Word: conventions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...reality, Sister Gonzales saw nothing. She was asleep in a nearby convent when the killing took place. There were only two eyewitnesses. One was Francisco Bocel Cumes, 18, a gardener, who was forced at gunpoint to lead the killers to Father Rother's sleeping quarters. The other was an American nurse named Bertha Sanchez, who was sleeping in a guest room in the rectory the night of the murder...
...mocks all social codes as shams that bind the will. When he steals Dona Elvira (Frances Conroy) from the convent to be his wife and then abandons her, he mocks vows made to God and to fidelity. He protests undying love and proffers marriage to two peasant girls (Kristine Nielsen and Hillary Bailey) merely as bait for the gullible. He mocks his fellow aristocrats by tripping them up in the niceties of codes of honor, and his aged father (John E. Straub) by an icy disdain for filial piety...
Good novels about school - like The Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace - are classics. Here, the common memories of childhood - fear, rebellion, shame, what Yeats called "Youth's dreamy load" - are set against the structured, unfair world of a convent school...
British Novelist Antonia White, who died in 1980 at 81, attended a school like Lippington (formal name: the Convent of the Five Wounds) with handicaps like Nanda's: she was the daughter of a classics master who had just converted to Roman Catholicism. Her autobiographical Frost in May, first published in 1933, has just appeared here in paperback, along with three sequels. As Elizabeth Bowen writes in the introduction, it is one of the best school novels ever written...
Christine (Cristine Rose) and Léa (Patticia Charbonneau) have been schooled in a convent so that obedience is second nature to them. Their venal mother has farmed them out as domestic servants. In one revealing scene, an early employer flicks through a pile of dinner napkins that Léa has ironed and airily tosses half of them on the floor as insufficiently impeccable. The eventual demise of their present mistress, Mme. Danzard (Anne Pitoniak), is built on such moments, and the murder is a strange admixture of revolt and matricide. Throughout, the play is charged with the alternating...