At
home without mask
It´s
not uncommon to hear stories like the one told by Ian Jack. Very
often cases similar to what seems to be happened to his great grandmother are
heard. And I say it happened to her great grandmother because it was really she
who suffered it.
Surely
we all have in mind great men, real geniuses of Painting, Physics, Cinema or
the Church who have publicly carried out a work only within the reach of the
elect, but that once the door of the house is closed they have behaved in a way
we never would have believed.
Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde in reverse? Why of this split? The tenderness, the generosity,
the social denounce that Dickens shows in his works are typical of a mask to
compensate domestic outrages? Which of the two personalities is the real one?
Is that bipolarity unique to the nineteenth?
I
believe that this type of behaviour isn´t only the heritage of past centuries.
I remember very well my mother who —with all her faults— was able to vent
herself saying: ‘Those sanctimonious people are the worst’. She called sanctimonious
to people in the street that looked immaculate, elegant and a respectable
citizen, but that by digging a bit inside them you got a surprise. Sometimes it
happens that everything that glitters is not gold.
On
the other hand those who have died -and Dickens is one of them- cannot defend
themselves and we cannot do a face-to-face between his wife and him. We have a
comment that his wife made to a neighbour.
What
I am happy is that if the writer wanted to lock his wife because she was very
wrinkled and old and she was blocking an explosive relationship with a
beautiful young actress, the decision made by his friend the psychiatrist –it´s
supposed to be a friend of the two- it was the most successful. Less luck had
Mr Jack's great-grandmother.
By
the way, I understand that R.L.Stevenson published his famous novel some
fifteen years after the death of the author of Oliver Twist.
From
my Bostal.
LDR
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