Orthogenic Cases.XV? The Feminine Absolute

Author:

Sarah Warfield Parker, M.A.

Joana challenged our attention by her precocious display of undeviating femininity. She challenged it the more because this unusual conformitj- to the absolute feminine type was discovered in a child diagnosed by eminent physicians as an imbecile.

To be sure, on the March day this chunky little girl of nine came into our school, we saw neither grace nor delicacy in her stocky figure with its large head, perceptible stomach, and torso unrelieved by any waist line. She revealed herself, however, the incarnation of the popular ideal of her sex in the subtle charm of her golden brown eyes, of her creamy skin, and of the pale luster of her fine, straight hair; and, above all, in the orientation of her interests, in the ladylike quality of her weaknesses and in the feminine subtlety of her strength.

For four years, from the first day to the last that Joana was with us, we watched this femininity rise militantly to resist the assaults of her schoolmates upon her demure complacence. Though they rumpled her and romped with her and pelted her with snowballs, she refused, with tears and sullen passivity, to indulge in the vulgar pursuits of running, jumping and outdoor games. Though they tumbled her and rough-housed her, and, on occasion, pulled her long hair till her dainty primness was gone, she persisted in her feminine policy of stubborn non-resistance, repelling all suggestions of retaliation, such as one child’s “Why don’t you spit at him?” with a shocked “I don’t know how.” Though the boys taunted her and teased her, she continued to pilfer face powder and hair tonic, and to deliberate nightly on the respective merits of Espey’s Cream and Daggett and RamsdeU’s.

In Joana there was no tomboy streak, no leavening masculinity. She was impregnable, irredeemable in her sheer femininity. With the girls she liked to play daintily at dolls, or rather to appear to play, for she never lost herself in an occupation, nor failed to pose for possible spectators. With the boys she did not wish to play at all. As males, they were her prospective slaves, and stirred her to arch animation, stimulating in her reflexly the inherited reactions of her fcex. For their conquest she used the instinctive arts of coquetry, till, thwarted by their scornful indifference, she retired with superior dignity tofremain^aloof, a lady, an intrigante, a gossip, a housewife, a coquette.

This was the child we watched for four years, atypical, so mentally retarded that she lived under the shadow of the adjective deficient; yet facing her social group complacently, sustained by her congenital endowment, a complete complex of feminine instincts, impulses and interests.

An orthogenic study of Joana must, therefore, be a study of this endowment of femininity, and its relation to her social competency.

For fear, however, of playing traitor to the stauncher qualities of woman, I dare not offer Joana as a pure feminine type without something of a definitive preface.

The word female has retained, in the main, its biologic signification; womanly still denotes a somewhat just, even appreciative, appraisal of the qualities peculiar to the female human being. To the adjective, feminine, however, popular speech and literature, both artistic and philosophic, attach a mild opprobrium. Even the dictionary of Noah Webster, defining the attribute of feminine gender/ damns with faint praise and applauds with gentle condemnation.

Any evening we may find on the vaudeville stage evidence that the disparagement of the feminine concept is not confined to intellectuelles such as Schopenhauer, Strindberg, Guy de Maupassant, and Otto Weiniger. The popular connotation of femininity is, at best, merely charming, Victorian, expressive of tolerant reproach and deprecating admiration.

This concept persists because it is based on the fact of woman s biologic inheritance of inferior strength, partial physical dependence and less stable equilibrium; on the fact of the modification made upon women by social and economic environment, particularly in the class where woman’s life is what Veblen calls, man’s “vicarious leisure;”2 and on the fact of the molding suggestible and imitative organisms have received, generation after generation, from the very psychic force of the idea itself.

Femininity, in the connotation in which we use it, denotes a complex of attributes that women in part covet, in part deny; it denotes, perhaps, the absolute and therefore non-existent feminine ?Feminine. Having the qualities of a woman; as, in a good sense, modest, graceful, affectionate, confiding; or, in a bad sense, weak, nerveless, timid, pleasure loving, effeminate. J Veblen. The Theory of the Leisure Class.

type. It is, however, a complex too limited to comprehend more than a segment of woman’s character and too exaggerated to represent justly the feminine traits as they appear in the actual woman. With this definition, I no longer hesitate to present Joana as the phenomenon of a prepubescent child congenitally endowed with all the pleasing, as well as all the invidious, feminine attributes and some qualities, perhaps, that were admirable and womanly. Even Joana’s apparent imbecility seemed to spring from a mental aberration inherent in this typical feminine complex. Joana was like the princess in the old tale. On her birthday she had been showered richly with the proverbial qualities of her sex, but some wicked old fairy had added the ominous touch of hysteria which Dr Tanzi says1 “is almost inherent in feminine nature”.

The idea of jumping a rope three inches from the ground, of writing a word, of buttoning a shoe, released in Joana a flow of tears and a cry of ” Maybe I can’t do it. I don’t know how. My mother doesn’t want me to. Isn’t it a sin?” A pin-prick, a stubbed toe, a small blister, a sign of wear on her shoes, threw her into a state of nervous apprehension. Toothaches, earaches, sideaches, headaches, appeared with suspicious frequency and variety and disappeared as suspiciously in an unsympathetic environment. In her Dr Tanzi’s “touch” of the hysterical was so aggravated that, before she was ten, juvenile hysteria had not only effectively blocked Joana’s educational progress but had dissipated much knowledge she had already acquired. In March, 1914, when her father and mother brought their daughter to Dr Witmer for a clinical examination, her performance level in school work was so low and her memory for the “three R’s” so conspicuously untrainable and unretentive as to appear imbecilic. Outside the classroom, however, neither her memory nor her manners were in any sense characteristic of the feeble-minded. The report that, until her seventh year, Joana’s behavior had been entirely normal may have been but the familiar optimistic inaccuracy of parental statement. It may be, on the other hand, that we were actually confronted by a case, not of amentia, but of dementia, of a mind obstructed by a juvenile hysterical obsession. At all events Joana’s governess declared that she had completed four grades of the lesson sheets sent out by the Calvert School. She reported sincerely that her pupil read “fluently” in the Fourth Reader; spelled with “fair accuracy” in Hazler’s Grade Speller, Second Book; had mastered arithmetic as indicated in ” Wentworth’s 1 Tanzi, Eugenio. A text-book of mental diseasea. Translated from the Italian. M. D. Redman Co., New York, 1909. Reprint 1911, p. 589.

ORTHOGENIC CASES. 115

New Elementary Arithmetic, pp. 1-116 (including such examples as 864 X 9); had covered “some elementary geography and grammar”, and had acquired “familiarity” with Greek mythology and the poems of some two dozen writers. Possibly, before the hysterical disorganization of her mind, Joana had actually mastered the earlier grades of this work. Her teacher, young and inexperienced, had continued to drag her on according to schedule till such portion as she had learned became hopelessly confused with that larger portion which she was unable to learn. With futile, conscientious efforts to keep an unrecognized deviate up to the standard of normal progress demanded by parents, she had carried the child to the fourth year of prescribed work without in any way adding to her actual capacity for performance. Indeed, as the work grew more complex, each month brought to Joana a reduction in competency and efficiency. At last, when a younger sister outstripped her, the blow to her feminine vanity, and the absence in her of any masculine response to the spur of competition, prompted a run to cover, a refusal to do anything in which she feared failure. Then and there, with insistent hysterical cries of “I can’t” and “I won’t,” Joana balked.

