Word: bloodsmoor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1982-1982
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...BLOODSMOOR ROMANCE...
...Doris Lessing has taken an apparently irreversible leap into outer space with her multivolume chronicle of "galactic empires." Now Joyce Carol Oates has again wandered off into the never-never land of the neo-gothic romance. In Oates' case, the purpose of the excursion is parody. A Bloodsmoor Romance, like the author's 1980 Bellefleur, is intended to poke fun at gushy Victorian women novelists and such latter-day descendants as Barbara Cartland, Victoria Holt and Rosemary Rogers...
...this empurpled mode, relentlessly maintained throughout the novel (her 14th), that Oates has undertaken to recount the saga of the five nubile Zinn sisters of Bloodsmoor Valley, Pa., circa 1880. For these young ladies, the trajectory of love follows the customarily lunatic lines of an Oates romance. The youngest Zinn, Deirdre, is snatched away by a stranger in "an outlaw balloon of sinister black-silken hue" as she sits crocheting in a gazebo. Sister Malvinia escapes the toils of Victorian family life in her own way: she makes a career as an actress and is courted by a singularly repulsive...
...Mother?) and underarm deodorant (chloride of lime and powdered salicylic acid). Oates' heroines quote liberally from the world's worst verse, culled by the author from such works as The Ladies' Wreath, a Magazine Devoted to Literature, Industry and Religion. But what the women in A Bloodsmoor Romance seem to do most is knit, embroider and crochet. So assiduous is one character that she produces an antimacassar "somewhat above the conventional in length, being 1,358 yards, or some three-quarters of a mile .. ."-the perfect symbol for the futility and tedium of Oates' novel...
...such a world the escapes must be extravagant and complete and Oates allows her heroines outlets that would have eluded their real life counterparts. Time travel exists in Bloodsmoor Valley and a magical are protects each sister's life. Reality loses definition and their prissy but a affectionate narrator adds to this illusion as in her loving remembrances she lets facts slip out of chronological order...