#HenrikIbsen190
Today March 20 2018 is 190th birth anniversary of Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)
Ibsen's '
A Doll's House', 1879 became a very popular play in
Maharashtra of 20th century. The play was translated into Marathi -
Gharkul (घरकुल ), 1941 by
Anant Kanekar (अनंत काणेकर). Also
M G Rangnekar's (मो.ग.रांगणेकर) play '
Kulvadhu' (कुलवधू) is inspired by it.
I have also felt that
Jabbar Patel's (जब्बार पटेल), 1982 Marathi movie '
Umbartha' (उंबरठा )- featuring brilliantly acted
Nora by
Smita Pail (स्मिता पाटील)- was influenced by it.
This is how Ibsen's play ends:
"...Nora (taking her bag). Ah, Torvald, the most wonderful thing
of all would have to happen.
Helmer. Tell me what that would be!
Nora. Both you and I would have to be so changed that—. Oh,
Torvald, I don‘t believe any longer in wonderful things happening.
Helmer. But I will believe in it. Tell me? So changed that—?
Nora. That our life together would be a real wedlock.
Good‐bye. (She goes out through the hall.)
Helmer (sinks down on a chair at the door and buries his
face in his hands). Nora! Nora! (Looks round, and rises.) Empty. She is gone.
(Ahope flashes across his mind.) The most wonderful thing of all—?
(The sound of a door shutting is heard from below.)"
I read the play while in school and it made a deep impression on me.
Hilton Als says in The New Yorker, March 10 2014:
"...Actually, part of what makes the story feel
so desperate and urgent in our hearts—we never want it to end—is that it
so resembles life’s rhythms, with its various elisions and polite
misdeeds and yearnings, and yet it’s better than reality, since “A
Doll’s House” cannot be explained away, or treated merely as a distant
object; once it enters our consciousness, it sweeps us up in its
emotional irresolution. It is a knowing work but an innocent one.."
The most wonderful thing I read about it was: The sound of a door shutting was not just heard below but all over Europe!
As I have said earlier on this blog, I was always scared in my childhood if mother would do Nora some day and later I had the same fear about my wife.
Hilton Als concludes his review with these words: "...Before Nora leaves, she
tells Torvald that he’s a stranger to her, and she can’t live in a house
with a stranger. But that’s not true. Torvald was Nora’s self, or that
part of herself which was once ravenous for the security that comes from
being a citizen of a limited, calculable world."
I agree with Mr. Als: Most of us want to be a citizen of a limited, calculable world.
Isolated and trapped?
'Room in New York', 1932
Artist: Edward Hopper (1882-1967)
Gail Levin, ‘Edward Hopper: the art and the artist’, 1980:
“...In ‘Room in New York’, an oil painting of 1932, a man
reads his newspaper, while the woman he is ignoring turns halfheartedly toward a
piano and picks out a tune. The viewer, looking in through the window, has been
assigned the role of voyeur...”
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