It was this alarming retrogression in proficiency, this progress in confusion and resistance, which impelled her parents to place Joana in Dr Witmer’s care for psychological treatment and training. It is this history of retrogression, rather than of initial deficiency, together with the anomaly we observed between her timorous incapacity in the schoolroom and her confident capacity outside, which inclines us to class Joana amongst the cases of mental retardation due to temporary, and possibly curable, insanity. There can be little of action or incident in Joana’s story. We may find, however, something of the dramatic in seeing how her teachers battled to reduce her handicap of hysterical incapacity and something more in watching how, instinctively, Joana defended her dower against attrition; how, unconsciously, with the inevitable force of an a priori neural synthesis, she mobilized her congenital resources to win her way to feminine success.

On the first afternoon we had seen Joana’s confident and mature social poise. The next morning, in our schoolhouse, we saw in the same stocky little girl the accumulation of hysterical confusion, timidity and resistance. After an hour of wailing, “I miss my mother! I won’t do any hateful spelling and arithmetic. I miss my mother!” Joana read from a First Reader, reluctantly, in a high, expressionless monotone, and as she read she wept:

” A?fox?was?hungry ” “Running,” interpolated the examiner. ‘’T-h-r-o-u-g-h, I don’t know what it is,?a?fen.” “Field,” the examiner corrected.

“One?day?and?full?no?fell?into?a well?He was not? h-u-r-t at?all?but?he?could?not?get?out?He?called?for? h-e-l-p?as?1-o-u-d,?that spells long,?as?he?could?but?on? one h-e-a-r-d, heard?him?for?a?long?time?By?and?by?a? w-o-l-f,?I don’t know that,?p-a-s-s-e-d, pleased?that?way?and ?st-o-pp-e-d, stopped?to 1-s-t-en, I can’t tell what that is,?Then? he?went?to?the?e-d-g-e?of?the?w-e-1-1, world,?and?looked ?down.”

When asked to tell the story she had read, Joana parried the question. ” I don’t think I can tell it right. You tell me something,” she coaxed. “I’ve forgotten how it begins, I believe.” At length, half tearfully, in a tentative voice, she began: “A fox went out to the field, or grape vineyard, I don’t know which. There was a boy and a fox.”

Presently, Joana, holding her pencil tight between thumb and first finger when she was not mopping her eyes with a moist ball of handkerchief, wrote twelve words on which, her governess reported, she had received, four months earlier, a mark of 100 per cent. On this morning one word was spelled correctly; the rest, a curious jumble, gave evidence of an extraordinary confusion of literal images and also of the fact that she must, sometime, have had an idea with what letters these words were spelled.1 Shorter words Joana spelled less imperfectly because, perhaps, in them there was less scope for confusion.2

As she wrote tears rained upon her paper. At the blackboard, too, they streamed down her inflamed cheeks, while she protested: ” I don’t like to write with chalk. I don’t like the feel of it, and it gets in my finger nails.” Nevertheless, with the despised chalk, Joana kept at the task of writing numbers, so long as the teacher was at her side to answer her persistent, sobbing questions, “Does 1 sailor acher 1 bead had farmer farame fox fox worker work fish fis painter panter pond pud visitor viater bird baid professor prosefr fig fige conductor condar apple apple teacher testher duck dake month moters sweet swet year year mouse maws November Noverbr creator crether thirty-nine come after thirty-eight? What comes after forty? Is this the way you write forty-five? Maybe I can’t write fifty-six.” Addition and subtraction examples she worked with similar blubbering appeals for reassurance, producing, even then, answers which were an erratic jumble of correctness and error.1

Her knowledge of the multiplication tables, needless to say, proved to be quite as thorough as her ” familiarity” with Greek mythology and the colonization period. It was, however, Joana’s composition which showed best the chaos hysteria and pedagogic forcing had made in her none too capable mind. Her governess must have been particularly gratified by the first letter she received from her pupil, a letter toiled over for three or four hours, splotched by a ceaseless rain of tears, and written in ugly, almost illegible script.

Dear Miss Dascom.

The prtty rad shke thank hat of be drss tall dockr.Doerc to ritte to me. teell miss curcys Edmund last Moday he klays fites nicts Mis drocke ti allatomacken me anothr mitty bo a to me ard got sot kant a rad ti si misson a hopo colk mydon tnloi i ma ttolc es hide apon weet giv wham ma i corny hme ccone fom Joana

There was much justification for Joana’s habitual protest, “Maybe I can’t do it;” there was logical sequence in the development of this psychosis into the mutinous “I won’t.” For so long had she been asked to do what was beyond her capacity, so completely had hysterical confusion reduced her performances to something below her actual ability that she perpetually foresaw failure. A sort of mental paralysis, an hysterical state of inhibition, which became articulate in the cry, “I can’t,” had been established as a reflex action to the demand for any performance, possible or impossible. Rather than risk failure she refused to try. She desired to >3 56 7 256 8 13 243 3 733 2 94 4 8 8 10 10 8 9 10 10 5 3 8 72 64 4 3 35 35 2 4 22 23 9 15 220 1010 4 5 10 9 86 64 34 ?3 -3 -6 -6 -25 -15 -28 1 2 4 3 61 53 14 display her graces; she feared to betray her weakness. Therefore, in fields where she had discovered her relative incapacity, she would not compete; she said, “I won’t.” These emotionalized idea complexes?the conviction of inability and the determination to refuse? blocked her progress.

They were not Joana’s conscious conclusions; they had the depth, the fixedness of unconscious hysterical obsessions. Her retardation may have had some basis in congenital mental deficiency; it was certainly aggravated by a pathological condition approaching dementia.

Thus, hysteria, inherent in her very femininity, exaggerated by her nervous heredity, fostered by circumstance and provoked by fear of failure, forced Joana to play traitor to herself. As she fought staunchly, instinctively, to conserve the feminine resources she valued, so she fought perversely to balk the efforts of those who struggled to give her some part of a necessary education. She, unconsciously, and they, consciously, strove for the same objective, Joana’s social adequacy. From another base, with the equipment of her peculiarly feminine attributes, Joana drove instinctively toward that goal; yet, because of the hysterical strain in those same attributes, she fought blindly against her own allies. For all the four years she was with us her teachers, who struggled to lift her to the threshold of social sufficiency, had to battle against her unconscious obsessive resistance to the process of education.

Miss B.’s bare, brown classroom was the scene of the first engagement in the long campaign. For five months, through the spring and summer, Joana, in her starched dress and crisp wide hair ribbons, sat there at her desk, voluble, lachrymose, polite, baffling in the pure passivity of her refusals. Little by little, before the force of Miss B.’s vigorous, cheerful personality and her consistent practice of giving her pupil nothing that it was not possible for her to do, some of Joana’s defensive inhibitions gave way. Gradually she began to do, haltingly, part of the work of the first grade, the work she was supposed to have completed three years before. She did it haltingly because, for all pedagogic material she had the handicap of a memory of peculiarly low trainability. Miss B. undertook to teach her pupil to recite a poem, beginning, ” Down in the fields one day in June, The flowers all bloomed together.” It took Joana, with almost daily drill, two months to learn the eighteen lines of this poem.

