Word: puritanical
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Touted as the extraordinary tale of a Puritan American woman who, after following her husband to India, falls in love with a Hindu raja, The Holder of the World surely will be remembered as Bharati Mukherjee's finest rendering of a woman's story yet. There is no question that Mukherjee's creative use of a historical tableau--Puritan New England, Mother England, Mughal India--in her new novel demands a more intense reading than was needed for her previous stories of Indian women and their immigrant experiences in a contemporary North American context, but Mukherjee is doing much more...
...woman "undreamed of in Puritan society," Hannah Easton is born in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1670. She inherits her unconventional boldness of spirit from her mother who escapes a bloody Nipmuc insurrection by running into the night with her Nipmuc Indian lover. Hannah's foster family tries to inculcate her with the Puritan values of hard work and subdued deportment, but Hannah's legacy, resisting suppression, emerges in her lurid poetry and needle-work...
...legislators who proposed the change in the existing law are not latter-day Puritans. True, Massachusetts has had a history of government-imposed Christian morality. But this state has so many unenforced laws left over from the Puritan era that such name-calling is preposterous. More accurately, the state legislators are people who are aware of the decline in drunk-driving fatalities that has resulted from increased drinking restrictions all over the country...
...blasting music after 1:00 a.m., this turn of events still allows first-years ready access to alcohol. Even though the majority of the students in the houses are still underage, this situation provides a convenient dodge for the University. For students here, the law might become another ignored Puritan ordinance...
Previously, it was illegal to serve a minor in Massachusetts. But Massachusetts law contained no rules against drinking alcohol that, say, dropped from the sky--a curious phenomenon that seemed to happen often in Cambridge. The Puritan holdovers in the State House have made it officially illegal for minors to possess alcohol, meaning even Corona from the clouds is off limits...