Word: gothicisms
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...Benjamin Britten was over tempted to build an opera, on Henry James's unattractive little post-Gothic and pre-Freudian shocker, The Turn of the Screw, I confess I cannot easily conceive: James's novella, I have always thought, could only be dramatized by someone experienced in the nuances of psychological muck--a writer of the Grand Guignol, say, or perhaps even Mr. Alfred Hitchcock...
...sets, by Jac Venza, tried to be terribly Gothic, but only managed to look faintly dismal...
...days before the Really Big Rich, and few Texans could resist that sort of an appeal. Ma won. A rawboned woman with an American Gothic jaw, she looked as hard as a banker's heart. Actually, she was a college-educated, devoutly religious, well-bred woman who was about as political as peach cobbler. She was, above all, a dutiful wife. Her first act as Governor was to sign an "amnesty" restoring Farmer Jim's right to hold public office. (It was rescinded by her successor.) Though both Fergusons were teetotalers, they opposed Prohibition. In her first term...
...trap door in the cellar lies a mysteriously deformed skeleton. "This Gothick tale," says Author Russell Kirk, is "in unblushing line of direct descent from The Castle of Otranto." He is wrong. Historian Kirk (The Conservative Mind) has expertly stuffed his book with all the claptrappings of the Gothic romance, but what he has actually achieved is a political morality tale. For all the apparent ectoplasm floating about it, the Old House of Fear is haunted not by ghosts but by the shadow of the welfare state...
...Madonnas. Twice daily after she arrived in Paris, Alexandre went to Jackie's apartments on the Quai d'Orsay, brushing and shaping her hair in a huge silvery, mother-of-pearl bathroom. For a formal reception at the Elysee Palace, Alexandre, declaring himself inspired by pictures of Gothic Madonnas, thickened Jackie's bangs and "dressed her cheeks" with two sweeping waves. Anticipating complaints that the style hid too much of Jackie's face, Alexandre said: "A beautiful face needs foliage around it." For a ball next night at Versailles, Alexandre moved on from the Madonnas...