Free Write (5-10 minutes): What does “romance” mean to you?
Creative Writing Exercise: “The Language of Love”
Two romantic couples meet for Valentine Day’s.
The time is 6 months after the end of the play.
You choose the setting. Write a dialogue between the
two characters around “the language of love.”
Couple 1: Hedda Gabler and Lövborg
Couple 2: Nora and Torvald or Rank
Couple 3: Julie and Jean
Elsa Bernstein (1866-1949) Biography
(based on S. Kord’s introductory material in Twilight)
- born in Vienna to Jewish parents but raised as a
Protestant;
father Heinrich
Porges was supposedly an illegitimate child of
the composer Franz Liszt; later moves with family to Munich
- 1883-87: actress (gave up owing to failing eyesight)
- 1890: marries Munich lawyer Max Bernstein; their
home
becomes a literary salon and meeting place for writers and
artists like Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Richard Strauss, Rainer Maria
Rilke, Gerhart Hauptmann, Theodor Fontane, Henrik Ibsen, Frank
Wedekind, and Thomas Mann
- 1891: adopted a male pseudonym, Ernst Rosmer (after
a character in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, 1886), when the drama The Three
of Us published
- 1893: Twilight
- 1894: daughter Eva, later wife of dramatist Gerhart
Hauptmann, born; Kingly Children
- 1897: daughter Maria is born and dies
- 1898: son Hans-Heinrich born
- 1908: Maria Arndt
- 1925: husband dies
- 1942: sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp;
her sister Gabrielle, for whom she gave up a visa to go to
the US, dies after 2 weeks
- 1945: survived Theresienstadt concentration camp
owing
to her status as a “Prominent Person”
- 1949: buried under a common tombstone that lists
her
father’s name, Heinrich Porges
What's in a name?
Graef = similar to the German word for count or duke,
Graf
Isolde = female part of romantic couple in Wagner's opera, Tristan and
Isolde. It is pronounced eeee - zohl - duh
Ritter = knight
Sabine = pronounced Zuh - bean - uh
Group discussion questions:
1. In what ways does Sabine represent the “New
Woman,” and in what ways does she not (118)?
What
aspects of femininity does Isolde, on the other hand, seem to
embody?
2. What are the symbolic meanings of “twilight”
throughout the play (and “seeing” through in general)?
3. How do you interpret the ending of the play? What
does ending the play with Act V instead of the suicide attempt in Act
IV indicate about Bernstein’s view of the world?
4. How does Bernstein’s drama compare to Ibsen and
Strindberg’s Naturalist plays?
Francisco de Goya,
Saturn
c. 1821-1823
146 x 83 cm
Oil on plaster remounted on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid
