Word: sophoclean
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...plain, impatient critic has found his preoccupations morbid. The stories assembled in this volume, and the longer novels, Victory, Nostromo and Under Western Eyes, make both these accusations seem as irrelevant as the "dating" of Conrad's work. Neither time nor fashion really affects its nature, which is Sophoclean and tragic: "The plight of the man on whom life closes down...
...Antigone of Anouilh, unswayed by religion, unfond of her brother, and in love with life, can only be accounted a fanatical idealist-a character into whom Katharine Cornell finds it almost impossible to breathe life. On the other hand, Anouilh's Creon is at once the least Sophoclean and the most successful person in the play. He is an astute, cynical worldling whose decree is merely a sop to the crowd and whose desire is to save his niece's life; and he is played with chilling elegance by Sir Cedric Hardwicke. If Antigone has ethics...
...come a long way past her spoiled, too-sheltered girlhood. That is her own opinion, anyhow; some readers may feel rather that suffering, if it is to pay dividends, requires a sufferer. They may also feel that Emily's perceptions of Blairstown's social anguish are less Sophoclean than benevolently cross-eyed. But her sincerity and her delusions of self-knowledge, which the author appears wholeheartedly to share with her, will make Emily seem real and dear to thousands...