Word: berthas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...title of the book of course refers to Bertha Rochester from Jane Eyre, that actual madwoman in the attic, locked up to keep her from life, a condition experienced with varying intensity by a great many women. Along with works like The Minotaur and the Mermaid by Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Madwoman in the Attic is an indispensable text for understanding the world in which we live. It's expensive at $30.00, but it is a book to which one can refer repeatedly, not only for its insights into literature but for encouragement about our lives today...
Later in the book, in an essay called "Were Dinosaurs Dumb?," Gould takes us back to third grade and quotes from his textbook, the 1948 edition of Bertha Morris Partker's Animals of Yesterday, which the author admits he stole from P.S.26. Presenting the prevalent view of the huge reptiles, Gould writes...
...Craddock is a novel in which we see Maugham working out his familiar obsessions--the mother endangered in pregnancy, the stillborn child, the pain of love, and the quest for freedom. Just as Maugham identified with his mother, he makes Bertha Craddock his alter ego...Bertha represents both Maugham's mother and Maugham; she is the unconsciously disguised homosexual lover...
Generally, Morgan confines his discussions of Maugham's works to fruitful explorations of the characters. Occasionally, however, he goes overboard in his psychological dissection: "Bertha's finger fetishism begins to seem like an unconscious homosexual fantasy of the author's." When Morgan sticks to the biographical narrative he has researched so well, he fares much better...
...Bobby Barbash, the hotel emcee, who before the show each night sang, "After the Loving" and "I Did it My Way." He belted out those songs, imitating Dean Martin, every single night to rousing applause and a few wet eyes. Bobby could do not wrong--spill steaming coffee down Bertha's back, or worse, call the same bingo number twice in a row--the man in the wallpaper tuxedo was the perfect son who never left mother and sang to her every single night of her life...