Word: victorians
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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According to an October 10 article in The New York Times, the professors chose an old Victorian estate house in North Andover for the meeting. The talks were stalled when Ed Garvey, the executive director of the players' union, failed to arrive. According to the Times, Garvey said he was not informed of the meeting early enough to prepare properly...
Chasing the ineffable can make gymnastic philosophy and entertaining drama, but Hildesheimer's pursuit is a didactic lust for lifelessness. Having cleansed Mozart of the cliches of romanticism and Victorian propriety, he spills the cliches of existentialism and psychoanalysis. There are speculations on the speculative and a dozen ways to say perhaps. In one breath the man and his art are separated; in another, "we always experience Mozart's music ... as the catharsis resulting from one man's sublimation of his personal crisis." Mozart is certainly elusive, as Hildesheimer claims, but here he is hidden twice: once...
...galactic empires." Now Joyce Carol Oates has again wandered off into the never-never land of the neo-gothic romance. In Oates' case, the purpose of the excursion is parody. A Bloodsmoor Romance, like the author's 1980 Bellefleur, is intended to poke fun at gushy Victorian women novelists and such latter-day descendants as Barbara Cartland, Victoria Holt and Rosemary Rogers...
...these young ladies, the trajectory of love follows the customarily lunatic lines of an Oates romance. The youngest Zinn, Deirdre, is snatched away by a stranger in "an outlaw balloon of sinister black-silken hue" as she sits crocheting in a gazebo. Sister Malvinia escapes the toils of Victorian family life in her own way: she makes a career as an actress and is courted by a singularly repulsive Mark Twain. Octavia marries a closet sadist and feather-boa fetishist. Constance Philippa runs away on her wedding night, leaving in her bed a dressmaker's dummy with which...
...unless the defloration of the dressmaker's dummy can be reckoned as steamy. Octavia's lovemaking with her fetishist, involving half a dozen or more petticoats and "fifty or sixty or even seventy yards of trimming" (including the boa) is rewardingly comical. Still, Oates' mock-Victorian diction has imposed its own restraints, as exemplified by such pronouncements as: "I am heartsick that there may well be those persons of the masculine gender, who, lacking an intrinsic purity of character, may, by laborious effort, and much unseemly exercise of the lower ranges of the imagination, summon forth...