All Passion Spent (VMC)

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I liked this novel quite a bit. It is set in the UK in 1931. A woman close to 90s, after her esteemed-by-many husband, Viceroy Henry Slane, dies, chooses to live in a little house with her maid rather than live with her sons and daughters, who secretly view her as an elderly wife who is mourning her husband and who will die soon. We meet several characters who visit her in her house. We are privy to her thoughts as she reminisces on her past years. For me to reveal more would be to reveal what I liked so much about the novel. Better for a reader to come upon that themselves. The DVD with Wendy Hiller was absolutely, absolutely excellent. I loved it so much that I watched it three times.

It makes this reader, at least, almost eager to be eighty-eight, when one can at last step aside and meditate on the life that has been lived. Takeda, Arata. "Suicide bombers in Western literature: Demythologizing a mythic discourse". Contemporary Justice Review 13.4 (2010): 455–475. Despite all the wealth and opulence in her life, her children and her dutiful husband, Lady Slane’s life hadn’t truly been happy. Her musings show that the things society often says are good for women may not actually be so in reality, and that many women often have to hide their true desires, and have had their youthful desires dashed or pushed to the side:Of course, she would not question the wisdom of any arrangements they might choose to make. Mother had no will of her own; all her life long, gracious and gentle, she had been wholly submissive — an appendage. It was assumed that she had not enough brain to be self-assertive. “Thank goodness,” Herbert sometimes remarked, “Mother is not one of those clever women.”

This belief in the unparalleled authenticity of sexual love has for two centuries been a distinctive belief of our society; it is part of our aggrandisement of the individual against society and part of modern western culture's disdain for social structures whenever they come into conflict with individual desire. Yet it is striking how novelists today have moved away from this reliance on sexual intimacy as a source of emotional revelation, and how the search for intimacy is simply no longer the prime motor that it once was for the novel. This goes much, much further than simply disappointment that sex does not live up to expectations - rather, it is a pervasive feeling that sex is not worth making a great fuss about at all. Although sex can be as explicit as you like, it is no longer centrally important to many novelists. Even a novelist like Ali, who at first glance seems to be writing something like a 19th-century novel with her faith in the power of adultery to transform her heroine, decides that in the end the sexual intimacy is unimportant. Nazneen neither finds happiness or tragedy there. She neither marries her lover nor steps under a train, but instead leaves him and makes an independent, morally and materially satisfying life for herself in her community. The reliance on Hebrew Scripture allows Milton to emphasise a plot that he feels is worthy of discussion, while the elements of Greek tragedy allows Milton to deal with complex issues through use of choruses and messengers instead of directly depicting them in addition to softening the Hebrew characters. This merging of two forms alters Samson from a rough barbarian into a pious warrior of God. [13] Violence [ edit ]Samson's blindness, however, is not exactly analogous to Milton's. Rather, Samson's blindness plays various symbolic roles. One is the correlation between Samson's inner blindness as well as outer, the fact that he believes his "intimate impulses" to be divine messages, yet is never in any way divinely affirmed in this, unlike the rest of Milton's divinely influenced characters. Samson's inability to see that his inner vision does not correlate to divine vision is manifest in his physical blindness. It also plays on his blindness to reason, leading him to act hastily, plus the fact that he is so easily deceived by Delila, "blinded" by her feminine wiles. Some of the chorus's lines in Samson Agonistes are rhymed, thus suggesting a return of the "chain of rhymes", which itself reflects upon Samson's imprisonment. I have no intention on visiting with family tomorrow. It would take me ages to recover from it. I would think them true and I would have to read many, many books to forget myself and them (good books). Why would you write about secret selves and have nothing at all about what you have to think about all of the time to survive? I don't know, this whole book reads like some agreed upon system of what everyone is like anyway. Pretty people with titles and houses and suitors and stuff and free time. That's just not true. She loves Henry so much, she didn't know him. But what would she say if it happened more often that he said she was intelligent? How would she feel about him if she could have seen him and he never knew her? No, I just don't like books that talk, talk, talk and don't ask any of the good questions anyway and they never trust you to know the secret selves at all. What would they look like if you met them? Would you ever know they wanted to be something more than they felt they were? Would they even care that you felt those same things too, or dare to dream it? It pisses me off I'm robbed of suspecting it about Edith because she TELLS me she does. (I could have wondered if Kay was so comfortable by himself he didn't worry about the insides of outsides.) I wouldn't like this book even without the other problems for that alone. It really is the most unforgivable book mistake, for me. Don't they know it is where I live. Do they even care? Qué alboroto arman las mujeres con el matrimonio!, pensó, y sin embargo, quién podría culparlas, cuando el matrimonio– y sus consecuencias– es la única gran historia de sus vidas. ¿Acaso no es esta la función para la qué se las ha formado, vestido, engalanado, educado —si algo tan parcial puede considerarse educación— protegido, mantenido en la ignorancia, segregado y reprimido; todo ello para que en el momento adecuado puedan ser entregadas, o que ellas mismas entreguen a sus hijas, para la tarea de atender a un hombre?"