Word: symbolism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...have an emotional contact between his audience and his characters. Miller in effect, negates this power of the theatre by demanding that his audience focus so closely on his theme. I felt compelled throughout the play to try to discover the importance of each line and of each symbol. Esther's repeated comments on the meaning of the play, the symbols in the set, in the gestures, and in the speeches ("The price hasn't changed.") cries out to be noticed. The play did not allow me to become involved in the lives of the characters and to follow their...
Just after bearing her husband Malcolm a second child, Jane takes as lover her cousin's husband James. Malcolm is a successful musician. James is an unsuccessful garage owner and sportscar buff. But James, with his potency-symbol Maserati, can do one thing Malcolm never could: give Jane sexual satisfaction. (The problem of the modern girl who dares to is that, all too often, she is also the girl...
Almost like a suicide, she throws herself into "pure corrupted love," with Romeo and Juliet sounding doom in her mind: "These violent delights have violent ends." And in due course, another potency symbol-this time an Aston Martin-nearly kills the lovers. A curious kind of post-catastrophe serenity enters the novel. The puritan's dues have been paid, and for the moment all is in equilibrium. Jane, a blocked poet, can even write again...
Both Laird and Nixon believe that General Lewis Hershey, the crotchety septuagenarian who directs Selective Service, should be removed. An adamant opponent of the lottery draft system, Hershey's inveterate hawkishness has made him a symbol to the young of all that is wrong with the draft. For his part, Laird believes that a military man should not head Selective Service. Yet Hershey has some powerful friends on Capitol Hill, so Nixon is likely to wait at least until his bill passes through Congress, if it does, before easing the petulant Hershey into retirement...
...Only Harvard men manage to sit relatively still. Of course, freshmen do tend to panic. For them, Radcliffe is out-at least until second semester, by which time most upperclassmen have warily dropped their all-too-serious Cliffies. Still, for most, Radcliffe must exist only as an ideal, a symbol of the Maidenhead Impermeable that one pursues through the head, not the heart...