A ravishing tale about desire and betrayal in upper-class New York, Edith Wharton’s literary groundbreaker won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1921, making her the first woman ever to do so. It tells the story of Newland Archer, an aristocratic young lawyer, and his boring but beautiful bride-to-be May Welland, as they prepare for their wedding.
But when May’s exotic cousin Ellen materialises from Europe, having fled her failed marriage to a Polish count, Archer’s loins are activated by her worldly ways. He must make a choice: should he bow to societal strictures and marry a woman who bores him half to sleep, or to a femme fatale to whose flame he is intoxicatingly drawn?
Edward Hopper’s picture of social realism is comprised from a composition of multi-coloured geometric rectangles and depicts a scene within a Chinese restaurant. In the centre foreground are two women (both believed to be based on Hopper’s wife, Josephine) who appear to have an ambiguous relationship. They mirror each other’s solitary and aloof demeanour across a bright table in green and purple cloche hats. There is no tactile interaction, and the lady in green hides her hands in a defensive manner under the table, suggesting uneasiness. The four figures depicted are meeting for a social event, but the irony lies in a mutual lack of interest and spontaneity, which leaks through their detached facial expressions. A man in the background talking with a female friend seems to enjoy his cigarette more than his date. Hopper catches the each person’s loneliness despite them being in a public, open space. A mixture of natural and artificial light is seen throughout the composition; the sun reflects off the billboard directly onto the white tables and the woman in green, giving her a ghostly pallor.
Henry Miller earned the first 10 pages of his F.B.I. file for supposedly expressing Nazi sympathies during a guest lecture at Dartmouth College: “Subject believes Nazis are decent people and that he likes collaborationists.” The F.B.I. caught wind of this through Albert Kahn, who had attended the lecture, harassed Miller and written an article in The Daily Worker insulting the “phony writer” for being a fascist, anti-Semitic propagandist and a former labor spy. On more personal notes, Kahn claims that Miller’s “first wife supported him by being a prostitute” and that the professor who had invited Miller to speak was “a devoted member of the Miller cult.”
That last assertion triggered a chain of accusations about the “Miller Cult.” An article in Harper’s entitled “The New Cult of Sex And Anarchy” portrayed Miller as a Big Sur guru. Another piece appeared in theSan Francisco Examiner a month later, titled “Group Establishes Cult of Hatred in Carmel Mountains” and identified Miller as a cult leader.
Despite the accusations, all the F.B.I. was able to dig up from witnesses was that Miller was “strictly the artistic type” and “could very easily be called ‘screwball’ by people who didn’t understand or appreciate his writing.”
Existentialism is a catch-all term for those philosophers who consider the nature of the human condition as a key philosophical problem and who share the view that this problem is best addressed through ontology. This very broad definition will be clarified by discussing seven key themes that existentialist thinkers address. Those philosophers considered existentialists are mostly from the continent of Europe, and date from the 19th and 20th centuries. Outside philosophy, the existentialist movement is probably the most well-known philosophical movement, and at least two of its members are among the most famous philosophical personalities and widely read philosophical authors. It has certainly had considerable influence outside philosophy, for example on psychological theory and on the arts. Within philosophy, though, it is safe to say that this loose movement considered as a whole has not had a great impact, although individuals or ideas counted within it remain important. Moreover, most of the philosophers conventionally grouped under this heading either never used, or actively disavowed, the term ‘existentialist’. Even Sartre himself once said: “Existentialism? I don’t know what that is.” So, there is a case to be made that the term – insofar as it leads us to ignore what is distinctive about philosophical positions and to conflate together significantly different ideas – does more harm than good.
The Bloomsbury Group was a small, informal association of artists and intellectuals who lived and worked in the Bloomsbury area of central London. Most prominent of these was novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf. In all, only about a dozen people at any one time could have called themselves members of the group. Beginning shortly before 1910, the Bloomsbury Group gathered at irregular intervals for conversation, companionship, and the refueling of creative energy. The members of Bloomsbury, or “Bloomsberries,” would more or less maintain allegiance to their mutual philosophy of an ideal society, even through a World War and three decades of tectonic shifts in the political climate. They had no codified agenda or mission. They were not political in the ordinary sense of the word. Most importantly, there was no application or initiation required to become a member. Bloomsbury was an informal hodgepodge of intellectual friends, and one either merited inclusion to that circle or one did not. No rules of order, as in a committee, governed the way in which Bloomsbury managed their interactions. Instead, they held impromptu dinners and gatherings where any number of topics was the subject of serious discussion and contemplation. These intellectual exchanges served as the main influence on later work by individual members. By no means were all members in full agreement on all subjects. Some of Bloomsbury’s most stimulating ideas and writings were borne out of internal disagreement and strife. One can safely say that each member of Bloomsbury was leftist in his or her politics, although as individuals they expressed their politics in very different ways.
A significant fact about the Bloomsbury Group is that the members, for the most part, did not achieve their greatest fame until later in life. The Group held its discussions and parties while all the participants were still virtually unknown. The men of Bloomsbury were students at King’s College and Trinity College, constituents of Cambridge University. They were almost all high achievers and active in student life, yet one must imagine that they didn’t quite fit in as well as other students. Many of the Bloomsberries held particular ideas on human society which at the time seemed beyond radical. For example, the noncritical assessment of homosexuality, however appropriate today, was considered a serious moral error in the early twentieth century. Indeed, many of the Bloomsberries called into question the idea of traditional monogamous marriage. Several advocated for and practiced polyamory – multiple, consensual romantic partners. The idea of this level of sexual liberation in Edwardian England was unspeakable. In a sense, they made it very easy for their generation to dismiss them as quacks and deviants. However, none could deny that the Bloomsbury Group brought a great deal of intellectual clout to bear on any issue of the day.