This low trainability made spelling, for instance, particularly difficult for her. Each day she was given six words to write, to build with anagrams and to study. Usually, in recitation, she missed three of these words and, not uncommonly, on the day following five of the six. Once she missed circus the very day after she had written it sixty times and, on another day, immediately after writing cherries thirty times on the blackboard had not the slightest idea how to spell it. In review tests she sometimes failed with fourteen words out of twenty, after six weeks’ drill. Sounds for her had no association with letters, so that each word had to be learned by itself with painful study and interminable repetition. Writing a word and looking at a word seemed to help her little; she had to spell it aloud over and over again, scores and even hundreds of times, till the series of voco-motor images were established as firmly as was possible in a mind of such imperfect trainability and retainability. In spite of these difficulties, however, the daily performance of work within her power to accomplish began to clear away, very slowly and surely, the lamentable confusion which produced such an unintelligible document as the letter to Miss Dascom. Her cramped, pointed writing, too, was daily rounding into something more legible and pleasing. By the middle of April the ingenious reader might have drawn some portion of meaning from Joana’s diary: April 12, 1914.

We went to chartk sonday. Yesterday was sownday Esterury. We garthen Ester eggs. Dr Whene and Carls went out rid hor bat. Edeme mother and little sittle came out hear. A month later her family may even have extracted information from her weekly letter: May 9, 1914. Dear Papa, Dr Furness1 brou the monkey out sonday. thank for the box of nice rene candy. It is spring, how is mother and Sister, how is yorself. Dr Witmer and Charles og out horse back rid. love to all from Joana In August, however, there was still ambiguity in the sentences that Joana set down upon paper: August 5, 1914. I reaced a letter from sister today. We went walking yesterday and saw an old barn torun down, some antens were pling at the roff and it fel down. We went out walking to the carch yard to day. We picked black bears by the rode side. 1 The words in italice were spelled for Joana.

Joana still muttered, while she fingered the anagrams ineffectively, “I can’t find the letters.” She still, not infrequently, presented two lines of a diary as her maximum output for half an hour’s work. She still cried in the classroom till her full cheeks were flaky with scales of chap and flooded with a purplish red which ebbed with !wr tears, leaving her sodden face a pasty yellow. Yet, against her inclination, Joana worked a little. Her rigid opposition, though unbroken, was in part overriden by the will of her teacher, so that she was no longer retrogressing, no longer at a standstill. In this, the preliminary skirmish, she had yielded to Miss B. who had loosened the grip of her obsessive inhibitions and started her on a snail-like movement forward.

In the field in which Joana was the aggressor she had not yielded. The same lachrymose stubbornness which hindered her advance in the classroom, and something more of intuition and active ingenuity, Joana used to maintain and perfect herself in the role of the complete lady. In that role, she revealed each day more and more of her likeness to Otto Weiniger’s depreciative ideal of the typical woman.1

She was “always conscious of herself in relation to others,”2 always posing and preening. She purloined cosmetics, cherished her long fine hair, and employed the intelligence she suppressed in the classroom in inventing ingenious excuses to wear patent leather slippers, fresh hair ribbons or a silk frock. She treasured an embroidered nightgown in which, at night, before putting on her unfeminine pajamas, she used to preen herself before the mirror. When there was anyone to see her she trailed unnecessarily through the halls in her pale blue dressing gown. To all visitors, especially to the male relatives of her schoolmates, Joana played the gracious hostess and never, be it said, failed to charm by her cordial hospitality in passing her “pecahns;” by filial references to her parents and by her dainty display of such feminine possessions as lockets or pocket handkerchiefs. Nor did Joana ever quite despair of winning one of her companions by the display of those same specious graces. Though she was plump and square and unsylphlike, she was discovered on the porch, one hot Sunday afternoon, stretched languidly in a steamer chair, waving gracefully a pink feather fan and listening, with flushed cheeks and bright, inattentive eyes to James, who was reading aloud to her from Carpenter’s Geographical Reader on North America.

1 WeicittRT. Otto, Sox and Character. Translation from the sixth German Edition. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York.

> Ibid, p. 201.

Weiniger’s henid or undifferentiated thought, which he considers “the predominant content of the female mind,”1 certainly might be taken as descriptive of the vague ideation behind such phrases as Joana’s frequent “a dog, or fox or something like that.” Not only was her thought vague but her speech was, I believe, indefinite by preference. The Austrian extremist’s comments are relevant, also, to the anomalies of Joana’s memories. “We remember only the things that have some value for us, even if we are unconscious of their value.”2 According to his theory, woman’s memory is slight, except for “all the adulation and flattery, all the proofs of gallantry, which have happened to her since childhood,”3 and “for every compliment that has ever been paid her.”4 Joana’s memory, indeed, was almost nil for all facts in which she had no instinctive interest, and well nigh indelible for everything within the range of her feminine predilections. She could retail the happenings, even the milder scandal, of her home town in Alabama, could recount the incidents of our household from the kitchen up, for weeks back. Each week she made a mental memorandum of her laundry, so that she knew when one handkerchief or a single pair of tan stockings disappeared. She had in her mind a complete inventory of her possessions?and of everybody else’s for that matter, for she was a busybody. If there was any doubt as to the ownership of a trunk in the attic or a pair of boots in the closet, we asked Joana. She could tell the cook where the gardener kept the onions, and Mrs. G. where to find tissue paper in a drawer in the storeroom that had been barricaded for weeks by boxes, trunks and mattresses. For gossip and for household details Joana’s memory was tenacious. To Joana are pertinent, too, Weiniger’s observations upon the proverbial untruthfulness of woman. “It is evident that a being whose memory is very slight, and who can recall only in the most imperfect fashion what it has said or done or suffered, must lie easily if it has the gift of speech.”5 Joana had the gift of speech in unstinted measure, and, though she seldom lied badly, she was a consummate prevaricator, a conveyor of false impressions woven out of undeniable fact. To a surprising degree, Joana was endowed with the art of giving the innocent twist to the truth which makes a narrative insinuating and incriminating; of omitting just that portion of fact or adding just that negligible bit of fiction which reverses or distorts 1 Weiniger, Otto. Sex and Character. Pp. 98-102.

?Ibid., p. 133. ? Ibid., p. 125. ? Ibid., p. 124. ? Ibid,, pp. 145-146.

its significance. With subtle foresight and artful plausibility, she contrived extenuations of her misdemeanors. In place of crudely robbing the box of candy or pecans, Joana used to ask sweetly for the privilege of passing them, and then cram into her mouth as many of the nuts or sweetmeats as it was possible to consume on the way to and from the closet. She would coax another child to share in the crime of stealing cookies or the surreptitious consumption of jam, so that, if accused, she could, virtuously and circumstantially, lay the blame on her companion or if herself convicted, had at least the satisfaction of a fellow culprit. This artfulness, upon occasion became true feminine tact, so that she could glide with perfect social grace over the most awkward situations; as, on the day in the garden when she had giggled openly at James’ clumsy bumpings upon the back of the old carriage horse. When James protested in spluttering anger, Joana slipped out of the unpleasantness with facile glibness: “Oh, I wasn’t laughing at you. I was laughing at the horse.” Even in the classroom, in the midst of tears and resistance, Joana was always a lady, unfailing in formal courtesy and consideration for her teachers. Beneath this superficial courtesy, however, an unerring intuition guided her straight to their particular weaknesses and straight to the precise moment when comment would be most embarrassing. Thus, subtly, adroitly, she paid off old scores. An opportune day for such thrusts was, of course, the day on which her parents paid Joana a visit. As we went up the wide steps to the dining room, Albert whispered a warning. “Look out. Joana’s going to snitch on you.”

