ellauri107.html on line 183: As [Arlin]Turner says in analyzing this letter, “[Melville] was aware, it can be assumed, of the inclusiveness and interwoven imagery of his letter, and no less aware of the meaning behind the imagery. The same awareness can be assumed on the part of Hawthorne”. Edwin Haviland Miller, who interprets Melville’s affection for Hawthorne as in part sexual, says that in this passage, “the most ardent and doubtlessly one of the most painful he was ever to write, he candidly and boldly laid bare his love”. Miller goes on to say that “when Hawthorne retreated from Lenox, he retreated from Melville. How Hawthorne felt his reticences keep us from knowing, but his friend wrestled with the problems and nature of the relationship almost until the end of his life”. Turner says only that “there is evidence through the remaining forty years of Melville’s life that he thought he had been rebuffed by Hawthorne, and that he felt a genuine regret for his loss.”
ellauri107.html on line 438: Myra Babbitt—Mrs. George F. Babbitt—was definitely mature. She had creases from the corners of her mouth to the bottom of her chin, and her plump neck bagged. But the thing that marked her as having passed the line was that she no longer had reticences before her husband, and no longer worried about not having reticences. She was in a petticoat now, and corsets which bulged, and unaware of being seen in bulgy corsets. She had become so dully habituated to married life that in her full matronliness she was as sexless as an anemic nun. She was a good woman, a kind woman, a diligent woman, but no one, save perhaps Tinka her ten-year-old, was at all interested in her or entirely aware that she was alive.
xxx/ellauri128.html on line 542: In his memoirs, he calls his father “bashful” and his mother “reserved.” Between them, they filled the house with “melancholy reticences and unexpressed doubts.” Some of the silence surrounded a particular subject: the family’s Jewishness. This was not exactly hidden, but it was not brought to the fore, either. Maurois, who was born Émile Herzog on July 26, 1885, found out that he was Jewish at the age of about six, when a friend at the local Protestant church told him so. His parents confirmed it, but they also spoke highly of Protestantism.
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