Puberty and adolescence medico-psychologically considered / by T.S. Clouston.

Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Puberty and adolescence medico-psychologically considered / by T.S. Clouston. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    14/20 (page 12)
    action. From the time when, at the gaming-table, Gwendolen caught Deronda's eye, and was totally swayed in feeling and action by the presence of a person of the other sex whom she had never seen before, playing, not because she liked it or wished to win, but because he was looking on, all through the story till her marriage, there is a perfect picture of female adolescence. The subjective egoism tending towards objective dualism, the resolute action from instinct, and the setting at defiance of calculation and reason, the want of any definite desire to marry, while all her conduct tended to promote proposals, the selfishness as regards her relations, even her mother, and the organic craving to be admired, are all true to nature. Witness her state of mind when Grandcourt first appeared:— Hence Gwendolen had been all ear to Lord Brackenshaw's mode of ac- counting for Grandcourt's non-appearance ; and when he did arrive, no con- sciousness was more awake to the fact than hers, although she steadily avoided looking towards any point where he was likely to he. There should he no slightest shifting of angles to betray that it was of any consequence to her whether the much-talked-of Mr Mallinger Grandcourt presented himself or not. And all the while the certainty that he was there made a distinct thread in her consciousness. Again:— Gwendolen knew certain differences in the characters with which she was concerned as birds know climate and weather. The sentimentality of this period of life is well illustrated when Gwendolen says— ' I never saw a married woman who had her own way.' ' What should you like to do 1' said Alex, quite guilelessly, and in real anxiety. [He was an adolescent just entering on the period.] ' Oh, I don't know ! Go to the North Pole, or ride steeplechases, or go to be a queen in the ball, like Lady Hester Stanhope,' said Gwendolen, nightly. ' You don't mean you would never be married.' ' No, I didn't say that. Only, when I married, I shoidd not do as other women do.' The inchoate religious sentiment, as a psychological faculty con- tending with the egoism, is thus brought out:— What she unwillingly recognised, and would have been glad for others to be unaware of, was that liability of hers to fits of spiritual dread. . . . She was ashamed and frightened as at what might happen again, in remembering her tremor on suddenly finding herself alone. . . . Solitude in any wide scene impressed her with an undefined feeling of immeasurable existence aloof from her, in the midst of which she was helplessly incapable of asserting herself. With human ears and eyes about her sne had always hitherto recovered her confidence, and felt the possibility of winning empire. The craving for notice is thus hit off:— I like to differ from everybody. I think it is so stupid to agree. Her thoughts never dwelt on marriage as the fulfilment of her ambition. . . . Her observation of matrimony had induced her to think it rather a dreary state, in which a woman could not do as she liked, had more children than were desirable, was consequently dull, and became irrevocably immersed in humdrum. Of course marriage was social promotion. She could not look