We sat at the big round table; nine children of assorted age and mentality, four teachers and two fond, solicitous parents. Joana, in her best dress with her hair smoothed into soft, loose rolls and her cheeks becomingly flushed, knew intuitively that the restraint the school placed upon her volubility was, for a little space, removed, and felt herself the center of that company. She began with a graceful introduction:

“This is Miss Collins, the teacher who doesn’t like to meet parents. She was upstairs, h-i-i-ding.” With her tongue now pleasantly loosed, Joana talked continuously through the meal, every now and then satisfying the delighted Albert beyond his highest expectations. “Mrs. G. wasn’t going to ask you to dinner until I begged her to. Thank you for the strawberries you sent me. I only had four, or eight, or something like that.” “Papa,” she said, “who would you rather have for your sister, Mrs. G. or Miss B.?”

And again, “Will you please buy me a new tooth brush? Mrs. G. gave the one you sent me to Jack?” In the middle of dinner, Joana spoke across the table, solicitously, to her teacher. “Wouldn’t you like me to lend you a handkerchief after dinner, Miss B.? I know you borrow them when you have a cold.”

Still with generous sweetness, she turned to her mother: “I would like to take you to Atlantic City if I had money enough. I had two quarters, eight dimes, four nickels and ten pennies, but I think Miss S. took one of my dimes for carfare, and” ?throwing him a covert glance?”Albert owes me some.” This child, who, in the schoolroom, was timid, hysterical, inefficient, imbecilic, was in the sphere of her innate interests confident, sufficient, supreme. Each month Joana grew more competently, surpassingly, discomfitingly feminine. In September, Joana, leaving Miss B. in the bare classroom, may have welcomed the transfer to Mrs. G.’s pleasant room in the big house. There, though work was no less distasteful, the surroundings, at least, were more congenial. At Mrs. G.’s wide mahogany desk, where the leather desk pad with its unspotted green blotter, the silver-topped inkstand and the pens in the neat glass tray were arranged with a mathematical precision satisfying to Joana’s orderly soul, she could contemplate work with a minimum of pain. Likewise, the opportunity to tend the beautiful feathery fern on the white window seat compensated for much. Moreover, Mrs. G. herself, eccentric and foreign, with a personality partly Scandinavian and redundantly Slavic, interested Joana. Her room and her person radiated “atmosphere.”

When Mrs. G. bellowed, “Jo-ah-nah,” Joana stood to attention in respectful dignity. “Yes, Mrs. G.” Her new teacher was a woman of imperious will who, with none of Miss B.’s buoyancy and tact, sought to bulldoze her pupil into some semblance of submission and industry. Joana’s submission, however, was of manner and not of spirit. The adolescent, Semitic, impertinent Albert, Mrs. G. could crush, captivate, enslave. Others she could intimidate, or at least subdue. Before her overwhelming personality, Joana, alone of the whole household, maintained her poise, submissive but not abject, her emotions perfectly balanced between respectful dislike and tacit gratitude.

Yet possibly, at times, Joana was something more than neutral. While she endured with stoic indifference Mrs. G.’s intermittent efforts to break her stubborn resistance, she yet admired her antag124 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CLINIC. onist’s heroic capacity for domination. In the intervals, moreover, she warmed to her with a sense of singular congeniality.

Joana, indeed, found Mrs. G., with all her bulk and virility, sympathetically feminine. She released Joana’s chunky figure from the exaggeration of the short-waisted, box-plaited dresses of monstrous plaid gingham, and clothed her in a chic, long-waisted frock of silk and serge. She loosed Joana’s hair from its plaits and let it fall, long and straight and fine, about her square shoulders. She listened with attentive ear to Joana’s mature list of possible gifts for her father?silk socks, necktie, cuff links, ring, handkerchiefs and silk shirt. She took Joana shopping, in smoky gray furs and a quaint black velvet bonnet with rosebuds and an ermine band about the crown; she took her, once or twice, to lunch at a fashionable restaurant with music, palms and elaborate food. In such clothes, in such atmosphere, Joana expanded, radiant, for, though she was bourgeois in figure and antecedents, there could be, as Albert said, “some class to Joana.”

During the fall and winter, therefore, in part because of the impetus she had gained from the work with Miss B., in part because of the coercion of Mrs. G.’s peremptory will, and in part because some of her rigid, involuntary resistance relaxed in this expansion of her feminine nature, Joana made considerable progress. Though she became neither very much quicker nor very much more willing, she gained in ability to write more lucidly. In November she wrote to her sister: November 7, 1914.

Dear Sister

We went for a walk to Media last night. When we got up this morning the frost was on the gress. I received your nice letter writing with pen and ink. The hair dresser came this morning to wach my hair. Please thank Papa for the pemert candy he sent to Anor and I. We both like it very much. Love to all from

Joana.

In that same week, with prolonged and tedious effort, she wrote a composition:

KING MIDAS

Once upon a time There was a king and his name was Midas, he had gold but he wanted more gold, and then came the fary and king Midas said to the fary I want more gold and the fary said everything you tuch may turn to gold. Then king Midas went to the table and he sat down in the chers and they turned to gold. Then he eate and drank his food and it turned to gold. And he herd his little girl cry out and he ran to her and picked her up and she turned to gold. And then king midas began to cry he said to the fary that his dear little girl had cange to gold.

With painful and unremitting drill, Joana also acquired some efficiency in spelling. At Mrs. G.’s inexorable command her tears had ceased to flow so that, now dry and enduring, she spelled and spelled and spelled, tirelessly and interminably. The effective energy Mrs. G., and subsequently Miss M., put forth to overcome the wellnigh insuperable obstacles of Joana’s stubborn disinclination, her chronic confusion, the absence in her of any phonic sense, and her memory which, for spelling, seemed both untrainable and unretentive, ultimately prevailed. On the second day of June, Joana conceded their success in ‘forcing her to learn in spite of her handicaps and her opposition by spelling sturdily, for a full hour, till she had demonstrated her ability, as measured by the scale of Dr Leonard P. Ayres,1 to be not greatly below that of the Third Grade in the public schools.2 Even her errors indicated a distinct gain in capacity. She spelled income, encome; inspect, inspeck; contract, contrack; all words totally unfamiliar to her.

She yielded the honors to her teachers somewhat less generously in the contest over reading. Through the winter, with the face of a martyr, she read as she had spelled?interminably. She read to herself, with lips moving in an inaudible whisper; she read aloud with Mrs. G. to catch her teacher’s intonation; she read aloud by herself, over and over again. She read till her jerky monotone was modified to something which approximated smoothness; till it was relieved by an occasional lift of her voice at an interrogation point. In consequence, on that same day in June, 1915, she was able to read at sight from the Second Reader, in five minutes, four and a half pages, missing but two words and spelling two others before she pronounced them. Joana’s reading was still, however, predominately in a monotone and broken by frequent repetition of words.

1 Ayres, Leonard P. Measuring Scale for Ability in Spelling. Russell Sage Foundation, 1915. Column Second Grade.

99 98 94 E 92 73 J K 66 58 L 50 N 0 JOANA. 100 100 100 100 100 96 90 89 84 74 74 52 40 25 Third Grade. 100 100 100 99 96 94 92 84 | 79 58 50

Though she surrendered nothing of her spontaneous force to this necessary routine work, there were occasions when her latent energy was released by an exercise which touched one of her expectant interests.

