For Three-Word Wednesday, Magpie 119 and ABC Wednesday

("T" is for "trite")

This week we take up the work of Edward Hopper, one of America’s best-known realist painters.
A century ago Hopper had visited Paris, had studied the emerging art scene there in all its forms, but he came down with a style that was all his own. History has shown he was vindicated; his realism is successfully rooted in the presentation of the familiar, the commonplace – we might even say the trite.
But his sharp lines and large shapes, the unusual lighting, create a special meaning and mood.
As for this week’s prompt, a critic said of Hopper: “he achieves such complete truth that you can read into his interpretations of houses any human implications you wish.”

In this prompt the house is seen as very quiet – perhaps there’s even a hint of stagnation – but there’s a psychological impact to the scene. That impact comes from the dark, lowering background, which seems to raise a sinister threat.
When I viewed the picture above I thought of the quiet home life of one of Shakespeare’s most famous couples – the Macbeths.
Surely Lady Macbeth is one of the playwright’s most fascinating creations.

Well before greed and ambition caused the wild, melodramatic actions of the couple, before the killings began, they had a solid loving relationship.

The critic Barbara Everett wrote that, far from being strange bedfellows, “The Macbeths are probably Shakespeare’s most thoroughly married couple. He addresses his wife with extra care, as ‘Love’ and ‘Dear wife’ and ‘Dearest Partner of Greatness’; she is everything to him.”

The public usually thinks of her as a scheming and evil force – which, admittedly, she became. But Lady M originally brought to their life a sense of calm, of order, of practicality. The heart of the tragedy is the destruction of their marriage. She changes. She becomes the one who moves Macbeth to brutality: the killing of King Duncan.
She uses a phrase that stayed with me for years after I had first studied the play. To get her reluctant husband to act, she says, “Screw your courage to the sticking-place!”
Now that was interesting. What was the sticking-place?
Well, if you’ve ever done wood-work, say as a hobby, ever created end tables or chairs or whatever, you have had the experience of using a screwdriver to drive a screw into wood. You twist the screwdriver and turn it and finally it sticks and it will turn no more - that’s the sticking place. She wanted her husband to gear his courage up to that point.

Finally, however, Lady Macbeth is not able to live with her basic error, with what she has done. She has put her image of their future where her conscience should have been. Her nerves go jingle-jangle: her life finally becomes a long, endless nightmare. Barbara Everett: “And she can’t live with it; it stops her sleeping ever again.”
(Also submitted to Sunday Scribblings.)