Back to AtD: Dally rises

[Paul Mackin]

On 6/9/2012 6:44 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:
> p. 898 Dally rises into some kind of celebrity status.......R.Wilshire 
> Vibe returns
> and her new suitor Clive Crouchmas is always lurking around...........
> Clive, with the Turkish intrigues, now knows how to "borrow in 
> quasi-perpetuity",
> like modern governments (as TRPs idealistic anti-Statism shows up?) 
> and where--
> p. 899--government spending is linked to 'arms procurement' which means
> Clive has to talk to death merchants like Zaharoff---[the hair 
> off?]--who also
> has a thing for Dally.
> Beauty and a little fame, like many an actress, gets her involved with 
> all sorts.
> Is this just a more prosaic presentation of what TRP did so compactly, so
> poetically in GR: linking money and the global war machine and even beauty
> to our death wish?
> Hunter had just asked her if she wanted to pose for those missing 
> spaces in his
> work---she who was then posing as the Angel of Death----or as she 
> described
> it, " a kind of amateur religious pageant"-----
> One of those little jokes with a thematic stab that permeate AtD.....
> That make us reread like Janeites do...

The passage is also about the image of ideal feminine beauty of the 
time. Lots of hair, a la the Gibson Girl, and of the right shade. And 
Dally evidently could project sexual dominance, men falling at her 
feet.  Very important. Not sure she'll be right for the coming post-war  
sexy Hollywood vamp (in black and white and uncensored) But Broadway 
then, yes.

P


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