Her dislike for oral reproduction as a classroom exercise, for instance, was not so strong in her as the instinct for gossip, so that she often retold a story with considerable animation. Such was her recital of the interesting tale of Mr. Brown’s Midnight Adventure: “There was a man named Mr. Brown and he lived in a house?I believe in the country?no in the city. And he went to bed one night and slept and slept, and slept. Then he heard a noise of fire whistles and bells and clocks and everything like that. Finally he woke up and heard the trolley cars coming and policemen rode very fast on their horses and struck the lamp posts and hit people. And Mr. Brown finally woke by the last street car round the corner.

Then Mr. Brown got out of bed and put his foot out the window. Then he got up and went downstairs on tiptoe to the switch and turned on the lights. Then he saw a burglar standing by the sideboard where the silver had just been laid down so nicely and neat. And then Mr. Brown grabbed the burglar and the burglar pushed him against the door and Mr. Brown had a time trying to stand up. Then the burglar pointed a shining pistol at him of his and Mr. Brown yelled help, help as loud as he could. Then finally two policemen stood before him with guns pointing at the burglar and the two policeman grabbed the burglar and shook him and hit him. The burglar wore a yellow cap and a blue coat and green trousers, and a red beard.”

On another afternoon the details of a simple colored picture, given to Joana to study for two minutes, attracted her quick, observant eye and awakened her highly particularized expectant attention to color and clothes. Therefore, when the picture was removed, Joana gave eagerly a detailed and vivid description:

I. There was a little boy with a rose colored shirt and a white collar and black trousers with little white dots in. He had black slippers on and socks with pink at the bottom and white at the top. He was standing behind some stones and there were little pink flowers. He was watching a spider spinning his web. The web was pink. The spider was walking up the web. The spider had black and pink on. The little boy was pretty big and looked about eight.

II. There are two little girls. One had black hair and the other white hair with a blue ribbon on it. The two were sitting on a fence. The little girl with black hair had on a blue dress and black stockings and shoes and the other had on a white waist with a blue skirt and slippers and black stockings and lines in her dress. There were blue flowers and rocks by the fence? three rails in the fence. Two sheep?one sitting by the fence? one trying to get through. The little girl with white hair had a blue staff in her hand to catch the sheep around the legs if they should run away. They both were sitting up with legs crossed on the fence.

In the same manner the Binet Tests so appealed to Joana’s interest that she gave responses copious and characteristic enough to suggest, in a single hour, many of the inclinations and traits of mind and character which it had taken months of association to reveal. Something of her interest in company, parties, food and domestic arrangements, something of her characteristic idea complexes, was suggested by her descriptions of the objects given to define: Table?”A round table that you eat at, or talk around with company.”

Fork?”Something that you eat dinner with, or pies. It has four prickly things and some have five. It’s to pick up food with.”

Mama?”A mother, a mama who takes care of children, and things like that, and keeps you happy and well, and teaches you how to sing and play and everything nice, and plays with them and reads to them, and gives parties for them, and sends them to do errands, for the mail, for eggs, and to the butcher shop, and many other things.”

The effeminate sensitiveness with which she shrank from the slightest pain, her interest in flowers and insects and a spontaneous impulse to observe analytically appeared in her response to the questions designed to test discrimination of difference: Glass will cut you and is sort of whitish color.

Wood is more brown and more splintery and will run slivers into your hand. They hurt awfully.

A butterfly has pretty colored wings, and a fly has teeny thin wings not hardly any color. A butterfly has four little feet and two feelers and a head and eyes. That’s just the same as the butterfly.

Her aptitude for conversation and, again, her alert capacity for minute observation, oriented from her interest in wearing apparel and domestic furnishings, were both patent in Joana’s flowing description of the three Binet pictures:

I. Poor people, it looks like to me, poor people drawing a cart, a little boy and an old man, and a high hill with a broken fence. Buckets and pillows, and sheets, and houses and a high stump. Part of the wagon is broken. It looks like it had been raining, snowing a little. The man can hardly pull it and the boy has a strap. The wheels are bending a little. The man is pulling like a horse. He has on a high hat, a derby you call it, I think, and an old, old, apron on and shoes. The boy hasn’t brushed his hair, and has on ragged clothes, and there are trees and shrubs. It’s been raining because the road looked slushy like.

III. There’s a man in his house. He was taking a nap on his couch one day. But he woke up. He had some papers on his couch, and a pillow, and a cover, black with a little white in it, I mean greyish color. The man had on a black coat and white trousers. His arms were folded across his chest, I think it is called. He was looking out the window to see the children come home from school, I believe. There was a chair behind the couch and two tables and a door entering into the other room. The man has a mustache and greyish hair. The rug is grey and black.

There was a hint of Joana’s complacent righteousness, and of her facility in fabricating excuses in her answer to the question, If you were delayed on your way to school, what would you do? “Tell the teacher that my grandmother was sick, and she wanted me to go to the doctor’s for her. I was the one who was usually on time, though.”

Joana’s petty superstition and her lack of a sense of humor, too, might be inferred from her total inability to detect in the “absurdity” test anything but general foolhardiness in all the persons mentioned, with the sole exception, perhaps, of the man who displayed proper respect for the ill-omen of Friday.

The record of this single series of tests, which so faithfully suggested Joana’s interests, aptitudes and character, likewise sustained the impression of her teachers that her general mental capacity was not so subnormal as her school work. Measured by these tests, the 1911 Revision of the Binet Scale,1 Joana had, three months after her tenth birthday, a mental age of eight and one-half years and a retardation of less than two years. These same performances, scored later according to Dr Terman’s Standard Revision,2 gave Joana a mental age of eight years and one month and an intelligence quotient of eighty-six.3 Dr Terman considers quotients ranging from eighty to ninety indicative of “dullness, rarely classifiable as feeblemindedness. “4 1 Binet Alfred and Simon, Th. A method of measuring the development of the intelligence of yoang children. Authorized translation, by Clara H. Town, Ph.D., Lincoln, Illinois, 1912. s Terman, Lewis M. The Measurement of Intelligence. Guide for the use of the Stanford Revision and Extension of the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale. Houghton Mifflin Company. New York, 1916. ‘ Such a transposition of scores is not permissible for statistical comparison because of differences in material and method, but we offer it here merely as suggestive data. ? Ibid., p. 79.

Similarly her performance of the Witmer Cylinder Test1 in sixty-eight seconds on the shortest of three trials, a performance normal in quality and equal in speed to slower girls of ten; and her “memory span”2 of six digits, usual for children of ten, eleven and twelve years, added two other items to the evidence that Joana’s pedagogic performances were an unfair index to her total mental capacity.

Nevertheless, Joana had genuine deficiencies. Her imagery, though adequate to the demands of her intellectual level, was distinctly weak. Where her perceptions were sharpened by her particular interests, as in her detailed observations of the pictures noted above, and of flowers and plants on a country walk, and in her alert attention to changes in the dress of people about her, or to the slightest defect in her own clothes, her visual imagery, indeed, had considerable vividness. Where her interest was less keen, however, her images seemed to be less vivid. With the design blocks, in June, 1915, she reproduced four block patterns from memory very slowly, with painful effort and a good deal of inaccuracy. She could not reproduce anything that even approximated the design shown in the ten-year-old Binet Test. On November 28, 1914, in a series of six tests in which she could rely on the reinforcement of voco-motor images, she succeeded better.3

In Joana’s classroom work this dependence on voco-motor imagery was apparent. Hearing a word spelled, or looking at it silently, or even the attempt to build up a kinaesthetic image by writing it over and over, never sufficed to teach it to Joana. She learned best by saying the letter sequence over and over aloud, either alone or in unison with her teacher, preferably with her eyes closed. Often, in a reading lesson she was able to recall a word she failed to recognize at sight, by spelling it aloud. When asked a question in arithmetic or geography, she would stand for several seconds moving her lips rapidly before she was able to give the answer. Diaries and letters, too, were invariably composed with much muttering and spluttering.

