we are now assuming that there already exists the situation favorable to the student's spon- taneous and personal response to literature.What does it "feel like," from within, to be this kind of person or that? To be angelic, cruel, dominating, passive? What are the satisfactions, what are the elements, of the many roles that may be played? He is no longer satisfied with a childlike acceptance of the mere external gestures and trappings as of silhouettes against a screen. He wishes to experience these things from within. It is often to literature--and principally fiction--that he turns. Here he finds not only emotional release for the impulses already strong within him, but denied satisfaction in his life as a minor; he finds also through vicarious experience the insight he craves into the possibilities that life offers, the possible roles open to him, the possible situations in which he may find himself. Being still in the dependent childhood relation to the family, yet feeling himself practically an adult, the youth often begins to question the authority of the
family. Even in a stable well-integrated society, such as pre-industrial, agricultural America, the period of ado- lescence brings with it a heightened tension within the family group. The youth seeks ways of asserting his ex- istence as an individual apart from it. He sets up the goal of psychological as well as economic independence. These attitudes frequently come into conflict with the desire of the family to continue its dominance, and with the psychic need on the part of the parents to feel them- selves still an essential force in the life of their offspring. These strains and stresses make the whole subject of family relationships a field of particular interest to the adolescent. We should at least help him to understand the function that our culture assigns to the family in the life of the individual. He needs also to become more aware than ever before of his parents as personalities with emotional needs of their own. He will profit also from a clear understanding of the nature of both de- pendence and independence. Yet in the education and training that are given the adolescent in America there is little to enlighten him along these lines.(R) He will sense these needs and curiosities, and here again, it will be often only from the reflection of life offered by lit- erature that he will acquire these insights. These conflicts and difficulties are tremendously com- plicated for the present-day adolescent, of course, by the fact that he is living at a moment when our society is
singularly lacking in consistency, when changes in our economic and social attitudes are going on with un- precedented speed, when few of the traditional ideas re- main unquestioned. The young boy and girl who have grown up within the relatively stable pattern set by the family are suddenly catapulted into a world of innum- berable alternative patterns; the burden of many choices is placed upon them. They often find the ways of life, the ideas, and the activities that have been valued within the family, ill adapted to the conditions of a changing world. More than probably any other generation, they have the opportunity to formulate their own ideal life patterns. It is no longer assumed that the families they create will be organized on one pattern; an extraor- dinary range of possible relationships with their mates and with their children can be envisaged. Similarly, in their choice of work the settled values need no longer hold. The prestige of the successful business man has somewhat dwindled; the social value of the artist, the scientist, or the artisan is increasingly recognized. Similar breadth of choice and challenge to personal crea- tion meet the adolescent as he seeks to develop a social philosophy and a set of values. In ironic contrast to the bewilderingly generous choice of goals that presents itself are the heartbreaking obstacles toward their attainment created by our present economic disorganization. This too has enormously heightened all of the characteristic problems of ado- lescence. Economic independence seems often an impos- sible goal, or if it is attained at all, it is in such limited
form that a full adult life including marriage and a fam- ily is impossible. Formerly, in the years of prosperity and expansion, political questions or concern with pos- sible alternative organizations of society often seemed remote and academic to the adolescent involved in plans for his own personal life. Today, even the least socially conscious individual is forced into some recognition of the influence of the surrounding society upon him. Here again, the teacher or professor will fail to convey a living sense of literature if he goes blithely on his academic way without recognizing that the student turns to literature out of this welter of shifting and uncertain social conditions. Probably because of the jolt that our habitual atti- tudes have received, we have become somewhat more aware of the automatic and indirect ways in which we acquire our ideas of the roles open to us in life. In a stable society, we should absorb from our childhood ex- perience in the family and from the community about us the image of the behavior, the appropriate attitudes, the rights and the responsibilities of, for example, the various family roles. The young man probably would automatically assume in his turn the roles of husband and parent, without even consciously defining their at- tributes. He would need only to follow unquestioningly the well-channeled paths of social behavior. Although more of these aspects of behavior have been forced into consciousness in our age of transition, it is still in the same automatic and indirect way that much of our behavior is patterned. We have absorbed ready-
