So, I've been re-reading David Lindsay's novel THE VIOLET APPLE and have come to a passage that puzzles me. What I know about girls' education circa 1924 is negligible, but what are we to make of this?
It's the modern female education. A girl is encouraged -- practically forced by her mistresses - to cram for matriculation, while the rest of her time is largely spent on hockey or other violent sports. That means that nervous waste goes on continuously, at the expense of that quiet slow growth of the physical organs so beneficial to young girls, and one might almost add, so essential to a successful marriage later on. Of course, some have to pay for it more than others, and Haidee [Nt1] is one of the unfortunate ones. I expect her nervous system has been so exasperated during her school course that now she is sometimes hardly responsible for her actions. What she wants, she must have -- not tomorrow or the next day, but at once. I blame her mother very much. She has been a teacher herself, and there is no excuse for her not recognizing the evils of the modern educational methods. The blunder is appalling.
[THE VIOLET APPLE, circa 1924, published 1978]
--I have to confess that if asked to name major problems bedeviling girls' schools of the era, hockey wd not have been among my guesses.
--John R.
Nt: (one of the novel's characters)
THE WIFE SAYS
Oh, you are a boy, aren't you?
No comments:
Post a Comment