Word: vestals
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Poor Atalanta. She doesn't want to marry anybody, ever. She doesn't even want to stay at the College of Vestal Virgins, as the Dean (Nick Whitlam) keeps urging. No, Atalanta wants to be a famous athlete, and most any day you'll find her practicing the various track and field events she plans to enter in the next Olympiad...
...vulgar spectacle. "It was for a purse of $150," reminisced Referee Jack Sheean, "and I matched Knucksey Doherty of Donegal Square with Tim Harrington of Cambridge and told them to be themselves. I figured some of those sedate, quietly dressed society women would scream or faint, but the vestal virgins in the Coliseum never looked on with more calm than these high and haughty dames as they watched these two babies murder each other...
...earnest if somewhat amateurish biography, Yvette is finally portrayed in truer colors. She was nearer vestal than scarlet. As a critic noted at the time, the onstage illusion Yvette so shatteringly evoked was of knowing virginity; as stage-door admirers soon discovered, it was no illusion...
Vassar's vestal mysteries are not always so explicit. This most female of novels is calculated to make the male reader feel like an involuntary voyeur, as if he had blundered into a contemporary version of the Eleusinian mysteries. Is there some kind of sex war going on? Certainly, it is made clear that the task of fitting man into Vassar's vision of perfection is hard indeed...