made standards and attitudes from the family back- ground, from the lives of neighbors, from the images of accepted patterns of behavior with which we are sur- rounded. The very emotions with which we most spon- taneously meet a situation have, after all, been learned through the force of cultural suggestion. If a woman is indignant and jealous at the thought of her husband taking a second mate, it is because from childhood on she has constantly observed that situation coupled with that reaction. For the same reason, the native African woman will automatically express pleasure and grati- tude when her husband proposes to take a second wife. Our sense of the culturally approved emotional reac- tions, our notions of right and wrong, our sense of the appropriate types of behavior, are in largest measure the result of such unconscious assimilation. Thus it is that the adolescent will already possess a wealth of culturally absorbed attitudes and ideas of human behavior. And it will be principally through this same process of unconscious cultural absorption that he will build up his images of the possible future roles that life offers. Innumerable influences in his environ- ment will have given him a definite image, for instance, of the possible ways of behavior and feeling, even of the kind of temperament, appropriate or possible for a man or a woman. His parents and his family, through their own example and through explicit statement of the accepted attitudes, will have done much at an early point to set this mold. These will have been reenforced not only by the men and women about him
but also by the images presented in newspapers, books, and magazines, and in that exceedingly potent influ- ence, the moving picture. The image of the man as dominant, masterful, superior, the woman, emotional, dependent, clinging, in need of help and guidance, is, for instance, the one most often and most forcibly pre- sented to us even in this supposed age of woman's emancipation. We are constantly bombarded with these images: in the actions and attitudes of the conventional members of the older and younger generations about us; in the distinctions, both subtle and crude, between the things proper for men and for women repeated endlessly in the newspapers and popular magazines; in the types presented with monotonous similarity on the screen. And we must recall, literature is another of these image- forming media. The human complications that are rec- ognized as important and valid enough to be given ex- plicit attention in fiction, in the newspapers, or in motion pictures reflect overwhelmingly the stereotyped notions of masculine and feminine nature and behavior. In the great majority of cases, these images will condi- tion the actions, feelings, and choices of the individual. Even in the case of the post-war generation that seems in such large measure to have broken away from these conceptions, the pressure of these older more deeply rooted images is still felt. The redefinitions of possible roles for man and woman and of the possible relation- ships between them has gone on constantly in terms of revolt or readjustment to the older attitudes which still
permeate our environment. The present generation of adolescents particularly is subjected to the conflicting pressures of contradictory images. On the one hand, the traditional notions of the behavior of man and woman are being constantly reiterated; on the other hand, the adolescent meets with increasing frequency images of men and women behaving in ways alien to the tradi- tional ideas. Women enter into activities thought ap- propriate only for men; children are given freedom that would formerly have been considered dangerous; grandmothers behave in ways formerly thought scandal- ous. The adolescent's own assumption of adult roles can- not therefore be as automatic as in the case of the youth in a more stable society. His choices, nevertheless, will probably in large part be made on an emotional basis. Against the weight and pressure of the traditionally ac- cepted image, there will be exerted the dramatic appeal of the new and perhaps more practical image. In many cases, the assumption of the new type of role will be made only under the compulsion of new economic and social conditions. The old attitudes and habits of re- sponse will be constantly intruding themselves, compli- cating the individual's life, creating insecurity and con- fusion. It is with such attitudes and preoccupations that the adolescent comes to his experience of literature. Any- thing that his reading may contribute must take its place in the complex web of influences acting upon him. His attention will be diverted to those phases of any work
that apply most clearly to his own emotional tensions and perplexities. He may often conceal with seeming indifference the reactions dictated by his particular obsessions, yet a teaching situation such as we have out- lined in the preceding chapter would encourage him to give articulate expression to his emotional responsOo Moreover, we must face the fact that if a work, no mat- ter how intense and stirring the teacher may think it, does not meet any of the adolescent's needs, he will remain indifferent to it.
