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A quarter century ago, the sensation of the season was the children’s book Masquerade, by British artist Kit Williams. This story of a hare’s quest to deliver a message between moon and sun incorporated dazzlingly archetypal illustrations and bits of many myths collapsed into the inscriptions framing the fifteen pictures. Masquerade became a media event because it presented in code the location of a golden hare sculpture Williams had buried. Once revealed, the code was disappointingly simple: "To solve the hidden riddle you must use your eyes," the book’s opening words, meant that eyes in the paintings pointed to words in the margins. The dazzling imagery was only filler, albeit hauntingly mysterious filler. Sensitive readers still felt that the visual mystery had to have meant more than this literal mapping. An equally unanticipated publishing phenomenon, Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code, suggests that already existing buildings and works of art, some of them famous, are codes conveying a specific message. Once again, the public longs for implications deeper than those borne out by the text. This time, debate centers on whether those implications might actually be there. After two years at the top of the lists, Brown’s bestseller spawned a late-2004 "Special Illustrated Edition" featuring color photos of the artworks and architecture mentioned in its pages. For Brown’s "symbologist" hero, works of art and architecture hold genuine clues to unsuspected mysteries, and Brown’s readers have wanted to see the works his novel so fragmentarily describes. The illustrated edition gratifies their wishes and, of course, increases sales. The novel’s main source of popular fascination is its combination of thrillerdom with the supposed revelation that early Christianity suppressed secrets of sacred femininity. The Catholic Church would seek to keep these secrets suppressed for political reasons, while esoteric societies like the Priory of Sion seek to reveal them, also for political reasons. What is of interest in our context is the ancillary aspect, the use of the interpretation of the painting -The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci -to advance the plot leading to this revelation. In one sense, The Da Vinci Code is the heretical flip side of the national obsession with fact-based faith, the opposite half of the impulse that made Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ a movie-going phenomenon. At bottom, America’s historic mix of Enlightenment with radical Reformation encourages Americans to expect "just the facts," and to believe that facts are ultimately unambiguous. As Michelle Cottle notes in the March 20th issue of The New York Times, " depending on which poll you consult, between one third and one half of Americans identify themselves as biblical literalists. " It scarcely requires Vincent Crapanzano’s anthropological investigation to puzzle out the impact of this on the other half of Americans. Prefacing his novel with a capitalized declaration of "FACT," Brown uses mystery-novel conventions to assert an alternate religious history in which hard facts lie behind emotionally gripping symbols. The idea that symbols simply conceal facts has become a popular obsession; the same books -Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh’s 1982 Holy Blood, Holy Grail and Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas’ 1997 The Hiram Key -both inspired Brown’s trilogy-in-progress and fueled the brief but explosive success of the film National Treasure’s Disneyfication of hidden spiritual histories. In practice, archaic connections between the symbolic and the real persist in such issues as flag desecration, claiming for national emblems a sanctity reserved in other cultures for purely religious ones. Religious symbols have generated passions of their own. when latterday Catholic Andres Serrano combined religious statuary with body fluids, the confusion of symbol with fact returned with a vengeance. In art as in everything else, Americans show a perennial preference for symbols synonymous with daily reality. Norman Rockwell’s paintings are shorthand for complex social relations, but Americans love him, not for this, but because his well-composed sentimentality allows the belief that he’s just showing "the way things are. " Pop culture also misreads Andy Warhol as a hipper version of Rockwell, another purveyor of unambiguous surfaces. In a way, The Da Vinci Code embodies a Rockwellian approach to art gussied up in gorgeously mysterious trappings. Art can’t possibly be a place where contradictory possibilities collide; it must mean only one thing, although cash or prestige value can come into play alongside meaning. Despite wide-ranging interests, Dan Brown represents the presuppositions of most Americans. He doesn’t present the intellectual universe his Harvard-based hero would inhabit; Brown’s protagonist Robert Langdon uses symbols to solve puzzles, but not in the way scholarship actually works. However, this fictionalized scholarship has led many readers to look at works of art as something more than incidental decoration. That in itself is an advance in terms of popular awareness of the uses of the visual. Thus it might seem to be an excellent time to initiate the public to the more ambiguous uses of symbolism, were it not that The Da Vinci Code is largely impervious to such ambiguities. According to the passage, how to decode the information embedded in Masquerade about the location of the golden hare
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The campaign to name ______ was started in 1999 with nearly 200 nominations.
