Word: clarissa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...unvarying theme of Maude Hutchins' novels is the incongruity of love and the indignity of sex. This time it is traced among a genteel New England family in a drafty old house patrolled by the most inquisitive and devious child in present fiction. As her grandfather puts it, Clarissa "is an eight-year-old tape recorder," determined to hear the truth about her identity (father unknown, mother never spoken of). Staked out behind curtains and doors, she stalks the family skeletons with the patience of a gumshoe and then rattles the bones triumphantly in the face of the relative...
...able to learn his identity as a man because he could never forget his identity as a Negro. His sister Ida battles the white world too, but ends by yielding to the love of her brother's best friend, an Irish-Italian from Brooklyn named Vivaldo Moore. Blonde Clarissa Silenski, a Boston aristocrat (Puritan uprightness. Puritan guilt), is disappointed in the second-rate values of her husband Richard, a teacher and writer of Polish immigrant stock. Actor Eric Jones (the American South) has had to quit Alabama for Europe, less because he is a homosexual than because...
...onto this strange and sometimes morbidly haunted path? Like the good psychological determinist he is, Author Fiedler feels that it all began in the womb of English letters some two centuries ago. Pioneering American novelists had two English models-the sentimental novel of love embodied in Richardson's Clarissa and the gothic novel of crumbling castles and mental phantoms invented by Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto). Eventually housewives and what Hawthorne called "female scribblers" took over the sentimental novel; as a romantic fantasy it has paced U.S. bestseller lists ever since. When Charles Brockden Brown, a graceless...
...decline of the sentimental love nov el is a sizable calamity in Fiedler's eyes. In Continental terms, the aristocratic Lovelace's siege of Clarissa's stoutly preserved virginity was a class struggle of courtly manners v. the rising middle class. Transferred to the democratic U.S., it became a puritan's version of the war between the sexes. Woman stood for Virtue, Man for Vice. Having struck down the paternal authority of prince and prelate, the immigrant-rebel found that the voice of conscience, convention and society sounded strangely feminine. The divine right of kings...
...book, When you see this remember me Gertrude Stein in person, "The normal adolescent girl, busy with playmates, clothes, parties, school lessons, does not read Wordsworth, Scott, and other poets, a set of Shakespeare with notes, Burns, Congressional Records, encyclopedias; she does not absorb Shakespeare nor pore over Clarissa Harlowe, Fielding, Smollett, and a tremendous amount of history." Strangely, she already feared that there would not be enough books to fill her lifetime...