Word: prim
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Hubbard, and Old Mother Goose, and Holy Mum the Church, down to Mother Ireland and your own dear departed and long-suffering Mother Machree." Thus in Mur der at Cobbler's Hulk, a retired travel agent lives in fastidious loneliness near a remote village. A woman attacks his prim self-sufficiency. "No love. No drink. No friends. No wife. No children. Happy man! Nothing to betray you." She is proved wrong, for O'Faolain shows him capable of a drastic act of love...
...like a Harvard administrator in his comfortable chumminess, generous desire to do good and general inability to see how to do it. Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) is, in my view, the real hero; in the book she was called simply "Big Nurse." In the film she is well-meaning, prim, and, on the whole, sympathetic--especially when McMurphy begins to take control of the ward. The only thing we are shown that might lead us to dislike her is her unscrupulous use of the meaning of a parliamentary majority in a vote taken in the ward--but one which...
...Alys Pearsall Smith, the prim American Quaker who had been Russell's first wife, still pinned pink ribbons in her hair for his visits...
...publication of this material would doubtless have pained Joyce deeply. Despite his reputation as a writer of dirty books, he was remarkably prim in his speech and other correspondence. "Keep my letters to yourself, dear," he admonished Nora. "They were written for you." Yet because everything Joyce experienced found its way some how into his fiction, the exposure of his raw sexual fantasies is not the simple invasion of privacy it might seem. Joyce's life was a tug of war between schizoid contradictions. He fled Dublin but never wrote about anything else. He renounced Catholicism, then cast himself...
...even suggested. Finally, there is the problem of Big Nurse, the chief authority symbol in McMurphy's little world and his main antagonist. In the book, a good deal of the tension between them is oddly sexual. In the film, Big Nurse (Louise Fletcher) is merely a prim, quite sexless nag and a symbol only of niggling institutionalism. So nothing of any dramatic power gets going between her and McMurphy...