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The New Freedom by Woodrow Wilson

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Such is the vision of some of us who now come to assist in its
realization. For we Democrats would not have endured this long burden of
exile if we had not seen a vision. We could have traded; we could have got
into the game; we could have surrendered and made terms; we could have
played the role of patrons to the men who wanted to dominate the interests
of the country,--and here and there gentlemen who pretended to be of us
did make those arrangements. They couldn't stand privation. You never can
stand it unless you have within you some imperishable food upon which to
sustain life and courage, the food of those visions of the spirit where a
table is set before us laden with palatable fruits, the fruits of hope,
the fruits of imagination, those invisible things of the spirit which are
the only things upon which we can sustain ourselves through this weary
world without fainting. We have carried in our minds, after you had
thought you had obscured and blurred them, the ideals of those men who
first set their foot upon America, those little bands who came to make a
foothold in the wilderness, because the great teeming nations that they
had left behind them had forgotten what human liberty was, liberty of
thought, liberty of religion, liberty of residence, liberty of action.

Since their day the meaning of liberty has deepened. But it has not ceased
to be a fundamental demand of the human spirit, a fundamental necessity
for the life of the soul. And the day is at hand when it shall be realized
on this consecrated soil,--a New Freedom,--a Liberty widened and deepened
to match the broadened life of man in modern America, restoring to him in
very truth the control of his government, throwing wide all gates of
lawful enterprise, unfettering his energies, and warming the generous
impulses of his heart,--a process of release, emancipation, and
inspiration, full of a breath of life as sweet and wholesome as the airs
that filled the sails of the caravels of Columbus and gave the promise and
boast of magnificent Opportunity in which America _dare not fail_.






THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N.Y.

Copyright (c) 2007. bestextbooks.com. All rights reserved.

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We do not know the women's names, but their voices are quite distinct. All are pregnant. But while the first woman awaits the birth of her baby with a moon-like serenity, the other two are not so lucky. One, whose previous pregnancies have failed to go to term, is experiencing a heartbreaking late miscarriage; the other is a young student whose accidental pregnancy will end in her child being put up for adoption.

Sylvia Plath's only play was never intended for the stage, being broadcast instead on BBC radio in August 1962. Less than six months later, Plath killed herself, but not before the burst of astonishing creative energy that produced her extraordinary, terrifying Ariel poems.

Anyone who knows Plath's poetry will see the connection between Three Women and Plath's subsequent poems, particularly in the way she talks about the agony of childbirth, the rush of love for this tiny alien being, and both the wonder and wounded rawness of motherhood. It is a beautiful piece, full of startling imagery that draws you in through the sheer intensity of its femaleness, and because it so precisely articulates the emotions that are often thought but seldom voiced by women - certainly not in the early 1960s - about men, motherhood and our relationship to our bodies.

It's been 20 years since there has been an attempt at a professional stage version and - in a theatre world that happily accepts the poetic offerings of Sarah Kane and Debbie Tucker Green, or the staged possibilities of The Waves, one of Plath's own inspirations for the piece, I see no reason why it shouldn't be brought to life. Sadly, it doesn't breathe here, in a production by Robert Shaw that is clearly a labour of love, but which never finds a way to give the internal a physical reality. Plath's poetry, like most babies, is more robust than it appears - and won't break if treated with a little less reverence and considerably more grit.

Instead, what we are offered is tinkling piano music, mournful mood lighting, an innocuous pale setting, as well as three perfectly good but indisputably ladylike performances that capture none of the wounded redness of Plath's poetry, and do her the disservice of making her sound bleached and somewhat prissy. It's a pity. What might have been a wonder ends up a mere curiosity.

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