Word: spinsterhood
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...this perfect little film, a literary- philosophical interpretation of their lot. The human characters could possibly supply some self-explanations, but they don't bother. William is a perversely perky little man, hesitantly alert. Neaera has a closed ferocity about her, as if she may be contemplating spinsterhood but finds the idea just too commonplace for a woman of truly unfettered mind...
When Sarah, Macon Leary's wife of twenty years, runs out of the house leaving her wedding rings in the soapdish, Macon's first instinct is to return to the childhood nest, the domestic asylum where his three sisters, all doomed for spinsterhood, still live. The tragedy which initiates their estrangement--the freak murder of the Leary's twelve year-old son, Ethan, that occurs while he is away at camp--lays bare the stasis their marriage has reached. When Sarah openly seeks comfort in her grief, Macon's only solace is the reminder that he, with his usual caution...
...keep the Father on the straight and narrow. Played with great enthusiasm by Louise Latham. Margaret is as eminently predictable as the other characters, but at least succeeds in engaging our attention; dishing out mashed potatoes with the air of a martyr, she is the very image of virtuous spinsterhood--faithful, honest, and pitifully boring...
...subject of American Gothic is in fact a small-town Midwesterner and his unmarried daughter, and once this is seen, the details of the painting fall into shape, as Wood meant them: the pitchfork becomes a scepter of paternal authority, a weapon for fending off suitors and perpetuating spinsterhood; its shape is echoed in the limp seams of the man's overalls, foreshadowing his own masculine debility; and so forth...
...things, on the evidence of Hepburn's films of the '50s and '60s: the lonely triumph of spinsterhood (Summertime, The African Queen, The Rainmaker), the sad declineinto dementia (Suddenly Last Summer, Long Day's Journey into Night). These later roles gave her the opportunity to soar, and she played each lovely chance to the hilt, whether she was getting morosely drunk over a lemonade in Pat and Mike (1952) or losing herself in heroin and reverie as O'Neill's Mary Tyrone...