1 Paschall, Franklin C. A report on the standardization of the Witmer Cylinder Test. The Psychological Clinic, Vol. XII, No. 2, April, 1918. 2 Humpstone, Henry J. Some aspects of the memory span test; a study in associability. The Psychological Clinic Press, Philadelphia, 1917. s The tests consisted each of a sheet of gray construction paper, 9 X 12 inches, divided into four rectangles in which were pasted respectively: (1) four color squares, (2) four geometric figures, of lusterless black paper, (3) four gummed letters of glossy black inches high, (4) four numerals like the above, (5) four monosyllables of three letters each of the same gummed paper, (6) four nonsense syllables of three letters each. The subject was permitted to study the sheet exposed for sixty seconds and was then given a gray sheet similarly ruled, and?a jumble of?double the number of letters, figures, or symbols from which to select the correct letters or symbols and with them to reproduce the original sheet.

Visual and voco-motor images, weak as they were, appeared to be the prevailing mode of Joana’s thought. Of auditory and kinaesthetic imagery she had very little. She could not carry a tune, showed no interest in music or sound and had little capacity to modulate or inflect her voice in reading and recitation. She had absolutely no sense of rhythm, and, though she could cut and color paper dolls fairly well, it was almost impossible to teach her even the simplest stitches in sewing or knitting; and in running, jumping and all athletic games her awkwardness was conspicuous. Furthermore, Joana had a difficulty in recalling proper names so pronounced as to amount almost to mild name aphasia. In November this congenital deficiency was so aggravated by hysterical disturbances that the names Genoa and Spain had to be omitted from the story of Columbus. The most insistent teaching could not insert in her mind more than the two names, Columbus and America.

In spite of this obstacle, as her hysteria waned, her teachers, during the winter, drilled Joana into reciting no negligible amount of geography. In January, she was heard to name Asia, Africa and Australia as three cities. By June, she could recite the definitions of the common forms of land and water on the earth’s surface, point out on the globe the poles, the equator, the continents and oceans, and name the most important mountains, seas, peninsulas, gulfs and rivers of the several continents, and, in somewhat more detail, some facts about New England and the Middle States.

This was, however, pure memory drill. Joana’s greatest deficiency was her total incapacity for generalized or abstract thought. Of this geography she understood absolutely nothing. She had memorized certain facts, but she could not make use of them. She knew that the Rocky Mountains were in the western part of the United States and that New Jersey was one of the eastern States, yet she saw no inconsistency in hazarding the guess that the Rocky Mountains were in New Jersey.

Even in the things she could do, Joana was inordinately slow in all her movements and reactions and conspicuously deficient in energy, except where dress and sex stimulated her to vivacious response. Her interest, moreover, had no range beyond clothes, scratches, illnesses, flowers, gossip?especially unpleasant gossip? and food.

Indeed, Joana’s ontic norm was not high. The disturbance of her emotional equilibrium had, moreover, held her or, perhaps, reduced her to a level considerably lower than that norm. Congenital mediocrity had been aggravated by adventitious factors into a specious and possibly irretrievable imbecility.

Nevertheless, with the development in control and efficiency which came to Joana in her new environment, she advanced steadily in her profession of the complete lady. Each month she grew more domineering and more ingratiating. With those whom she considered her social inferiors she became very nearly insufferable. In her room, she scattered bits of paper over the floor and ordered the chambermaid to pick them up. When not obeyed at once, she stamped her foot and vented her petulant anger in a stream of abuse which was not innocent of profanity. No child was more capable of dressing herself than Joana, yet she quietly refused to lift a finger and so converted the kind and busy Fraulein into her own personal maid. With the air of a haughty, tyrannical queen, Joana demanded service. The other children obeyed Fraulein; Joana commanded her. Joana also read all Fraulein’s letters from the policeman, and hurled back Fraulein’s protest with supercilious disdain, “You are only a servant and a blond imp.”

On the other hand, with those whom chance had, for the present, placed as her superiors Joana was all tactful sweetness. For them she gathered flowers and arranged dainty bouquets. To them she would offer as gifts her gold locket and her prettiest handkerchief, for, though miserly, she was quick to see that these gifts were never accepted, and astute enough to observe that by this insincere generosity she conserved her possessions and escaped punishment for stinginess. With smiles and gracious movements of her head, she would make professions of appreciative generosity: “Isn’t there something you would like? You never let me give you anything, Mrs. G. Shan’t I write my mother to send you a pearl necklace, or a pony cart?”

Joana’s resistance to the process of acquiring an education became, more and more, a skilful evasion. She never lost her manners nor crudely rebelled. After a tearful scene with her teacher, she would come to school the next morning, full of bustling, smiling courtesy. To her teacher she would say, “I’ve made up my mind to be nice to you today because I made you tired yesterday.” She would flit about the classroom, anticipating her teacher’s ever}’ movement, handing her pencils, finding books, offering her glasses of water or sniffs at the bottle of cologne she carried in her pocket. With extravagant solicitude, she would say, “Let me get the chalk for you. Don’t get up. It might tire you.” In her letter home she would write, ignoring yesterday’s punishment, “I have such a nice teacher.” All the same, on the day after such a morning, resistance began again. Joana sat at her desk, chewing pencil, pen and eraser and at the end of three-quarters of an hour showed three lines of a diary as her total output. For her spelling lesson she stood up, tense and flushed, twisting her handkerchief in nervous fingers.

“T-h-e-r-e, three,” she spelled. “F-o-r-f, fork; e-r-n, earn.” “How many letters are there in the word earn?” her teacher asked. “Four, or five, rather,” whimpered Joana, beginning to weep copiously.

Tears fell and fell and fell, till Miss Shannon threatened to report her to Dr Witmer. Joana, desiring admiration, dreading humiliation, especially in the masculine world, meekly asked permission to use her handkerchief, dried her eyes with care and, sitting down at her desk, wrote painstakingly and accurately twenty-four words, dictated to her and her fellow pupil. Gordon’s list was examined first. “You can’t get a hundred,” Joana taunted, “you missed one word. You can’t get a hundred.” When one misspelled word was discovered in her own list, however, Joana began to whine, “Why can’t you give me a hundred anyway? You can.”

A history lesson came next on the schedule. “The king called the land Pennsylvania in honor of Penn’s father.” Joana improvised glibly. “What does Pennsylvania mean?” interrupted Miss S. “Brotherly love,” responded Joana, positively. “What was the question?” Miss S. demanded. “What does Philadelphia mean?” Joana misquoted. Gordon interrupted with disdainful emphasis on the correction, “What does Pennsylvania mean?” Joana, however, still persisted, “Brotherly love.” Miss Shannon said then, very sternly, “Joana, no trip to the circus tomorrow for anyone who cannot answer better than that.” All in one breath, Joana burst out, “Penn’s Woods. Philadelphia means Brotherly love because Penn wanted everyone who lived there to love each other like brothers now can I go to the circus if I answer like that?” This goodness lasted on into the geography lesson until Joana had named five of the six rivers she knew in Pennsylvania. On the sixth river she balked. “What city is on that river?” hinted Miss Shannon. “Harrisburg,” Joana replied, “but I don’t know the name of the river.” It’s hard. I don’t know it anyhow. If it isn’t the Hudson it ought to be, anyway.” “You are not going to the circus unless you can tell me.” Miss Shannon declared.

