Word: shrew
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...shrew-the animal namesake of bad-tempered women-is the smallest but fiercest and most voraciously carnivorous of all mammals. The brown, beady-eyed, two-to four-inch creature looks like a tiny, sharp-nosed field mouse, and lives under logs, leaves, roots and grasses in the woodlands of America, Asia and Europe. Last week Cornell's Zoology Professor William Robert Eadie (now a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy) made known some new facts about this diminutive killer...
Still another New Englander named Wooley (Fredric March), a candidate for Governor, is about to marry still another shrew (Susan Hayward). The witch promptly embodies herself as Miss Lake, nude in the obscuring smoke of a hotel fire, and sets about hexing Wooley into hopeless love with her. Though she wears his pajamas, gets into his bed, makes a shambles of his wedding, calls her father into fleshly form to help, drives Best Man Robert Benchley half-witted, and witches Wooley first out of, then into, the Governorship, she makes little amatory headway until she brews a love philtre. Unluckily...
...visit some kindhearted relatives, at first proves only a nuisance who demands a lot of waiting on, but soon turns into a back-stabbing monster who plots everyone's destruction. She enrages the servants, drives the husband to drink, wrecks his career, ruins his marriage, makes a shrew of his wife, a hypochondriac of his child, precipitates a village scandal. Her trouble, which is sex, finally unmasks her; her phobia, which is birds, finally causes her death...
...world in which such things could occur." Wilson demonstrates that the novels are powerful and bitter social criticism; that the Dickens character gallery contains ever more pitiless portraits of Victorian archetypes: the mealymouthed, blood-squeezing merchant, the vapid doll, the turncoat self-made man, and the soul-destroying shrew; that Dickens progressed from social to psychological, almost metaphysical analysis, and at his death was writing into the schizoid murderer Mr. Jasper (in Edwin Drood} not only the last and most symbolically charged of his Victorian hypocrites, but a sinister self-portrait as well...
Central figures are Eilley and Sandy Bowers. Regional history says they were admirable people, but in City of Illusion they are more like monsters-she a driving shrew, he a small, henpecked caricature of pathos. Eilley knows she is going to get rich, and when she is rich she enjoys it. But Sandy is miserable in his fine clothes and fine house, goes off to live in a shack. After Sandy dies of tuberculosis, Eilley loses both her mine and her mansion, ekes out a living taking fees as a "clairvoyant." But adversity alters her iron soul not a whit...