Word: verena
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...women to remain passive, dependent, domestic and obedient, and that any female who ventured to differ was regarded as at best a shrew and at worst a witch or even a vampire. He buttresses this argument with evidence from both high culture and high camp. He decries Henry James' Verena Tarrant (in The Bostonians) and Tennyson's Lady of Shalott for their dim-witted self- sacrifice, and he manages to get angry about even such endearing targets as Dracula and Trilby...
...Verena Greig El Khobar, Saudi Arabia
...less a response to its source than a careful college outline of it. There is a certain undiminishable power in the struggle between Basil Ransom (Christopher Reeve), all snaky masculine guile, and Olive Chancellor (Vanessa Redgrave), representing feminism at its most sternly ideological, for the innocent soul of Verena Tarrant. But Ivory's camera behaves like a tourist trapped meekly behind a velvet rope at a historical reconstruction, and most of his actors seem afraid they might damage the nicely chosen antiques the curator has permitted them to perch upon...
Vanessa Redgrave rises to the challenges of her role, decidedly a difficult one. She portrays Olive-essentially an unattractive, narrows-minded, selfish character--without condescension. There is genuine pathos about Olive's obsessiveness, as it is evident that Verena is her sole emotional focus: suffragism her only raison d'etre. But even her idealism is problematic--talking about women's suffrage, she sounds more like a mystic than a social reformer...
Madeleine Potter as Verena manages to create a character that is infinitely sweet without being insipid: an innocent but not an imbecile or a wimp. The ambiguity of Verena's character comes across-on one hand, she is being hailed as the champion of women's rights: on the other, she has little identity of her own. Ransom's old and Olive's new are alternately borrowed and discarded in an effort to keep all parties of the love triangle reasonably happy. At the same time, Verena is convincing and interesting enough--"an original," as an admiring New York matron...