Word: bourgeoises
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Havel, born in 1935 and raised in a well-to-do bourgeois family, began as an absurdist playwright in the style of Ionesco or Pinter or Beckett. An attitude of surrealist paranoia turned out to be the right moral optic through which to see the Communist world clearly, and Havel...
Romance, in Misalliance, is less a consuming or ennobling passion than an excuse for conversation. In Shaw's theater, verbal sparring may be a more socially acceptable pleasure than sex, but it is hardly an innocent one, as its main appeal seems to be outdoing and occasionally humiliating another person...
Filled with exasperation at the strictures of bourgeois life, and at the perpetual "talk, talk, talk" that replaces action, Hypatia envies the freedom of the poor and the wicked. Yet the audience (if not Hypatia) later learns that they are no more free than she is.
The other characters are similarly frustrated with the gaps between words and reality. When Julian Baker (Thomas Derrah), the socialist son of Tarleton's old mistress, arrives and tries to kill Tarleton, he first tries to justify the murder in true bourgeois fashion, saying he's avenging his mother's...
The play appears to regard bourgeois English society as flawed beyond repair. The only normal character is a woman who is outside conventional female roles, "respectable" class roles, and England itself. Liberation seems to lie in rejecting conventional categories of thought and learning to be true to one's self...