Word: hysterias
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Both the Right and the Left in America have their own memories about the period of flirtation with Marx. To the Right, it has become the decade of treason, when Americans ate of totalitarian fruit and knew sin; the guilt and hysteria of the late '40's and early '50's extended to liberals who had never been associated with the Communist Party in the '30's, even to men who were born too late to be part of the decade of treason. Thus the weakest and least sympathetic portion of Arthur M. Schlesinger's Age of Roosevelt...
Tennessee Williams is now 50, still gets scared ("I am a definition of hysteria''), still tells stories that get scarier and scarier-and tells them so hypnotically that the public pays him over $200,000 a year not to stop. He is the nightmare merchant of Broadway, writer of Orpheus Descending (murder by blow torch), A Streetcar Named Desire (rape, nymphomania, homosexuality), Summer and Smoke (frigidity), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (impotence, alcoholism, homosexuality), Sweet Bird of Youth (drug addiction, castration, syphilis), Suddenly Last Summer (homosexuality, cannibalism), and The Night of the Iguana (masturbation, underwear fetishism, coprophagy...
Nation's Spearhead. The philosophy behind the S.A.O. is a muddle of authoritarian, imperialist and populist ideas. S.A.O. propaganda is the sort often found in flights from reality?orotund, florid, declamatory, and so ecstatic as to approach hysteria. Communists delight in identifying themselves historically with Spartacus and his slave revolt; the S.A.O. officers see themselves as Roman legionnaires holding off the Red barbarians on the marches of empire and sending back semaphore messages warning Rome?or rather, Paris?to "beware of the anger of the Legions!" A typical S.A.O. manifesto recalls French soldiers fallen in colonial wars: "Our dreams...
...British club, Fielding-convinced that Aziz is innocent-defends him against the noble hysteria of whites who think that one of their own has been insulted by a nigger. He is ostracized and must turn to be Indians in the town, who are enraged over Aziz's arrest. This club scene is not as well handled as others, with the exception of an eloquent speech by Mrs. Moore on the terrifying echo in the caves...
...rape. The victim is a college girl (Carroll Baker, in private life Mrs. Garfein) who goes skipping through a New York City park alone after dark. When she comes to, she tidies her clothes, staggers home, sneaks upstairs past her prudish parent (Mildred Dunnock). In a meticulous ritual of hysteria, she cuts up her torn clothes, flushes them down the drain, pops into bed as if nothing had happened, as if out of sight were really out of mind...