真是“悲劇”的一天，同時看到3個悲劇的music
Dark Waltz - Hayley Westenra
Fancy - Reba McEntire
Concrete Angel- Martina McBride
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1. The House of Mirth - Dark Waltz
The House of Mirth examines the conflict between rigid social expectation and personal desire. Lily Bart is adept at playing society's games, which expect her to achieve an advantageous marriage. Yet, torn between her desire for luxurious living and a relationship based on mutual respect and love, she manages to sabotage all her possible chances for a wealthy marriage. Gradually losing the good opinion of her social circle, she is left to try to survive below the level of "dinginess" of her only true friend, Gerty Farish.
Beautiful and well-trained in "proper" behavior, Lily has many opportunities to marry a wealthy man, but none of them ever seem to work out. She breaks her engagement to an Italian Prince when she flirts with his son; she sabotages her relationship with the prudish, but very wealthy Mr. Percy Gryce, and when she has the opportunity to marry the very wealthy social climber Sim Rosedale she refuses him.
An old friend, Lawrence Selden, finds her attractive and delightful, but does not seriously attempt to engage her affections, since he is not rich and thinks that she is unwilling to consider marrying for love. Yet he also continuously misreads her intentions throughout the novel. He is a characteristically "bad reader" who misunderstands her intentions when she comes to him to make one last appeal to his love for her before she overdoses/commits suicide. By the end of the novel we realize that he has romanticized her, vilified her, and tried to rescue her but he has never listened to her or helped her on her own terms.
Simon Rosedale is a social climber whose commercial success has admitted him partially into elite society. Rosedale courts Miss Bart until her fall from her social circle and her break with Bertha Dorset makes her more of a social liability than a socially advantageous match. He does offer to marry her after she has "fallen from grace," but he requires that she re-enter society through blackmailing Bertha with love letters she wrote to Selden, thus securing both of their social positions through gaining the upper-hand on Bertha and maintaining it with Rosedale's vast fortune and Lily's social charms and beauty.
Through a series of mis-steps that actually begins with her visit to Selden's private rooms at the beginning of the novel, Lily loses the good opinion and favor of her circle of friends and her Aunt Peniston. Lily's social standing erodes further when she loses the favor of her friend Judy Trenor, whose husband Gus gives Lily a large sum of money. Lily innocently accepts the money, believing that it is the return on investments he supposedly made for her. When rumors of this debt, and her mysterious visit to Gus at his city residence, circulate through her social circle the foundations of her social standing crack further. To escape the rumors and gossip about her relationship with Gus, she accepts an invitation from Bertha Dorset to join her and her husband on a cruise throughout Europe aboard their yacht the Sabrina, but she jumps right into another scandal when Bertha implicates her in adultery with her husband, George. Bertha Dorset accuses Lily of infidelity to distract society's attention from her own infidelities with the poet Ned Silverton.
The ensuing scandal ruins Lily, causing her priggish Aunt Peniston, to disinherit her. Although Lily has the power to defend herself—she has evidence of an earlier affair that Bertha conducted with Selden—she chooses to suffer the consequences of the scandal rather than blackmail Bertha, since exposing her would also expose Lawrence Selden. This act, along with the interactions that Lily has with Selden suggest that she is in love with him but this thread is never realized in the text.
Lily moves lower and lower into the social strata, working as a personal secretary for "new money" until Bertha sabotages her position by turning them against her. She then takes a job as social secretary to a disreputable woman, but her dignity forces her to resign after Selden comes to "rescue" her from complete infamy. She takes a job working in a millinery, but produces poor work and is let go at the end of the season. Eventually, she receives her meager inheritance, ahead of the projected time. After paying her debt to Trenor, Lily dies from an overdose of the sleeping draught to which she had become addicted. It is unclear if this is an accidental overdose or a suicide. There is one word on her stationery that might be read as the word that both she and Selden share throughout the text. This is the same word that can be read as an explanation of Lily's seemingly erratic behavior throughout the text, that word is "Beyond!"
2. Fancy (song)
The Southern Gothic style-song tells the tale of an impoverished mother whose husband has recently abandoned the family. She buys her daughter a red "dancing dress" and encourages her to "be nice to the gentlemen" (implying prostitution) as a means to gain financial independence. Told from the perspective of a woman named Fancy, approximately thirty-two years old, looking back to when she was an eighteen-year-old girl, the song describes their poverty and her mother's predicament, and recalls her mother's parting words: "Here's your one chance, Fancy, don't let me down" and "'If you want out, well, it's up to you." Soon after, Fancy's mother dies and her baby sibling becomes a ward of the state. In the song, the girl ends up using connections she makes to build a better life for herself, eventually making peace with her mother, and acknowledging the complexity of the decision her mother was forced to make.
3. Concrete Angel
A power ballad centers around a main theme of child abuse. The narrator tells a story about a little girl (named Angela Carter in the music video) who's trying to deal with abuse from her alcoholic mother. In the music video, Angela Carter (Noel Wiggins), is a young girl with an abusive mother. She goes to school, where the teacher and other students ignore the bruises that she has on her body. One day a boy (played by Luke Benward) befriends her. One night Angela is talking to the boy out her window and her mother catches her. After this final beating, an ambulance and police officers are shown at her house. At the end of the video, it shows the little girl's grave, surrounded by a group of people, including her teacher, and the little boy that befriended her. The boy, who turns out to be an angel, hugs her and they run to meet another group of angelic children who were abused too. At the end, they run off into the horizon. When the video was originally released, it featured the phone number for the child abuse hotline and encouraged viewers to report abuse.