The role of and treatment of the housewife, which is really the major bone of contention in social security reform, has, of course, a major place in feminist thought. Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique, which was influential in initiating the current wave of feminism in the United States, centered on the disadvantages to women of assuming the housewife’s role. All feminists believe that women should not be forced into assuming it, and that alternative choices should be available. Many feminists, such as the present writer, go further and believe that the disadvantages of the role of housewife are so great that it would be better if younger women were to avoid entering the role even temporarily and if the "option" to assume the role were to disappear. There is a second strand of feminist thought concerning housewives, which derives from the solidarity which feminists feel with all women, housewives included. This solidarity expresses itself in a concern to alleviate injuries (physical and psychological as well as financial) inflicted on housewives by their husbands and by the institutions of society. This second strand is not logically contradictory to the first; it is possible to love the sinner (the housewife herself) while hating the sin (playing the role). Nevertheless, the two strands do tend to cut different ways in terms of policy. Moreover, individual, feminist thinkers differ in the emphasis they place on each. These two strands of feminist thought inspire two kinds of complaints against the social security system -- that some housewives are treated too well and that some housewives are treated not well enough. The housewives who are treated too well are those married to retired men, who are enabled by the system to live at a higher standard than retired working wives whose family had comparable total covered earnings. The housewives who are treated not well enough are those whose dignity is scanted by treatment as a dependent, or those whose marriages end, and whose husbands retain all rights to social security (and private pensions) earned during the marriage. The solidarity-with-housewives strand of feminist thought results in attitudes which emphasize the housewife’s productiveness and give dignity to the position of housewife. It results in policy suggestions which would have the effect of making the woman who becomes and remains a housewife safer, more comfortable, less subject to financial shipwreck, more able to hold up her head as a productive member of society. The most characteristic product of this line of thought is the suggestion that housewives be awarded social security credits for the homemaking work they do. Some credit schemes would require the household to pay taxes in return for the credit; others would not. One merit of homemaker credits in the eyes of the solidarity-with-housewives advocates is that it makes housework and "paid work’ more alike, thereby raising the status of housework psychologically and financially. A second merit, of course, is that in the case of divorce the homemaker would keep her credits, and thus would be more financially independent that is the case now. The author advocates that women ______.
What makes Susan become an overnight star
Theodoric Voler had been brought up, from infancy to the confines of middle age, by a fond mother whose chief solicitude had been to keep him screened from what she called the coarser realities of life. When she died she left Theodoric alone in a world that was as real as ever, and a good deal coarser than he considered it had any need to be. To a man of his temperament and upbringing even a simple railway journey was crammed with petty annoyances and minor discords, and as he settled himself down in a second- class compartment role September morning he was conscious of ruffled feelings and general mental discomposure. He had been staying at a country vicarage, the inmates of which had been certainly neither brutal nor bacchanalian, but their supervision of the domestic establishment had been of that lax order which invites disaster. The pony carriage that was to take him to tile station had never been properly ordered, and when the moment for his departure drew near, the handyman who should have produced the required article was nowhere to be found. In this emergency Theodoric, to his mute but very intense disgust, found himself obliged to collaborate with the vicar’s daughter in the task of harnessing the pony, which necessitated groping about in an ill-lighted outbuilding called a stable, and smelling very like one—except in patches where it smelled of mice. As the train glided out of the station Theodoric’s nervous imagination accused himself of exhaling a weak odour of stable yard, and possibly of displaying a mouldy straw or two on his unusually well-brushed garments. Fortunately the only other occupation of the compartment, a lady of about the same age as himself, seemed inclined for slumber rather than scrutiny; the train was not due to stop till the terminus was reached, in about an hour’s time, and the carriage was of the old-fashioned sort that held no communication with a corridor, therefore no further travelling companions were likely to intrude on Theodoric’s semiprivacy. And yet the train had scarcely attained its normal speed before he became reluctantly but vividly aware that he was not alone with the slumbering lady; he was not even alone in his own clothes. A warm, creeping movement over his flesh betrayed the unwelcome and highly resented presence, unseen but poignant, of a strayed mouse, that had evidently dashed into its present retreat during the episode of the pony harnessing. Furtive stamps and shakes and wildly directed pinches failed to dislodge the intruder, whose motto, indeed, seemed to be Excelsior; and the lawful occupant of the clothes lay back against the cushions and endeavoured rapidly to evolve some means for putting an end to the dual ownership. Theodorlc was goaded into the most audacious undertaking of his life. Crimsoning to the hue of a beetroot and keeping an agonised watch on his slumbering fellow traveller, he swiftly and noiselessly secured the ends of his railway rug to the racks on either side of the carriage, so that a substantial curtain hung athwart the compartment. In the narrow dressing room that he had thus improvised he proceeded with violent haste to extricate himself partially and the mouse entirely from the surrounding casings of tweed and half-wool. As the unravelled mouse gave a wild leap to the floor, the rug, slipping its fastening at either end, also came down with a heart-curdling flop, and almost simultaneously the awakened sleeper opened her eyes. With a movement almost quicker than the mouse’s, Theodoric pounced on the rug and hauled its ample folds chin-high over his dismantled person as he collapsed into the farther corner of the carriage. The blood raced and beat in the veins of his neck and forehead, while he waited dumbly for the communication cord to be pulled. The lady, however, contented herself with a silent stare at her strangely muffled companion. How much had she seen, Theodoric queried to himself; and in any case what on earth must she think of his present posture The word "solicitude" in the first paragraph probably means
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