Word: unrealism
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Exasperated critics frequently took the failure of feeling further and said that Shaw's characters were unreal, that they were no more than walking arguments. This is a half-truth, though it is a fact that Shaw did not believe in character for its own sake. Few Victorian writers did. His eye for the middle-class milieu was perfect. He knew exactly the values beneath the humbug and was only rash in assuming that men and women can live without it. Candida is an excellent portrait of a woman and so is the delightful Major Barbara. The theater...
...wore a girdle which pinched in her waist . . . she had a beautiful figure. And after . . . modeling and posing in shows and for national magazine ads, after dates, after her night or two a week with her lover, she would go to bed and there lie in terror of something unreal and unseen, and she would get up at all hours and take taxicabs just to be with anyone who would hold her hand [and] tell her she was a good girl and that she wasn't alone . . . What could life hold for her in a few years, when younger...
...Waldorf-Astoria for the occasion. Over turtle soup and filet mignon, and through a few innocuous speeches, everyone would ignore the war in Korea for the moment, be friendly and smiling for each other and the photographers. Hence the whole thing, like past U.N. banquets, would be unreal, in a pleasant sort of way, and also somewhat dull...
...moviemaking, but a disappointing movie. It succeeds in making the crime a tantalizing enigma-which in itself may leave some cinemagoers feeling cheated-at the cost of making its leading character too enigmatic to invite either sympathy or censure. Madeleine (Ann Todd) seems inadequately drawn, inconsistent and unreal. The story's conflicts grow out of hidebound Victorian conventions, and these are pictured so stiffly, e.g., in the character of Leslie Banks as Madeleine's priggish father, that some of the situations resemble showboat melodrama...
...Brown is Virginia Woolf's heroine, too. Her essays discuss books, literary currents, social questions, but fundamentally their concern is with people. They are full of subtle portraits, penetrating yet sympathetic, always economically drawn. The characters, one sometimes feels, are created with too much sympathy, but they are never unreal. In their creation, Mrs. Woolf has followed her dictum about Mrs. Brown; "She is an old lady of unlimited capacity and infinite variety . . . the things she says and the things she does and her eyes and her nose and her speech and her silence have an overwhelming fascination...