The teacher should be aware of still another con- ditioning factor which will affect the student's sensitiv- ity to literature. The individualistic emphasis of our society builds up a frequent reluctance to see the im- plications for others of our own actions, or to under- stand the validity of the needs and drives that motivate other people's actions. The fact that the success of the individual must so often be at the expense of others places a premium upon this kind of blindness to the needs and feelings of others. We teachers of literature must take this cultural pressure into account, since it is so directly opposed to the attitude of mind we are attempting to foster. For the very nature of the literary experience is a living into the experiences of others and a comprehension of the goals and aspirations of per- sonalities different from our own. Furthermore, much of what the student reads and sees will tend to coarsen his sensibilities and to make him less able to respond fully to the complex and subtle nature of good literature. We cannot afford to ignore
the crude pictures of human behavior and motivation offered to their millions of readers by the newspapers, or the oversimplified and false images of life presented by the pulp magazines. Not even the school as a whole, let alone the teacher of literature with his much more limited scope, can hope fully to counterbalance the great weight of the influences met in the surrounding society and in such institutions as the newspaper or the mov- ing picture. The mere reading of a play by Shakespeare, or a novel by George Eliot or Henry James, cannot in itself be expected to wipe out the effect of all the desensitizing influences met outside the school or col- lege. Yet this is not a reason for assuming a defeatist atti- tude that would limit our hope of influence to the gifted student or the one with unusually favorable back- ground. On the contrary, we must broaden our under- standing of our function. We must do more than merely expose the student to great art. Although the reading of a novel will not in itself counteract all the unfavor- able pressures, it may be made a means for helping the student to develop some resistance to those influences. And we can accomplish this only if we remain con- stantly aware of the nature of the social forces acting upon the student. When an individual student reads a particular work, there will come into play one of the innumerable pos- sible variations upon our general picture of adolescent concerns. The particular community background of the
Student will be a factor; whether he comes from the North or the South, from city or country, will affect the nature of the understanding and the prejudices that he brings to the book. Stribling's The Forge or Green's This Body the Earth will elicit a very different response from students of northern and southern background. Main Street and Manhattan Transfer will not mean the same thing to the city boy and the country boy. The daughters of a railway magnate or mill owner and of a factory worker will probably react differently to Nor- ris' The Octopus or Anderson's Poor White. And when we turn to the literature of the past and of England, these same differences hold. The fact that our American population is becoming increasingly urban may explain the growing difficulty of keeping alive the love of Eng- lish poetry, so permeated by country imagery. The STUDENT WILL BRING to his reading the moral and religious code and social philosophy assimilated from his family and community background. His parents may stem from a Main Street setting, or they may have turned from a life such as F. Scott Fitzgerald pictured to assume the duties of parenthood. The adolescents who will be coming to our schools and colleges in the next few years especially will reflect this diversity of moral atmosphere. The religious background of the student also often plays an important part. In a class studying Milton's Paradise Lost, the girl who was a de- vout Catholic presented a very different response from
the one who had been brought up in an agnostic milieu. Similarly, a discussion of Romeo and Juliet was given a rather unusual turn by one student's insistence that there was no tragedy since the lovers would be reunited after death. Similar problems will arise in connection with social and economic views. The child of well-to-do, middle-class parents who, after reading Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, insists that "some people like to be dirty and ragged and just won't work'' will have rather a special approach to Dickens' Hard Times or Hugo's Les Miserahles.It is extremely valuable for the teacher of literature to recognize the nature of some of these possible "stock responses." We have seen that in large part they rep- resent the dogmatic platitudinous ideas about people and life that one meets on all sides: in the newspapers
and the moving pictures, or on the lips of the man on the street. Similarly, they show themselves in ways of feeling that have become so conventional as to have lost all individual quality or fine shades. Our popular songs are repositories of such sentiments. Such responses are aroused with great ease as we see in the commer- cialized appeal to stock sentiments represented by Mother's Day and Father's Day, or by much of our ad- vertising. Yet the very essence of literature is a rejection of such stereotyped, superficial, and unshaded reactions to the mere outlines of situations or to the appeal of vague and generalized concepts. A poem or a novel grows out of some fresh insight into the quality of these things. The reader, therefore, must possess a certain flexibility of mind, a freedom from rigid emotional habits, if he is ever to enter into the esthetic experiences the artist has made possible. This is not to argue that our object should be to create in the student such a state of flexibility and such a passivity to new kinds of experience that he will lose all the advantages of an