Word: gabrielic
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...things I have always taken issue with in Southern literature is that it is almost all rooted in social realism," says Kenan. "I grew up around people who took the Bible literally, and still do." So in college, when Kenan first read such South American authors as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, he abandoned his plans to be a physicist and turned to writing. "When I encountered writers who wrote about spirits like they would changing a carburetor, I realized you can come at this form from an entirely different vantage point...
...happened in its course--a preventable atrocity, we eventually learn--and he is determined to raise his numerous progeny in peace and prosperity on his South Carolina plantation. In the state assembly he votes against raising troops and money for a war of independence. This alienates his son Gabriel (charmingly played by Heath Ledger), who joins the Continental Army. And it reckons without the relentless cruelty of Colonel William Tavington (whom Jason Isaacs plays with ferocious candor, offering neither excuses nor a single redeeming grace...
...pursuit of retreating rebel soldiers, Tavington comes riding up to Martin's plantation at the head of a cavalry troop. Insouciantly, even rather jauntily, he orders all the Americans--most of them wounded--to be shot, the plantation fired, and for good measure, he marches Gabriel (by this time a dispatch rider for the valiant Colonel Harry Burwell, played by Chris Cooper) off to be hanged. When one of Martin's other sons tries to rescue his brother, he is coldly murdered...
...this psychopathy that begets Martin's patriotism. With two of his other boys, he rescues Gabriel from the hanging party in what is surely director Roland Emmerich's most dashing set piece. This action establishes Martin, whose character is surely based in part on Francis Marion, the not-as-nice "swamp fox" of the Revolution, as a great, almost ghostly guerrilla leader. Also, it personalizes the war for him. At some point, we know, he must confront the hateful Tavington mano a mano...
These parallels and contrasts, when seen in conjunction with works showing Mary calmly accepting Gabriel's news or holding Christ in Il Pontoricchio's 16th-century painting "Madonna and Child with the Infant St. John the Baptist and Saints Andrew and Jerome," illuminate different qualities of the Virgin as portrayed by artists over the centuries...