Female Adolescence: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Literature by Katherine Dalsimer (review)

94Rocky Mountain Review and a determination to believe in false stereotypes of impossible purity as the standard for normal healthy people" (149). By contrast, Carter lauds Swinburne for his courage in exploring passion, even "deviancy," with psychological depth and compassion. The final six essays are more diverse. His discursiveness undermines Mark Spilka's contention that Dickens is the first to guide us into the complexities of early childhood sexual conflict. The title itself indicates the verbal pomposity of the essay: "On the Enrichment of Poor Monkeys by Myth and Dream: or How Dickens Rousseauisticized and Pre-Freudianized Victorian Views of Childhood." However, the next essay by Sara M. Putzell-Korab on "Passion between Women in the Victorian Novel" gives an intelligent overview of the few explicit novels dealing with lesbianism before the nineteenth century. She then examines Charlotte Bronte's Villette as a work that explores the bisexual options of a mature female heroine. The reading is provocative and insightful. Wendell Stacy Johnson turns our attention to Wilde. In "Fallen Women, Lost Children: Wilde and the Theatre of the Nineties" he contrasts Pinero, Shaw, and Wilde to illustrate Wilde's superior comedy in revealing false pride and false judgment to his audience. The next essay, Thomas F. Boyle's " 'Morbid Depression Alternating with Excitement': Sex in Victorian Newspapers" will surprise many readers for Boyle has very effectively used excerpts from police and trial accounts in daily newspapers to illustrate how explicit they were about violent crimes, "seduction, rape, adultery, transvestitism, illegal abortion, prostitution, bigamy, sadism, and indecent exposure" (213). Such material, drawn on by potboiler novelists themselves, was problematic. It at once acknowledged sexuality as a force in one's daily life and made certain manifestations talkable subject matter, yet still reduced sexual activity "to some quantifiable malfunction of the human organism" (228). Lest we smile too broadly at this Victorian quandary, Howard W. Fulweiler in his essay, " 'Here a Captive Heart Busted': From Victorian Sentimentality to Modern Sexuality," does an historical and literary review of sentimentality in the novel from mid-eighteenth century forward, and effectively argues that we have not integrated mind, heart, and body any more successfully than the Victorians we tend to ridicule. The final essay, John Maynard's "The Worlds of Victorian Sexuality: Work in Progress" is an exceptionally good bibliographic overview of Victorian sexuality. This is an excellent collection with interesting articles for the general reader and major research articles for the historian and literary critic. ALANNA KATHLEEN BROWN Montana State University KATHERINE DALSIMER. Female Adolescence: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. 149 p. Dalsimer is a clinical psychologist and teacher in the Department of Human Development at Columbia University. She is wise enough to read literature for insights into human character and to hope that her writing about literary texts "may deepen the reader's experience and pleasure in returning to the works themselves" (141). Her introduction states her promising subject: inquiry into distinctly female adolescence, Book Reviews95 using five well known literary works featuring adolescent girls. She starts with twelveyear -old Frankie Addams in Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding and proceeds chronologically according to the ages of the protagonists: the early adolescent girls in Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Anne Frank in The Diary ofAnne Frank, Juliet in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and finally the late adolescence recalled by Anne Elliot in Jane Austen's Persuasion. Dalsimer cites numerous passages in these texts that indeed illustrate familiar aspects of female experience. She sees these aspects as developmental processes, psychological processes, stages. This is where the problem of her interpretation begins. As she herself notes in a different context, "description inevitably shades into prescription" (10). While she notes that the five works are from different periods and cultures, she basically ignores class, race, culture, historical circumstances, and individual reactions and pro-actions in her schema of the stages and passages of girlhood. Common patterns of development are not so easily applied to individuals. Even more disturbing is the psychoanalytic premise Dalsimer uses as her framework. She states as one purpose of the book "to make more accessible to those outside the profession...