{"id":2261,"date":"2014-07-08T09:57:41","date_gmt":"2014-07-08T14:57:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/?p=2261"},"modified":"2014-07-08T10:04:06","modified_gmt":"2014-07-08T15:04:06","slug":"theater-critic-bristles-at-the-maleness-of-updikes-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/2014\/07\/08\/theater-critic-bristles-at-the-maleness-of-updikes-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Theater critic bristles at the maleness of Updike’s work"},"content":{"rendered":"

In reviewing a West End revival of Arthur Miller’s witch-hunt play, The Crucible<\/em>, critic Ingrid D. Rowland\u00a0bristled at another critic’s notation that “there were more women than men in the Old Vic audience for The Crucible<\/em>.”<\/p>\n

That led her to take exception with Updike’s\u00a0“irksome insistence on calling women’s sitting bones ‘haunches'” and to name\u00a0him, along with Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth, as standard bearers for the “apogee” of novelists whose works command a largely male readership. Here’s what she\u00a0wrote in response to fellow theater critic Quentin Letts:<\/p>\n

“Evidently, a large female spectatorship by definition diminishes the importance of the performance, just as female readership is still thought, in many quarters, to diminish the importance of books more than a generation after the apogee of Mailer, Bellow, Roth, and Updike (consider the last of these writers\u2019 irksome insistence on calling women\u2019s sitting bones \u201chaunches\u201d)\u2014or their Britannic counterparts, Amis (Kingsley) and Fleming (Ian). Ya\u00ebl Farber, The Crucible<\/em>\u2019s director, is guilty, for her part, not only of that feminine specialty, self-indulgence (so often termed \u201cartistic license\u201d in the hands of male counterparts, beginning with Paolo Veronese when he appeared before the Venetian Inquisition in 1573 in an unsuccessful attempt to defend the presence of two drunken Germans and a dog in a painting of The Last Supper<\/em>), but indeed of elitist self-indulgence, keeping the people from their commuter trains in heedless pursuit of her artistic vision.”<\/p>\n

“The Witches of West End”<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In reviewing a West End revival of Arthur Miller’s witch-hunt play, The Crucible, critic Ingrid D. Rowland\u00a0bristled at another critic’s notation that “there were more women than men in the Old Vic audience for The Crucible.” That led her to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2261"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2263,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2261\/revisions\/2263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}