That Hawking struggled is without doubt, which is perhaps why the movie also delves, quite justifiably, into the hardship and toil that his self-sacrificing wife had to endure. Hawking was diagnosed with a rare form of motor neurone disease during his tenure at Cambridge at twenty-one, which gradually paralyzed his body, and eventually robbed him of speech. Jane Wilde stood strong by him throughout most of his life, sacrificing her own love for another man in order to take care of him. Jane Wilde comes across as a woman of integrity, loyalty and duty. Sheis portrayed almost as a saint, though in real life she managed to find a balance between her academic pursuits (she finished her PhD in Modern Spanish Poetry) and her arduous familial commitments. But her loyalty and allegiance to her difficult and uncompromising husband, despite her infidelity, is portrayed as spotless. It seems redundant to stamp a feminist analytical structure because this is a real life story. She does ultimately escape (or was she released?) to the arms of her future husband. However, she does seem to function in the movie as a character to be used to reveal Hawking’s humanity and personality. But the story is fair and reveals Hawking’s deep insecurity and doubt in his wife’s acts of love, which he saw as insincere acts of obligation, and his sheer happiness at being able to find someone who he with whom he could simply communicate and laugh.
Another counterpart of Jane is Alicia Nashwife of John Nash in A Beautiful Mind (2001), whose life, too, revolved around her mentally ill husband. Both movies are of the same genre, focusing on the personal and extraordinary lives of great men, and both eventually and ultimately end up stressing the importance of love, determination and perseverance, while simultaneously illuminating the sacrifices made by the wives of these tall men. No one is an island, and such movies seek to inspire and motivate, but also to bridge the gap between ordinary folks like us and the ones who are visionaries or of great minds.
The Theory of Everything opens up the eternal debate of the existence of God versus the physicist’s version of the creation of the universe, and rightfully (flawless, like I said) remains incredibly sly in this matter by ending that debate with the prototypical answer of ‘where there is life, there is hope’, but also accentuating that religion is a creation of human civilization to find order out of chaos. It is a rationalistic conclusion, and rightfully (again) so. The movie is almost mechanical in its effort to be perfect, almost robotic… like Hawking’s Americanised voice. It is motivational, even inspirational, and like in real life, Hawking in the movie too seems to function as a philosopher and hero. But is it a movie that is worth remembering, like A Beautiful Mind, whichstill resonates today after fourteen years? Only time will tell, but we all sure will remember Stephen Hawking who taught us the theory of success.
By Ananya Tiwari