Do this even if the thought of going mortifies you.
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A middle-aged woman named Sarah (Laurie Metcalf) sits at a table confessing to something that mortifies her.
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It mortifies most people who walk into that room for the first time, and then they're so glad they went.
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Warbucks sends Annie back to "the Home" numerous times, and the staff hates her for that. "Daddy" (Oliver) keeps thinking of her as his daughter. Mrs. Warbucks often argues with Oliver over how much he "mortifies her when company comes" and his affection for Annie. A very status-conscious woman, she feels that Oliver and Annie are ruining her socially.
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The novelist Elizabeth Bowen, who was a pupil at the school during the First World War, wrote after revisiting Down House in the 1930s: "I have never liked scientific people very much, and it mortifies me to think of them trampling reverently around there on visiting days, thinking of Charles Darwin and ignorant of my own youth."Bowen 1950, p. 194.
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When the waiter repeats the uncle's order, both think that their opposite is mocking them. While the hurt waiter refuses to tolerate the abuse, the amused uncle loudly asks to speak to the innkeeper. By now, all the guests are observing the dispute which, growing more violent, mortifies the boy and his mother. Only when the waiter proves his lisp with a note in his passport, the tension resolves in the uncle's loud, pitying laughter, and he shows his veteran passport in return.
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Instead, he nearly blinds himself with too much reading, then further mortifies his wife by deciding to eke out a living, at least temporarily, as a furze-cutter. Eustacia, her dreams blasted, finds herself living in a hut on the heath, chained by marriage to a lowly labouring man. At this point, Wildeve reappears; he has unexpectedly inherited a large sum of money, and is now in a better position to fulfill Eustacia's hopes. He comes calling on the Yeobrights in the middle of one hot August day and, although Clym is at home, he is fast asleep on the hearth after a gruelling session of furze-cutting.
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Jameson views a number of phenomena as distinguishing postmodernity from modernity. He speaks of "a new kind of superficiality" or "depthlessness" in which models that once explained people and things in terms of an "inside" and an "outside" (such as hermeneutics, the dialectic, Freudian repression, the existentialist distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity, and the semiotic distinction of signifier and signified) have been rejected. Second is a rejection of the modernist "Utopian gesture", evident in Van Gogh, of the transformation through art of misery into beauty whereas in the postmodernism movement the object world has undergone a "fundamental mutation" so that it has "now become a set of texts or simulacra" (Jameson 1993:38). Whereas modernist art sought to redeem and sacralize the world, to give life to world (we might say, following Graff, to give the world back the enchantment that science and the decline of religion had taken away from it), postmodernist art bestows upon the world a "deathly quality… whose glacéd X-ray elegance mortifies the reified eye of the viewer in a way that would seem to have nothing to do with death or the death obsession or the death anxiety on the level of content" (ibid.).
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