Word: victorianism
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...lived in a dream world far above the thugs and petty schemers who were anxious for the quick kill and wanted to prey on all those nice people in all those nice houses. The Continental Op lived with the thugs, but he aspired, ethically at least, to the Victorian mansions. He would keep the wolves from their doors--and then they could go back to their fantasies. Only the Op knew it was a fantasy that didn't exist anymore, and that there was no such thing as justice...
...much about sex, and the little counsel that is offered tends to be erratic. Men should rise for a woman after work, but not at an office meeting. A hostess can, in good conscience, allow an unmarried couple to share a bedroom (a stunning advance from the Victorian days when etiquette guides recommended that even books by unmarried male and female writers be kept on separate shelves). At large parties, however, coats should be sexually segregated-women's in the bedroom, men's in the hall...
From his black-trimmed London studio, Aubrey Beardsley transformed book illustration into high art. His use of curves and filigrees had the delicacy and tensile strength of Victorian wrought iron, but his subjects-fauns, satyrs, naked slaves-earned him a reputation of fearful decadence. Even in the prurient "yellow nineties," when young men dragged live lobsters down Pall Mall on silken leashes, Beardsley was singled out. "A monstrous orchid," Oscar Wilde proclaimed him, a judgment unchallenged until...
...sharply than pleasure. There is, however, a good deal of subliminal throb. While his wife is writing for the press "on horses and equitation," Powell's career as a largely unread novelist goes nowhere. He works for Warner Bros, near London, hacking out scripts about messenger boys and Victorian philanthropists. None are produced. In 1937, at the suggestion of his agent, Powell journeys to Hollywood. The high point of his stay in Celluloid City is a lunch at the MGM commissary with Scott Fitzgerald, who draws a rough map of North America for the English visitor, diagramming with arrows...
Polanski seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of Thomas Hardy. Hardy rebelled against the genteel tradition in Victorian literature. His novels describe violence, poverty and, particularly, sexuality with startling candor. He scandalized the literary classes with his disdain for repressive society, his grim mockery of propriety. His works were bold, cynical, and for most of his audience, shocking--not unlike the more familiar work of film director Polanski. Perhaps it was their shared obsessions with the impervious force of Evil, the cruelty of the bourgoisie, and the sudden, unpredictable groin-kicks of Fate that initially attracted Polanski to Hardy...