Word: spinsterism
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...pseudo seer, caked in makeup and swathed in fading Gypsy finery but maintaining an inner core of steely rage. Her climactic revelations, hokey on the page, sound torn from the depths of a great and dangerous soul. She has less to do in Black Comedy, but as a spinster liberated in the dark -- literally -- to indulge dreamy fantasies of booze and sex, she melds exquisite comic timing and gesture with spontaneous sweetness...
...Europe kids grow up different -- earlier and tougher. Parents still wield authority; Papa could be Yahweh with a toothache, and Mama could sell her daughter into child prostitution. And because Death hangs around the house like a spinster aunt, the kids must ever be packed off to relatives for whom child care is just the latest of life's dirty tricks. Sometimes the kids run away and never come back. No wonder children in European films often look like stunted adults. Since birth they've been in a dress rehearsal for distress...
This insidious new image, Faludi claims, was Hope Steadman, the exalted, blissful, breast-feeding mother of thirtysomething, who provided a postfeminist contrast to the "neurotic spinster ((and)) ball-busting single career woman." Or Glenn Close's character in Fatal Attraction, the crazed professional temptress -- beautiful, successful and mad as a hatter, thanks to the deafening tick of her biological clock. Or the Dress for Success models who, in Faludi's lethal description, "trip down the runway in stiletto heels, hands snug in dainty white gloves. Their briefcases swing like Easter baskets, feather light; they are, after all, empty...
...Maud Bailey, a dedicated feminist, is interested in another 19th century poet, Christabel LaMotte. (Neither Ash nor LaMotte existed, but Byatt creates excerpts from their imaginary poems and journals that bring them vibrantly alive.) Roland stumbles across a tantalizing fragment of evidence that the respectably married Ash and the spinster LaMotte may have had an illicit affair; such an event, if proved, would set the scholarly world on its ear. Before long, he and Maud join forces to track down the truth...
...Miss Emily Brent, an aged spinster, Andrea Thome manages to keep her back erect and her opinions prim even as her peers die in hideous fashion. John Ducey adopts the physical mannerisms of an old fogey perfectly, and his General Arthur MacKenzie shambles from place to place in a manner that is both disconcerting (Ducey's mouth hangs open for much of his time on stage) and endearing (when he apologetically requests a certain seat because "that's where my chair is at the Club...