In her new book, Sex with Shakespeare: Here's Much to Do with Pain, but More with Love, Jillian Keenan uses Shakespeare's plays as a vehicle to tell the story of how she came to understand her own sexuality.
Emilia isn’t only a mouthpiece for the despair of the viewer; she is a witness to the violence committed against her friend, and an active agent in her own fate. “I care not for thy sword,” Emilia says to Othello, when she discovers what he’s done. “I’ll make thee known, though I lost twenty lives.”
We Have Always Lived In The Castle is a book about what would happen if everyone wanted to murder everyone else all of the time. All of the meals eaten therein are either poisoned or should have been. Here all of those meals are, in order of their sinister undertones.
Constance Fenimore Woolson was respected by critics of her day and viewed as a successor to George Eliot and a peer of James and William Dean Howells. In the years since her death, Woolson has become known as a tragic heroine in a story not of her own making, rather than what she really was: a marvelous maker of stories herself.
hey we're starting soon are you coming in? do you remember we said we'd meet at nine? The human race is a monotonous affair are you on your way? Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live so you're not coming in and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it…
Rebecca is a book about a young woman who is too frightened to ask her husband a question or even have a first name. She spends the entire novel very nearly having tea, then thinking better of it.
Only the first Mrs. de Winter deserved to have tea.
Jane Eyre is a book about a woman who hates feeling comfortable. Every meal that passes her lips is full of gravel and self-sufficiency. Sometimes she drinks tea, but more often than not she turns it down suspiciously, for what if within the tea someone had secretly placed the bonds of servitude?? Here is every meal she begrudgingly eats before running away into the hills.
Art is important. It is an echo of the real world, capturing our perceptions and reflecting them back to us. And what do we discover reflected in the story of Marie-Laure? A well-crafted homage to destructive stereotypes about blindness, softened and made pretty by artful prose.
POLICE CAPTAIN: Monseigneur Bishop
we have apprehended this man – a known criminal – outside your gates with a set of silver candlesticks he claims you gave him
what say you?
BISHOP MYRIEL: Yes, he stole them. [to Jean Valjean] You wretched leech, if you wanted silver candlesticks, you should have created them.
ZENOBIA: I would like to discuss the possibility of hiring another housekeeper if Mattie ever gets married
as you know I'm chronically ill
and the doctor insists I have a live-in carer to help treat my condition
Wuthering Heights is the story of a group of people who eat the most miserable meals imaginable, and cannot experience love as a result. Sometimes they have tea, but more often they are merely offered it, and decide they are too furious to have tea, and die instead. Here is every meal the characters of Wuthering Heights almost eat before being interrupted by sex-rage and dying.
There was a curse upon the family of Laius, King of Thebes, and the story of his son Oedipus is the story of the fulfilling of that curse. Laius, driven from his kingdom, took refuge with Pelops, son of Tantalus, and then most ungratefully kidnapped the boy Chrysippus, son of his protector. In course of time Laius recovered his kingdom, and married a princess called Jocasta.
"There's one," she said.
"Where?" she said. "I don't believe you."
"Right over there," she insisted. "Look at him."
She looked. "Well," she said after a moment, "I suppose you're right."
"It was a little difficult to find him," she said.
"A little," she agreed.
"But the important thing is that we found him."
"We sure did," she said.
- A Good Man Is Hard To Find, Flannery O'Connor
Name: Mary Lennox, once-bratty orphan who has rather improved in her demeanor Location: Yorkshire, England, where the wind is always wutherin’ Size: Unknown, as owner Mr. Archibald Craven spends most of his time wandering the earth in a vain attempt to escape his sorrows
What I remember: buying a ticket to Hebden Bridge on the train, certain that the conductor would judge me as another American Plath girl if I asked for Heptonstall. The tough climb uphill to the churchyard. The sweeping view across the moors on that bright summer’s day.
