Word: conventionals
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...mocks all social codes as shams that bind the will. When he steals Dona Elvira (Frances Conroy) from the convent to be his wife and then abandons her, he mocks vows made to God and to fidelity. He protests undying love and proffers marriage to two peasant girls (Kristine Nielsen and Hillary Bailey) merely as bait for the gullible. He mocks his fellow aristocrats by tripping them up in the niceties of codes of honor, and his aged father (John E. Straub) by an icy disdain for filial piety...
Good novels about school - like The Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace - are classics. Here, the common memories of childhood - fear, rebellion, shame, what Yeats called "Youth's dreamy load" - are set against the structured, unfair world of a convent school...
British Novelist Antonia White, who died in 1980 at 81, attended a school like Lippington (formal name: the Convent of the Five Wounds) with handicaps like Nanda's: she was the daughter of a classics master who had just converted to Roman Catholicism. Her autobiographical Frost in May, first published in 1933, has just appeared here in paperback, along with three sequels. As Elizabeth Bowen writes in the introduction, it is one of the best school novels ever written...
Christine (Cristine Rose) and Léa (Patticia Charbonneau) have been schooled in a convent so that obedience is second nature to them. Their venal mother has farmed them out as domestic servants. In one revealing scene, an early employer flicks through a pile of dinner napkins that Léa has ironed and airily tosses half of them on the floor as insufficiently impeccable. The eventual demise of their present mistress, Mme. Danzard (Anne Pitoniak), is built on such moments, and the murder is a strange admixture of revolt and matricide. Throughout, the play is charged with the alternating...
...temporal O mores! It has been some years since young women needed or wanted such protection. As a near convent in an area of singles bars, the once elegant hotel had sadly declined before its purchase last year by a partnership that includes the Oberoi Hotels of India, Asia's largest hotel chain. While reserving a wing for the 113 women who still live there (some of them for more than 40 years), the new owners have started to remodel the 22-story building as a conventional hotel open to everyone...