“Susquehann,” Joana exploded. “Now can I go?” Thus, slowly and resistantly, Joana advanced in her school work. That she did advance in spite of her difficult moods, there is evidence in the letter that went to Joana’s sister on the seventh of August, 1915. It was beautifully written in ink without a blot or an erasure and read as follows: August 7, 1915. Dearest Sister:?

Will you please thank Papa for the one dollar he sent to me. It was very nice of him to think of me. We had our first corn from the garden Thursday. It was very good and I liked it very much. I wore my new black hair ribbons to Willow Grove. Miss Shannon made me a paper doll house. I think Fraulein and I are going out on Sunday afternoon to have a nice time. I received a very nice letter from you, and from Papa, Mama, and Miss Dascom, too. I know that you are glad that Miss Dascom is back. I hope you are going to have a nice times. Miss M. went to Atlantic City and will be back Monday. Albert and James are going to Philadelphia today. The weather is not so hot here. I am reading about Mr. Jeremy Fisher. I wrote a story about Benjamin Franklin and Lydia Darrah. I clean up my school-room and sweep it. Lots of love to all v from Joana

That same summer, Joana wrote from memory a very nearly faultless composition about Betsy Ross.1 On through the year she learned, with interest and without comprehension of time or sequence, a few more historical anecdotes and whined her way through a few more futile lessons in geography. “Did you say France? France is near?France might be near Russia. It might be near Italy. It might be Canada. It must be near Canada. It ought to be if it isn’t.” Her most obstinate pedagogic retardation was in arithmetic. Even in September, 1915, she could not do the problem:

1BET8Y ROSS George Washington wanted a flag for the United States. The first flag was made by Betsy Ross. She lived at Second and Arch Streets in Philadelphia. She was famous for her good sewing. She made a shirt with ruffles on it for Washington. George Washington went to sec Betsy Ross. When he asked her to make an American flag she said I do not know but I will try. George Washington thought that a six pointed star would do. Betsy Ross thought that a five pointed star would be different than the English flag. Mrs. Ross Washington said a six pointed star would be easier. Mrs. Ross folded a piece of paper and she cut it out and a five pointed star came out. They liked it very much and toldes her to finish it as soon as she could. Tha new flag was adopted June 14, 1777. We call it flag day.

If one stick of cancly costs one cent, how much will three sticks cost? The maximum of her performance level was reached when she answered the question:

If there are six cakes in a baker’s window and he sells three of them, how many cakes will be left? In November, 1915, after her eleventh birthday, Joana could add accurately simple columns of figures1 but could not do the most elementary subtractions.2 Drill on the addition and subtraction combinations was stressed through the fall, and in January, 1916, work with the multiplication tables was begun. Through the winter and spring, Joana advanced tearfully to the sixty-fifth page in Hamilton’s Primary Arithmetic, gaining no sureness and confidence, so that her performances in addition, subtraction, and simple multiplication with the tables up to five were slow, erratic and labored. In March she was able to tell how many feet have three cows. With pouts and clumsy fingers she was learning, too, to hem, but the result was so imperfect that she brought no interest to the task. A rapid glance through the letters for the year will show how Joana’s mind, so inactive in the classroom, continued in its feminine gossip, clothes, parties and flowers:

“I am sorry to hear what happened to the Murray’s horse. I hope they like their new automobile.?I am glad Sister had a nice time dancing with Frank.? John’s mother came to see him and brought him some sewing cards and a golf set and a soap bubble set.? I was very sorry to hear that you had a bad cold and I hope you will soon be well again.?I was very sorry to hear that the schoolhousc was burned.? I was very sorry to hear what happened at the turpentine still. It must have cost a lot of money.?All the teachers like my dress and coat. ? Will you please thank Sister for the vanity case she sent me and I like it very much. Whitman’s did not send the candy yet.? I was very sorry to hear that Mr. Raymond died.?I had a nice letter from Papa saying that Julia Ann and Mattie are taking good care of him while you are in Wisconsin.?The May apples are in bloom now. We went for a walk along the creek and found fourteen different kinds of wild flowers. ? I received three dresses this morning and three middy skirts and a new middy.? ? We went to the Green Dragon for lunch and had a very nice treat.”

Nevertheless, Joana was not exempt from the biologic law of adaptation to environment. She could not remain in a family where the boys outnumbered the girls, by a count of six to two, without some modification of her ultra-femininity. Here and there would creep into her letters sentences such as: “We had lots of fun coasting and playing in the snow.?We had a nice time playing puss wants a corner and hiden go seek.” Her chunky body grew robust and she began to take a sedate pleasure in the active games of her comrades. The boys now seldom teased and sneered at her, for her coquetry had vanished and she had become for them quite an acceptable playmate.

Joana never lost, however, her intuitive and feline gift for repartee. It was as sharp as ever one day when, after a relapse into her tantalizing trouble-making, she sat at the lunch table, a sodden, sullen little girl. Mrs. G., somewhat unwisely, had touched on Joana’s secret, haunting fear.

“Joana, if you behave like this, you are sure to be an old maid. The only way you’ll ever get a husband is to fool him.” Joana, whimpering, thrust back swiftly:

“Is that what you had to do, Mrs. G.?” In June, 1916, Joana went, with the other children to spend the summer on the Nova Scotian coast. There, at St. Margaret’s Bay, began her work with her truest and staunchest friend. For seventeen months, under the quiet force of Miss Carroll’s friendship and teaching, Joana continued to advance with a certain noticeable acceleration.

Miss Carroll was the first to rouse in her a genuine interest and pride in her work. This accession of interest came first in reading. When, on the nineteenth of June, they started with the first lesson in the Silver-Burdett Second Reader, Joana’s reading was painful to hear. She skipped words carelessly, gave all words in a sentence exactly the same stress, or else emphasized the conjunctions and prepositions; she gave sometimes no inflection at all and at other times read all sentences as though they ended with question marks. Weary of months of monotonous drill, Joana seized with relief a new device Miss Carroll introduced into the reading period,?the device of underlining the most important words in each sentence and stressing them in the oral reading. After two weeks of supervision in selecting the words for underlining, Joana proved herself able to make the selection herself with very good judgment. Her reading changed markedly, till it became “almost interesting.” After she had two or three days on one story, she could read it with smooth136 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CLINIC. ness and expression and was always anxious to display her achievement to the other teachers. Their praise spurred her on to perfect the next story for exhibition. By the end of the following month she surprised her teacher by reading a new lesson at sight with very little hesitation and very fair emphasis.

“My mother will be pleased to hear me read like this,” Joana remarked. Her interest and initiative were so thoroughly aroused that when she repeated a word near the end of the page she asked to begin the whole story over again so that she might have a perfect recitation. Even such words as Portland and college no longer troubled her. In February, therefore, Joana was promoted to the Third Reader. A teacher who tested her at that time made note, “Joana read the story of the Elves fairly well, but with absolutely no expression of any kind, and then suddenly surprised me by reading the Story of the Stag fluently with real expression, warming up at the end to considerable warmth of feeling.” The words were hard for her, but she was able to work out for herself such words as ‘persistent, jaunty and oriole. Each month she showed more interest in the subject-matter of her reading, making running comments as she read. “Luxury, that means a lot of good things, doesn’t it??This word is printed different. That means to say it louder.?Survey,? that’s look over, isn’t it?” At thirteen Joana could read as well as the average trained child of nine.

