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The Adolescent Condition in Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders
- Literature and Medicine
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 35, Number 1, Spring 2017
- pp. 46-70
- 10.1353/lm.2017.0002
- Article
- Additional Information
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In The Woodlanders, Hardy examines the intersections between adolescence as scientific fact and adolescence as utilitarian economic construction. Hardy posits that the emergence of adolescence as a social category provides an opportunity for further, excessive control of young women in a patriarchal society when science is taken at its word, but, paradoxically, also opens up a space for a new kind of freedom and rebellion when the adolescent condition of nineteenth-century scientific theorists is seized for the very subversive qualities which the Victorians oppose.