Word: priggishness
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...making its leading character too enigmatic to invite either sympathy or censure. Madeleine (Ann Todd) seems inadequately drawn, inconsistent and unreal. The story's conflicts grow out of hidebound Victorian conventions, and these are pictured so stiffly, e.g., in the character of Leslie Banks as Madeleine's priggish father, that some of the situations resemble showboat melodrama...
...marries well and eventually becomes governor of Ohio; one daughter takes a fancy to a red-haired furnaceman, and runs naked in the night to the house of her chosen; another daughter becomes a school teacher. Sayward's son Chancey is the family disappointment; he turns out a priggish reformer and a Copperhead, but he shows up at his mother's deathbed, impressed in spite of himself by her hardy pioneer virtues...
...believe," a young London mother told a meeting of 3,600 other British mothers last week, "that there is a great fear in our generation of being labeled priggish. In consequence, people are sometimes afraid to show disapproval of what they know to be wrong...
...remarkably adopt in the very difficult scene in which she tells Cesariot that Panisse, her husband, was not his father. Reminding her son that she was forced to marry old Panisse because she was unwed and was carrying him, Mile, Desmazis defends herself well, and delivers to her priggish son what I am sure is one of the most astounding counter-offensive in motion-pictures. It is approximately: "You forget, Cesariot, that you, yes you, kept me from having the other children I wanted. If it had not been for you, I would not have had to marry...
...could completely live down a yarn like that, which was told to Parson Weems in 1800 by an "excellent lady." It is just such saccharine legends, overlaid with priggish nonsense, that have helped to make George Washington a forbidding figure in U.S. history. The too-well-known portraits, by Gilbert Stuart and others, haven't helped either. The frozen face of Washington that stares down on thousands of U.S. schoolkids is that of a jut-jawed old party whose cumbersome false teeth are giving him trouble...