Word: victorians
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Generations. Men with memories ask, "What, again?" The first sexual revolution followed World War I, when flaming youth buried the Victorian era and anointed itself as the Jazz Age. In many ways it was an innocent revolution. In This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald alarmed mothers by telling them "how casually their daughters were accustomed to being kissed"; today mothers thank their stars if kissing is all their daughters are accustomed to. It was, nevertheless, a revolution that took nerve, and it was led by the daring few; today's is far more broadly based. In the 1920s...
...difference between the '20s and '60s comes down, in part, to a difference between people. The rebels of the '20s had Victorian parents who laid down a Victorian law; it was something concrete and fairly well-defined to rise up against. The rebels of the '60s have parents with only the tattered remnants of a code, expressed for many of them in Ernest Hemingway's one-sentence manifesto: "What is moral
What the first sexual revolution in the U.S. attacked was not original Puritanism so much as its Victorian version-which had become a matter of prudery more than of purity, propriety more than of grace. The 19th century frantically insisted on propriety precisely because it felt its real faith and ethics disappearing. While it feared nudity like a plague, Victorian Puritanism had the effect of an all-covering gown that only inflames the imagination. By insisting on suppressing the sex instinct in everything, the age betrayed the fact that it really saw that instinct in everything. So, too, with Sigmund...
...members of the stodgy Royal Academy, which had managed to be hostile in turn to Constable, Turner, Whistler, the Pre-Raphaelites, French impressionism and most everything else that subsequently mattered. "Mal à la Tate," punned a peeved Punch. At first the trustees forced the stepchild Tate to accept Victorian tearjerkers that no one will even borrow today. The Tate did not succeed in winning its complete autonomy from the National Gallery until 1955, and it had to wait till after World War II for annual government grants, still a pittance at $112,000 a year, to buy works...
Sweeney Todd is like a mediocre Victorian novel. Filled to overflowing with weird characters and wild situations, the play nonetheless contains a large number of less funny scenes along with the gems. And the time element at last predominates. After the first two hours, as after the first two volumes of Henry Esmond, no amount of wit or slapstick can keep the audience from desiring a rapid...