Word: overwrought
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...consciousness, driven a trifle off center by the disasters in the family, revolves about her daughter. Overpowering possessive selfishness sets her to keep Jane to herself. She forbids the match. When Jane stands her ground the mother bursts into a blind fury and pours into Jane's sensitive, overwrought brain the poison tale of her inheritance among the children of the still, white satellite. The girl's mind falters under the shock, and as the final curtain falls the audience hears the purr of airplane high in the foggy night in which the lovers are climbing...
This is probably the first time that the New England conscience has been thus publicly pilloried by a medical man writing of mentally overwrought conditions. Those who have suffered from this peculiar inheritance often have inveighed against it privately and have fought against it as hard as their ancestors fought for it. But they so far have had few champions to take up the cudgels in their behalf. Those psycho-analysts who have studied New England cases have recognized some of the evils of this strange mental heritage, but they have given little comfort to its victims...
...playwright who attempts to infuse into his drama the age-old themes of passion and superstition must have a consummate skill if he is to avoid common banality or overwrought melodrama; and when, as is with the case with Jacinto Benavente in America, he is almost unknown to his audiences, and must assume the full burden of proff, his task increases tenfold. Yet Benavente is sufficiently a master of his art to have overcome these difficulties and presented a play of unquestionable merit...