Word: bride
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While Fairfax's friend Sgt. Meryll and Meryll's amorous daughter Phoebe plot his escape, the convicted sorcerer resolves to deprive his kinsman of the pecuniary benefits of his treachery by wedding an unknown bride before his execution. The rescue comes too late to prevent the marriage of Fairfax to Elsie, who was previously affianced to the jester Jack Point. Once escaped, Fairfax unhappily finds himself "free, yet in fetters held," and the plot begins to unravel in usual Gilbert and Sullivan fashion...
...peculiar about a comic opera in which no one's final happiness is convincing. Of the three marriages in the show, two spring from coercion, and the third--the wedding of Fairfax and Elsie--originates as a strategem to defraud an undeserving kinsman, proceeds only through bribery of the bride and, most importantly, culminates in the rejection and desolation of two abundantly worthy suitors...
Photographing a wedding has itself become dogmatic ritual. The repertoire of picture, now a liturgy of stylized question and response, has been made part of the sacrament. Each type of picture evolved asks for a certain image. The set-up of the formal portrait of the bride in gown and bouquet, for example, is designed to elicit a stock response of romantic wistfulness, (or regality, depending on the age of the bride involved). The family group picture produces a series of fixed, forced grins...
...convenience of the photographer and his client, many of the posed photographs are now taken long before or long after the event. "The formal of the bride," James Purcell of Bachrach Studios remarks, "is taken two weeks before the wedding with fake flowers. They photograph just as well." But the difference is visible; the formal portraits of more recent date are stiffer, more defensive. What Herbert Talerman calls the "gorgeous innocence of those early people," the proud hauteur of the bride who felt herself being immortalized by the camera, gives way to a nervous reserve as the formal portrait comes...
Lower-class families, in turn, demand that their son's new in-laws hand over transistor radios, motor scooters and sewing machines as well as cash. Fathers of the bride quickly learn that the local moneylender is their best friend. In rural areas, farmers frequently borrow bank money for "agricultural development," then spend it on their daughter's dowry. For generations, family savings have been wiped out by the dowry payments...