Word: nineteenth
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...final phase of nineteenth-century literature, the game turns into a complex pattern of tag or "mother-may-I". Henry James's American girls are seduced not by men, but by surfaces, by "their failure to look deep enough into things." And the men perceiving full well the awful depths, sense a mysterious force in women that threatens to undercut their own power. Their outright acts of betrayal and cruelty are breathless attempts to remain one step ahead of destruction...
Looking like a nineteenth century candy sampler resting on a mammoth paper doily, the printed scrim that greets the Loeb audience is engagingly nostalgic. Unfortunately, the production of The Matchmaker that unfolds behind it is as overly sweet as the candy one would expect to find...
...lives as women and struggle to break their own chains and their sisters'. Unlike their adventure-seeking predecessors, these women want to reform, even revolutionize the status quo--the Transcendentalist critic Margaret Fuller who combined Transcendental spirituality and practical agitation in her notorious Conversations and in Woman in the Nineteenth Century; the ex-slave Sojourner Truth who infused abolition and agitation for women's rights with her own "strange powers"; the anarchist Emma Goldman who pioneered the advocacy of birth control and tried to integrate Peter Kropotkin's emphasis on the community with Henrik Ibsen's emphasis on the strong...
This is a remarkably contorted way of getting at some simple truths. Orwell was, indeed, a virtuous man; many of his values, in fact, were those of nineteenth century Britain. But Trilling and many others seem to have made Orwell into a sort of holy fool, driven toward truth and morality for reasons he could not understand. It is a relationship a little like that of a nine-year-old boy to Batman; in a tight spot, he will ask himself, "What would Batman do?" If Orwell would have done it, it must have been all right...
...other ways. Usually I just sang teenage death songs. Laura's boyfriend Tommy drove to the stock car race and killed himself about 22 times during the course of the Marathon, and if that train didn't kill Teen Angel the first time, I imagine it had by the nineteenth...