Culture. Eat it
20 February 2017
Fridolin is the nightmare from which every woman would want to wake up. There, I said it.
Yes, because it’s enough that his wife Albertine confide him her innermost and adulterous dreams, to trigger inside him the desire to betray the wife, repeatedly. Will he be able to do that?
A Dream Novel tells the story of a young couple in the Vienna of the early twentieth century, the city of Sigmund Freud, the one who interpreted the dream as an unspoken and unfulfilled desire. It is no accident therefore if Arthur Schnitzler, author of the novel and classmate of the father of psychoanalysis, wrote a story that swings between dream and reality, between the conscious and unconscious desire.
The Albertine confession breaks an apparent domestic bliss: the two confide to each other their mutual and intimate attractions to strangers during a masked ball, in which they partecipated the night before.
It’s easy to think of the mask as something that it sets us free, because basically it hides part of the facial expressions, however only after taking it off the spouses give themselves up to
confidences and liberating thoughts .
The discussion is only seemingly without consequences, because something clicks inside Fridolin.
But can a man be offended because his wife tells him an erotic dream while he admitt himself to have dreamt a similar one? My answer is no.
And also, can this confidence trigger a sense of revenge such as to lead him thinking about adultery as a solution to the fantasized infidelity of his wife? My answer is still no.
And can Fridolin be a real man who knows the meaning of the word “trust”? Alas, the answer is again no.
In my eyes Fridolin is annoyed for having discovered a not suspected aspect of his wife and he reacts with a childish attitude, looking for confirmation from other women as only insecure men need to do. Women as masks of the sad staging of Fridolin: faceless is the patient’s daughter, the girl of the costume shop, the young prostitute and the masked woman for which he seems to have lost his mind. Fridolin is loooking for adultery to be consumed driven by lust and curiosity but above all by resentment toward his wife, which grows fed by her libidinous and dreamlike stories as protagonist.
Masks open and close the scene by spreading a veil on our unloved Fridolin.
Reading time: one night dream
Ph. Sara Cartelli
© The Eat Culture
Author
Bio:
She is an art historian, optimistic and empathic by nature. She imagines a world where sow kindness enjoying the little things. She's in love with stories since she was a child, for the Eat Culture she eats books and arts. Per aspera ad astra says the only tattoo on her skin. It reminds her that the road that leads to her dreams is not always easy but that she never gives up.
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