Word: old
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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According to the old common-law rule, a man who forces his wife to have sexual intercourse with him cannot be convicted of rape. The celebrated Rideout case in Salem, Ore., late last year resulted in the acquittal of Husband John accused of rape by his wife Greta. Attitudes are changing, however. Last week, in another Salem, in Massachusetts, James K. Chretien was convicted of raping his estranged wife Carmelina. He is believed to be the first American ever convicted of wife rape. Chretien was sentenced by Superior Court Judge Thomas R. Morse Jr. to three to five years...
Chretien, a bartender and an exMarine, was being divorced by his wife. After finishing work and a couple of beers one night, according to trial testimony, he burst into the couple's former home and dragged Mrs. Chretien upstairs to their old bedroom. In a similar case that went to trial in the same state more than a century ago, the husband was acquitted. There will undoubtedly be more wife vs. husband rape suits, particularly in Oregon, Nebraska, Delaware and New Jersey, which have all adopted statutes allowing a wife to press rape charges against her husband, even...
Those limits are defined-quite graphically-as incest, drug addiction and ambisexuality. The practitioners of these diverse sports are Caterina (Clayburgh), a recently widowed American opera star, and her androgynous 15-year-old son Joe (Matthew Barry). During the course of a summer singing tour through Italy, the wealthy mother and the spoiled boy carry on a tortured relationship that might well shock the cast of La Dolce Vita. Obscene screaming matches and violent brawls quickly give way to grueling sequences featuring heroin injection and masturbatory sex. The film's dramatic structure is built around the secrets the characters...
What happened? The first clue appears on the title page, where the word LETTERS is built up from a welter of small letters that, when properly viewed, spell the following: "an old time epistolary novel by seven fictitious drolls & dreamers each of which imagines himself actual." Letters made up of letters, fiction made up of fictions, Chinese boxes diminishing to emptiness. Such diminution is what the novel is about. The 772 pages that follow thus constitute a stunningly obsessive exercise in inflatio ad absurdum...
...chief virtue of the old epistolary novel was suspense; the tense was present, and the letter writers did not know what would happen once they put down their quills. Barth strips the form of any forward thrust. His interest is not in progress or advancement but in recapitulation. The letters are governed by a "Deeper Pattern"; the letter writers slowly merge in the conviction that they are living the first part of their lives for a second time or, as one writes, that "biography like history may re-enact itself as farce." Stasis reigns, history is not Viconian cycles...