integrated personality or a set- tled structure of ideas of his own. Keats, who possessed this quality of sensitivity to fresh experience to a su- preme degree, speaks in one of his letters of the poet as one who possessed no character of his own because he could identify himself so completely with other forms of being and could adopt so readily new and untried forms of response. Precious as that capacity may be for the poet, in such an extreme form it is not a practical asset for the conduct of everyday affairs. A stock re- sponse may often, as Richards says, be a convenience. Just as it would be disastrous if at every occasion for walking we had to reason out the best way of putting one foot before the other, so in our intellectual and so- cial life ready-made attitudes and ideas are also useful. By automatically taking care of the major part of our life, they leave us energy for meeting the new and unprepared-for situations. What is needed is sufficient flexibility to free one's self from the stock response when it prevents a re- sponse more appropriate to the situation. This is as true of the problems encountered in our daily practical
lives, as it is of our encounters with literature. Much of the mismanagement of our lives, particularly in our personal relationships, is the result of our following a stereotyped and automatic reaction to the general out- lines of a situation instead of responding flexibly to the special characteristics and changing qualities of that situation. The mother, accustomed to her children's dependence upon her for the management of their lives, continues to expect the same kind of dependence long after the children have grown beyond the need for it. During the years of America's economic expansion, the idea develops that the man without a job is shiftless and unenterprising; when the Depression makes it impossi- ble for many of even the most enterprising to have jobs, this same attitude toward the unemployed persists in many quarters. The young man who has been accus- tomed to his mother's housewifely attention to his phys- ical well-being becomes irritated when his wife, em- ployed in business, overlooks these things. In the experience of literature, where we are lib- erated from the demands that practical life makes on us for speedy and economical response and action, this capacity for flexibility should surely be exercised and enlarged. Fundamentally, what_ we are seeHng^ is the development of individuals who will function less as automatic bundles of habits and more as flexible dis- criminating personalities. Our great heritage of literary experiences can be enjoyed and understood only by such personalities. Our remarks concerning "stock responses'' can be
translated into terms of the breadth or adequacy of the individual life experience.In a motion-picture theatre recently, a ten-year- old boy was heard to exclaim, just as the hero and heroine fell into the traditional closing embrace, "This
is the part that I always hate!" That feeling is evidently not shared by the millions of adults who view such pic- tures weekly. This quite obvious point concerning read- iness is one that is often forgotten when literature treat- ing more complex situations and insights is involved. The teacher, particularly, needs to remember that in the molding of any specific literary experience what the student brings to literature is as important as the literaryjyork itself. Part of our equipment for helping the adolescent to fuller literary experience will therefore be an under- standing of adolescent concerns and an awareness of some of the possible personal factors that may limit or enhance his response. Every opportunity for coming to understand the in- dividual student will therefore be valuable. Under the usual teaching conditions, these opportunities are un- fortunately only too rare. All the more reason, there- fore, for the teacher to work out some general under- standing of the possible experiences and preoccupations typical of the particular group of students with which he is dealing. Since in this book our attention is cen- tered particularly on the high-school and early college years, it will be useful to suggest some answers to the question: What does the adolescent bring to literature? Our discussTo^^mll not attempt to He inclusive. We shall merely try to suggest some of the awarenesses of adolescent concerns that will be helpful to the teacher in his attempt to understand the student's spontaneous
response to literature. A knowledge of typical adoles- cent preoccupations will also influence the teacher in the choice of literary materials. The ADOLESCENT READER to whom we offer the experi- ence of literature comes to it out of a mass of absorbing and conflicting influences. It has become a cliche to de- scribe as a time of storm and stress this period when the child is coming into possession of the physical and nervous endowments with which he will function as an adult. The marked physical changes that occur at this time probably have been excessively blamed for the difficulties that beset the adolescent years. Anthropolo- gists have pointed out to us societies such as Samoa where these physical changes occur without emotional upheaval. In other cultures, the period of personal tur- moil may fall at an entirely different age and without reference to physiological changes. Nevertheless, with- out making these changes the sole reason for all the problems of adolescence, we are justified in believing that in our society they do have certain emotional reper- cussions. The girl or boy is made more or less aware of these physical readjustments and recognizes certain transformations in his emotional drives and personality traits. A heightened self-consciousness and curiosity about the seif usually follows. It is obvious that this will affect his attitude toward the essentially human art of literature. The self-consciousness of the adolescent seems often
