Word: havisham
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Schama, narrating in a scruffy leather jacket, is a popularizer in the best sense. He can be snarky, poetic or both, as when he describes Queen Victoria's funeral procession, the monarch dressed in white: "There was a touch of Miss Havisham about this--the 80-year-old, flower-bedecked virgin bride." He's an enlightening, entertaining guide to a history that isn't ours, except that it really is. --By James Poniewozik
...watch their charges squirm. There is but one drawback to wielding such power: the daunting task of grading essays. For every student who pulls an all-nighter wading through Great Expectations, there is a teacher who has to slog through dozens of tortured expositions on the symbolism of Miss Havisham's aborted wedding feast...
Such a male reaction is just as atavistic as Katie's castration fantasy. Let us elevate the discussion. What's interesting about this capsized fairy tale is what it tells us about sexual paradigms. The old paradigm in a case like this is Miss Havisham, in Dickens' Great Expectations. Miss Havisham had been left at the altar many years before. She stopped the clocks at the moment of abandonment. She shut herself off and lived ever after in the ruins of her nuptial hope. She trained up the lovely young girl Estella to take her revenge upon...
...Wales. Last week's jilted bride, Nicole Contos, followed the essential outlines of Diana's example. The script: 1)The man (Prince Charles, or Tasos Michael) is a rotten, unfeeling, abusive cad, and inflicts a humiliation upon a naive and innocently hopeful young woman. 2)Instead of a Havisham withdrawal, however, the young woman goes vividly public with her trauma and plays the story out in the media, turning her shame not only into triumph but into revenge. Thus Nicole paraded her drama all over national television last week. Broken dreams make you a star. The contemptible non-groom...
Celimene's spacy cousin, Eliante (Natasha Shapiro) is more of a ham, Despite a dress that makes her look like Miss Havisham...