Word: victorian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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STEPHEN SONDHEIM'S Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street shocks like an amusement park's house of horrors, slitting the emotions and jangling open nerves, but the chill melts quickly and the musical ultimately fails. For his first stab at opera, Sondheim appropriated the hackneyed Victorian tale of Sweeney Todd, a barber who exacts revenge for his wife's death by slashing the throats of her murderers. Sweeney's neighbor, a Mrs. Lovett, capitalizes on their punishment by grinding the corpses into filling for her famous meat pies. It's all rather messy...
Beneath all that frippery, however, is a work bursting with life, the hearty, beef-and-ale vitality of Victorian England...
...Elephant Man. David Lynch transforms the story of John Merrick-the noble ogre of Victorian England-into a grim, lovely fairy tale. John Hurt inhabits Merrick with grace and spirit in the year's sweetest movie...
...remarks had a lasting effect. Denied the education and independence forced upon her older brothers, Alice had little choice but to stay home and hope for escape through marriage. By the time it became clear that proposals were not forth-coming, Alice had long since adopted a third Victorian alternative. Although she dabbled in community activities for the rest of her life, her main energies, from the time she was 20, centered around her "nerves...
...Strouse refuses to make the error of presenting Alice as a martyr to frustrated Victorian womanhood. She frequently suggests parallels between Alice's problems and those of other nineteenth century women, and her book offers insight into the psychosomatic ilnesses common to Victorian spinsters. Nevertheless, she never presents Alice as merely a passive victim of masculine oppression. Alice herself, as Strouse argues, recognized her own responsibility for her failures, and one of the few emotions absent from her writings is indulgent self-pity. Toward the end of her life, looking back over her years of illness, she ruefully berated herself...