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A 5 page research paper that summarizes and analyzes John Updike's The Beauty of the Lilies. In this novel, Updike finds similarities between the decline of interest in religion in the twentieth century and the increase in the popularity of cinema, as he tracks a single family through four generations. Bibliography lists 4 sources.
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5 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_khjubotl.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
each section. Beginning in 1910, the narrative covers roughly the next century. However, the opening scene relates not to the Wilmot family, but to the D.W. Griffiths movie company as
they film a scene for Griffiths The Call to Arms starring Mary Pickford. While this seems out of context to the main story, as the narrative progresses it becomes clear
that Updike finds similarities between the decline of interest in religion in the twentieth century and the increase in the popularity of cinema. Updike begins his story of the
Wilmots with Clarence, a Presbyterian minister who experiences a crisis of faith at the precise moment that Mary Pickford is fainting on the set of The Call to Arms. Updike
indicates that, for quite sometime, Clarence had been harboring doubts about religion. His mind was "like a many-legged, wingless insect that had long and tediously been struggling to climb the
walls of a slick-walled porcelain basin" (Updike 5). In a blast of realization, which was like a "wash of water" sweeping the struggling bug to oblivion, Clarence thinks, "There is
no God" (Updike 6). An honest, good man, Clarence resigns from the ministry rather than profess a belief he no longer holds week after week from the pulpit. This
"tumbles" his family into a "financial ruin from which they do not recover for two generations" (Bottum 64). Clarence finds that an education geared toward the ministry has not prepared
him adequately to do anything else and he winds up selling encyclopedias door to door. His only solace lies in going to the movies. Thus, we have the thematic link
to the opening sequence with Mary Pickford (Bottum 64). The implication is that the movie theatre has replaced the church in American culture, that the "never-never land of Hollywood happy
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