The de facto leader of the Bloomsbury Group was Virginia Woolf, born Adeline Virginia Stephen, who descended from an eminently Victorian and moneyed household. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was an accomplished writer, and most certainly a powerful influence on his daughter’s intellectual development. Upon his death in 1904, Woolf and her two brothers, Thoby and Adrian, moved into a dwelling in the Bloomsbury neighborhood of London, and thus the foundation of the Group was firmly in place. Woolf was a gifted writer from her earliest years. Her essays, such as A Room of One’s Own, are cornerstone pieces in the history of feminist literature. She also wrote extensively on more strictly literary topics, and her theories on fiction have continued to draw the attention of critics. The novel, though, is where Virginia Woolf found her truest and most natural form of expression. Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925, showcases the full range of her talents, as well as demonstrating the effervescent stream of consciousness style for which she was famous. Without a doubt, the writings of Sigmund Freud made a profound influence on the artist Virginia Woolf, but she gave her creative outputs a vitality entirely her own. There is poignancy to Woolf’s characterizations that raw psychoanalysis does not achieve.
In “The Flapper,” Dorothy Parker shares the wild charisma of a young woman in the 1920s by describing her actions as well as reactions from others. As stated in the poem, “Her golden rule is plain enough- just get them young and treat them rough,” the flappers’ only rule was to have no rules. This is important because the carefree nature of the flapper was envied by their fellow young women, admired by gentlemen and frowned upon by elders. Parker explains this by saying that “Her girlish ways make a stir… All tongues her prowess herald,” this proves that they didn’t go anywhere unnoticed. Whether she received a good reputation or bad; she just appreciated the attention. Because of the line from the poem, “She’s not what grandma used to be, you might say, au contraire,” meaning that while times were changing, women were as well. This demonstrates that Flappers were independent, original women. They were nothing like past women of America; they created a new outlook, and with that, a new era. The individuality and strong traits of these young women are that of what inspires girls today to be one of a kind, powerful people.
The Flapper – by Dorothy Parker
The Playful flapper here we see, The fairest of the fair. She’s not what Grandma used to be, — You might say, au contraire. Her girlish ways may make a stir, Her manners cause a scene, But there is no more harm in her Than in a submarine.
She nightly knocks for many a goal The usual dancing men. Her speed is great, but her control Is something else again. All spotlights focus on her pranks. All tongues her prowess herald. For which she well may render thanks To God and Scott Fitzgerald.
Her golden rule is plain enough – Just get them young and treat them Rough.
Parker’s file began in the 1930s, according to The New York Times, when an anonymous source reported she was contributing to a communist movement. Parker’s work with the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, which the House Un-American Activities Committee considered an anti-Catholic communist front “masterminded by Jews,”also caught the F.B.I.’s attention in the 1940s, following a number of events to raise funds for medical supplies, ambulances, hospitals and orphanages to assist refugees of European fascism. The F.B.I. went so far as to save the entire guest list of JAFRC’s “Free People’s Benefit Dinner” at the Beverly Hills Hotel on July 2, 1942.
Altogether, the bureau kept a watch on Parker for 25 years, during which it accumulated a 1,000-page dossier on the author.
Will Longstaff’s depiction of the Menin Gate war memorial in Ypres (also known as Ghosts of Menin Gate) forms part of a collection at The Australian War Memorial in Canberra. The composition captures the spirits of soldiers marching in unison across a cornfield under an indigo evening sky. After attending the unveiling of Menin Gate in July 1927, Longfield claimed to have had an apparition of the steel-helmeted troops. The artist went home to London and completed his tribute in one sitting. The red poppies in the foreground represent the blood shed during World War I and the limestone memorial on the left shows a dark, sinister entrance. Buildings are dotted upon the far horizon (with intermittent light) suggesting that the area is under close scrutiny.
The Candy Lady is a legendary figure who is said to make children in Austin, Texas, disappear. “Children in the area told stories of how they would wake in the morning to find candy sitting on their windowsills … and would start to find notes on the wrappers, many times asking the children to come and play,” according to UrbanLegendsOnline.com. “The notes were signed ‘The Candy Lady.'”
According to legend, numerous children apparently took the Candy Lady up on her offer. “To this day, any time a kid goes missing, all the locals say The Candy Lady got them. Children believe that she takes them somewhere and pulls out their teeth or stabs them with a fork,” the website says.
When you approach a railway tunnel on Colchester Road in Fairfax County, be careful: This is where the Bunny Man is said to roam. According to local lore, the Bunny Man is a man dressed in a rabbit costume who carries and ax. A story by WAMU.org says, “In 1904, there was an asylum not far from this bridge. Clifton residents didn’t like the idea of mental patients near their new homes, so they got it shut down, and all the patients were taken by bus to Lorton prison.” The bus crashed and one inmate escaped. That story claims the name came from bunny carcasses left in the woods that the escapee had eaten.
The WAMU article reports that people began going to the tunnel on Halloween. Legend says if they see a bright light or orb, the people “are strung up like bunnies.”
Mark Bere Peterson’s Counterculture, Urban Legends, Paganism & Witchcraft 