Personal convictions and shared beliefs, the private and public life, sometimes seem at odds in the modern world. How did you find your chosen works touched on this conflict, and with what effect?
Both The Wild Duck and Blood Wedding seem to share a common theme in that they both contain characters that lead different public and private lives.
In The Wild Duck the character of Hjalmar when he is in public he tends to be shyer(spelling?) and less social. When he goes home to his family he tells them how social and witty he was around the rich people. Also, when Gregers, a rich friend, visits him in his home, Hjalmar has bread, butter, and beer brought out which he had previously stated he did not want. In both instances, Hjalmar changes his chararcter when in public and when in private. This creates a feeling that this character is unreliable. The reader cannot trust what he says because they do not know if he is putting on a face for the people he is around or being his natural self.
I also see this tendency in Blood Wedding with the Bride. When in the presence of her future husband and his mother, she is quiet, polite, everything a good wife should be. When alone with her maid or Leonardo she becomes extremely angry and aggressive. This can be seen again right after the marriage and she (sort of) calmly says she has a headache and would like to lie down, but once alone she runs away with Leonardo. Again this creates a character that you can't trust, however it seems more clear cut in Blood Wedding that the Bride despises her public life. It adds to the motif of secrets as well.
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