Word: protofeminist
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Zhao has become, without realizing it, a protofeminist. Once they earn money of their own, women like her break down the old tradition of male superiority. "If wives can't do anything for themselves," she says, "husbands just look down on them." Zhao used to be afraid to give a speech and could only read it, head bowed, eyes down. Now she speaks boldly and confidently, bubbling over with plans. Her daughter, 23, has gone to work as an accountant in the southern boom town of Shenzhen...
That is all changing. The swift success of both Campion's protofeminist film and Nyman's lush, haunting score (more than 1.5 million CDs sold to date) has meant far fewer puffy noses and sour faces. Previously, Nyman was best known for the music he wrote for the idiosyncratic director Peter Greenaway (The Cook The Thief His Wife & Her Lover) and for his own superb 1987 opera, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, based on Oliver Sacks' best-selling book about neurological disorders. On a recent tour of North America with his 10- piece chamber orchestra...
...artistic search Kingston describes is more complex than most: she is an ethnic Chinese in "white ghost" America, a protofeminist woman caught between two male-dominated cultures, a natural writer in English whose parents are literate only in Chinese. In addition to being captivated by folk mythology, she is, like most writers, in the grip of intense family mythology -- about an aunt shamed to suicide by giving birth to a bastard, about uncles murdered by communists who then arrogantly urge her father, safely in America, to "donate" the dead men's lands. These stories clearly indicated to young Kingston that...
...handsome young vicomte and a chorus girl, and the dark, obsessive bond between that same young woman and the Phantom, who seeks to win her devotion by making her a star. The maiden is thus expected to choose between outward beauty and the beauty of the soul and, in protofeminist fashion, between status as a rich man's wife and acclaim as an artist in her own right. As befits a fantasy, she gets both by virtue of a brief display of compassion...
...buried sorrow. Nancy Marchand, as the family's self-described cutup, has the gift of making banal observations sound witty. Anne Pitoniak, as the eldest and prissiest, combines dictatorial will with genuine dignity. Peggy Cass is the family entertainer, Elizabeth Franz its happiest housewife and Gisela Caldwell its edgy protofeminist, whose eventual crack-up seems to result from her discontent with women's lot. The most affecting performance comes from Bette Henritze, as a stroke victim whose singsong speech does not obscure a larger tragedy. When she admits, "I'm not very demonstrative," she speaks for the whole family...