to center about a concern with normality.(R) He is wor- ried by what seems to be any deviation from the "nor- mal."This may not often take so de- cided a form as in the case of the student who confessed that she had hated almost every story or play she had read in high school because they ended on the note "they lived happily ever after,'' so contradictory to the image of her own parents' unhappy disagreements. Authors, she felt, must be in some vast conspiracy of untruth. Here, certainly, is an instance in which ac- quaintance with some of the contemporary novels deal- ing with marital maladjustments might have led the
Student to realize that the writer attempts to illuminate
the whole range of human experience and that, there- fore, his images of possible happiness might also be given some credence. The student's own relations with his parents will also be a conditioning factor in his approach to literature. His identification with a domineering father, for in- stance, may make him get greater emotional satisfac- tion from images of successfully imposed authority than from images of an individual independently working out his own fate. Anything, of course, that has entered into and shaped the development of the student's personality will be significant also for his literary development. We cannot attempt here even to enumerate the major factors that have been recognized as typical in our society. Nor can the teacher in dealing with the student hope to glimpse many of them, of whose import the student himself will be most of all unaware. Yet such general social attitudes ultimately will condition the whole texture of the stu- dent's experience of life as well as of literature. We should at least be conscious of the presence of these elements in the interplay between the book and the per- sonality. Failures in sensitivity, lack of understanding, and seemingly distorted reactions often have their roots in these factors in personality. By helping the student to understand and evaluate his personal emphases, we shall help him to arrive at a more balanced and more lucid sense of literature. There is very little systematic information avail- able concerning the specific ways in which the individual personality colors the response to literature. The book by Professor Richards which we have cited (R) offers some valuable illustrations of individual reactions to poetry. His elaborate and subtle analyses of his students' com- ments on poetry reveal some of the typical patterns of response, and his discussion of "Irrelevant Associations and Stock Responses" is especially pertinent to our pres- ent consideration.The teacher who is sensitive to such personal and tempera- mental concerns will see how intimately involved he must become in the attempt to help his students to handle social, psychological, and ethical concepts such as we outlined at the very opening of our discussion."Anything in the reader's past experience, any of his present preoccupations, his needs and frustrations--even his present physical state--may enter actively into the nature of his primary spontaneous response. In some cases, these things will conduce to a ri^er and more balanced reaction to the work. In other cases, they will 
limit or distort the reader's image of it. It is important that the teacher of literature be aware of some of the personal factors that will inevitably affect the equation represented by book plus reader. The experienced teacher will undoubtedly be able to recall many illustrations of responses to literature colar.ed by some personal factor. Some personal preoc- cupation or some automatic response to a minor phrase or to the general subject of the work will lead the stu- dent to a violent reaction that has very little to do with the work itself. A word such as home or mother or a phrase such as my country, with their many conven- tional sentimental associations, may often set off an automatic reaction that tends to blind the reader to the context in which the poet had presented these words. The same thing happens on perhaps an even larger scale in connection with fiction and drama. A young college graduate recently expressed herself most forcibly concerning Anna Karenina. She had no sympathy, she said, for Anna, who was so preoccupied with her own affairs and who probably did not appreciate her hus- band. He was undoubtedly the kind of man who loves deeply but is unable to communicate his feelings to others. When the young woman was informed of the more usual interpretation of Anna's husband and was asked to point out in the work itself the basis for her interpretation, she replied, "But there are people like that, with very warm hearts and intense affections, who are unable to let others know it. Why, my own father is like that!''
The personal sources of this reader's blindness to the author's intention were revealed here in clearer terms than is usually possible in a classroom or a school situa- tion.The young girl's reaction to the love element in "The Eve of St. Agnes" is another illustration. Our discussion of some of the conditions affecting the adolescent today has already suggested various other factors that would tend to implant in the student's mind limited or stereotyped preconceptions. We have spoken, for example, of the influence of a rural or urban background or of sectional provincialism in building up stock responses. The same thing would apply to the student whose response to White's Fire in the Flint was that Kenneth Harper deserved his fate since he did not know his place as a Negro. The fixed ideas and emotional associations that clus- ter about family and sex relations may also lead to fre- quent irrelevant responses. An example of this is a Cam- bridge student's condemnation of D. H. Lawrence's poem "Piano" on the ground that no sensible person would want to give up his adult independence and re- turn to the limitations of childhood.Again we are confronted with the need of building up, as a preliminary, basis for literary appreciatioa,_a^richer, more refined, and more flexible sense of life.