to the cinema and the theatre. Both shows were about what it's like to be someone's wife. The film, entitled The Wife, was the more gripping. The play (an English Theatre production at the NAC) should have worked, too, but somehow didn't. Perhaps the actors were having a bad night. This play, called Silence, was about Alexander Graham Bell's wife, Mabel, who was profoundly deaf. The story of their marriage was shown from her point of view, not only dwelling on her frustrations as a deaf person and the tragedy of her loss of a son at birth, but also on the way A.G. Bell's achievements depended on her often unappreciated help. To convey this, there were long silences within the dialogue on stage, which didn't help to hold the audience's attention.

The film, on the other hand, developed without a moment of boredom. This was fictional, imagining a man who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, whose wife had been his "muse", or so he condescendingly said in his acceptance speech. It turned out she had been the one who had written his novels for him, biting her tongue all the way through his successes and his repeated infidelities. She, in fact, was the one who had really won the prize. At the end of the story when she finally turns on her husband, her anger, combined with the home truths she confronts him with, do him in. I appreciated the moment when she flings his golden Nobel Prize medal out of their taxi window in a temper and their Swedish taxi driver hops out to retrieve it.

If you approve of this uncomfortable theme, look out for other recently made films along the same lines, Big Eyes (2014) and Colette (2018), for example; I also remember Ken Russell's take (1974) on the character of Alma Mahler, another frustrated spouse. One scene from that older film sticks in my mind: Mahler's wife burying her "stillborn child" in a grave in the woods --- her "child" being the piece of music she had composed herself, which he had dismissed as worthless.