Tag: Sarah Jane I. Irawa
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Madame Defarge: The psychology of vengeance
Sarah Jane I. IrawaParañaque City, Philippines “And with these hands I keep a memoryOf the ones who’ve done such wrongUntil the judgment comes and all of us are freeI knit a picture of the way it ought to be.”1 In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens sketches a portrait of Madame Defarge, “a woman of…
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Matushka’s ordeal
Sarah Irawa Parañaque City, Philippines Catherine the Great Stefan Zweig, Marie Antoinette’s biographer, wrote of his heroine as “the most signal example in history in which destiny will at times pluck a human being from obscurity and, with commanding hand, force the man or woman in question to overstep the bounds of mediocrity.” The…
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Victoria’s curse
Sarah Jane I. IrawaParañaque City, Philippines The dining room in an ancient hunting villa obscured in the verdant vastness of the Polish forest erupted in thunderous applause, if not rambunctious laughter. The two youngest grand duchesses just concluded their performance of two short scenes from Moliere’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme. That evening in Spala was spent reminiscent…