Astarte Syriaca by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1877
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Part 4 of 6. For the whole series, click here.
3. The Nature of Woman
In Fantasia of the Unconscious Lawrence writes, “Women will never understand the depth of the spirit of purpose in man, his deeper spirit. And man will never understand the sacredness of feeling to woman. Each will play at the other’s game, but they will remain apart.” (more…)
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Part 3 of 6. For the whole series, click here.
2. The Nature of Man
As we have seen, Lawrence believes that men (most men) need to have a woman in their lives. Their relationship to a woman serves to ground their lives, and to provide the man not only with a respite from the woes of the world, but with energy and inspiration. (more…)
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Part 2 of 6. For the whole series, click here.
In a 1923 newspaper interview Lawrence is quoted as saying “If men were left to themselves, they would rush off . . . into destruction. But women keep life back at its own center. They pull the men back. Women have enormous passive strength, the strength of inertia.” Here Lawrence uses an image he was very fond of: women are at the center, the hub. This is because they are closer to “the source” than men are.
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This past February 11 was the 20th anniversary of the suicide in London of the American poet and writer Sylvia Plath. Since her death a continuous stream of biographies, critical surveys, and memoirs — as well as earlier unpublished stories, letters, and journals by the poet herself — has issued from the publishers, finally allowing Sylvia Plath the fame and recognition she yearned for while alive. Her Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982. (more…)
Cristofano Allori. "Judith with the Head of Holofernes," 1613
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Each sex has the instincts, emotions and mental powers related to the kind of life that it will have to lead, and the corresponding limitation in selecting and rejecting. For instance, the male as the active participator in coition is the wooer and initiator; he has to awaken desire for himself in the female, and finds his pleasure in these roles. The female finds pleasure in being captivated, in surrendering herself, in yielding to initiation, provided that she approves of the male.
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David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (New Line Cinema, 2005) is truly a superb movie, with a tight and economical script (the whole story is told in 96 minutes), a remarkably subtle and gripping performance by Viggo Mortensen (his best ever, in my opinion), excellent performances from the rest of the cast, and an unostentatiously elegant directorial style (unmarred by the middlebrow pretentiousness and penchant for the juvenile and repulsive that ruin most of Cronenberg’s movies).