The first summer of her work with Miss Carroll, Joana came to take effective pride, too, in transcription work. She copied into her notebook the lessons she had read, taking extreme care to make each page perfect in spelling and punctuation. Each day she would remark at the beginning, “I’m not going to have any mistakes. I know if I pay attention I need never have any mistakes. Today I’m going to try to get excellent,” and she usually did. Indeed, she desired a perfect page so passionately that when she was not allowed to correct an error by erasure she sulked and pouted for half an hour at a time.

Joana did not do original work with the same alacrity. Each morning, when it was time to write her diary, she insisted, with a downpour of tears, that there was nothing to say. She screwed her face into fearful contortions, muttering violently. Presently, with her pencil on the page, apparently all ready to begin, she would draw back and start her grimaces and whispers all over again until, at last, with an expression of extreme torture, she would begin to write very slowly. Sometimes she spent an hour and a half writing less than two pages, generously sprinkled with careless misspelling such as som for some and diner for dinner. Home letters were composed in much the same way. She showed in them, too, no regard for unity or sequence. Comments on news from home were inserted in the middle of an account of a picnic. Joana disposed of each event in one or two sentences, in which everything was either “very nice” or “very lovely.” Her fashion of dividing her compositions into sentences was often peculiar. “So the boy got off the ass and the miller got on the ass and they went on until. They came to some more people and they called out look at that boy he can hardly keep up with him.”

That these difficulties, particularly the muttering protests and the slowness of production, lasted on through the weeks and months into the following year is clearly shown by Miss Carroll’s account of the writing of one of Joana’s compositions.

May 17, 1917. I told Joana to write the story of Snow White, a fairy story which she saw yesterday in the moving pictures. As usual, she instantly began to cry and say she didn’t remember anything about it. It was then eleven o’clock. I told her that she could have until 11.30 to write it; that I was not going to fuss with her about it at all or try to force her to do it, but that if she had not either finished it or gotten a good deal written by that time, I would punish her. I also told her she was not to speak to me or keep muttering that she couldn’t do it, and that I did not intend to ariswer any questions or speak to her until the time was up. She sat and cried for about half the time. My watch was on the edge of the desk where she could see it, and about quarter past she got to work and by 11.30 had almost two pages covered, had been writing steadily, and seemed to have more to say. At twenty-five minutes of twelve she said she was finished. I looked at it and found a very good piece of work,1 except that she had left out one important part. I asked her about it and she said she didn’t remember it. I asked a few questions and found that she did remember it perfectly. So I told her to write another paragraph; whereupon she began to cry all over again and say she couldn’t write it and didn’t remember. I gave her another time limit, and then, as she showed every sign of waiting till the very last possible moment before beginning, I told her that if she had not started by quarter of twelve, she would be punished. It was then nine1 SNOW WHIT Once upon a time there was a little girl and her name was Snow Whit. She had a very pretty stepmother but the stepmother maid Snow Whit do all the hard work. She maid her stay in the kitchen and scrub the floors. Snow Wht had a lot of sisters and the stepmother loved all the other little girls better than Snow Whit. One day her stepmother said I am going to have Snow Whit killed. So she got a strong man to take Snow Whit out in the deep woods to kill her but the man liked Snow Whit. So the man killed a pig and took the hart to the stepmother. Than the stepmother took the hart to an old witch and the witch said that it is a pigs hart. Then Snow Whit became Queen and the old witsch took the beauty from Snow Whit’s stepmother. teen minutes of twelve. She cried and sat there till seventeen minutes of twelve, and then got to work and wrote steadily until five minutes before twelve, when she brought me the proper material clearly written out.”1

In the autumn of that year, the last months Joana was with us, the tearful fussing over composition disappeared so that she at last wrote with some ease and pleasure. The device of having her make a list of the things she wished to say before she began her home letter improved her correspondence markedly. The list Joana made for her last letter home on October 20, 1917, was long enough to refute any statement of hers that she had nothing to say.2 The letter written from this list should be placed beside that first incredible jumble which she sent to her parents in March, 1914. October 20, 1917. My dearest Mother:? Last Sunday Miss S. took all of us to church. Wednesday morning Miss Carroll and Miss M. took all of us in town. It was for my birthday celebration. We had dinner at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel. After dinner we went to the Arcadia to see William S. Hart in “The Narrow Trail” and we liked it very much. I will send you a program telling you all about the play.

The other day we went for a very nice walk with Miss B. and Miss M.

I have been doing some cross stitching on some little towels. I have been reading and I like it very much. Friday I had a very nice birthday and I thank you and Papa for the money and Sister for the lovely box of candy. Will you please thank Mr. and Mrs. Murray for the fountain pen and Miss Dascom for the money she sent me? We have lots of fun playing in the hammock. There has been lovely weather here this week. I was very glad to get the telegram that all of you sent to me. Will you please tell Julia Ann she will have to give me my birthday spanking when I come home? I hope that all of you are very well. Lots of love to all of you from Joana i When she was in the woods she came to a little dworfs house and she took car of the dworfs. When she was at the dworfs house the old witch came to fix her hair. As soon as she stuck the comb in her hair she fe’l to the floor but the dworfs came and took out the comb from her hair. Tnen the witch came the next time like a cook and she gave Snow White an apple and the apple killed Snow White. The stepmother broke her glas and then Snow White woke up. J1. Sunday church 2. Wednesday morning we went in town 3. The other day we went for a walk 4. I have been doing some cross stitching 6. I have been reading and like it 6. birthday 7. hammock 8. weather 9. Julia Ann 10. telegram 11. program

Spelling continued to the very end to be a desperate struggle for Joana, and torture for her teacher. Just how torturing it was is indicated by a transcript of Miss Carroll’s notes for July 24, 1916: “Today she misspelled carelessly words that she has spelled right times without number. The word sorry she spelled right the first time she came to it. The second time she spelled it soory. When told that wasn’t right and to spell it again, she cried and said, ‘That’s the only way I know how to spell it.’ Each time she was asked she spelled it soory, seeming to think that by changing the emphasis from one letter to another she was spelling it differently. Finally I gave her the four words that she absolutely refused to spell right to study. When she said she knew them, she again spelled sorry, soory. The second time she spelled it correctly. To make sure she had it straight, I told her to spell it out loud ten times. Immediately she began again to spell it, soory, and after that she refused to spell it any other way. She cried all the time and kept saying, ‘That’s the only way I know. That’s the right way to spell it.’ Finally I showed her the word in the book and told her to read what she saw there. She read soory, pointing to the letters as she went along. I said, ‘How many o’s are there in the word?’ She said, ‘One.’ ‘How many r’s?’ ‘Two,’ she said. I said, ‘Read it to me with one o and two r’s and she read ‘soory.’ Then I wrote the word four times across the top of her copy book and told her to copy four columns of what she saw. Just before she began I asked her what she saw. She said ‘soory.’ I told her to copy what she saw and she wrote it correctly and told me what she had written. After that I had her go outside and sit quietly on the porch for ten minutes. She had been crying hysterically and twisting nervously for nearly an hour. She went out and sat still, and when I called her in again and asked her how to spell the word, she said ‘soory.’

“Joana has a passion for neatness, and it comes out even in the midst of her weeping. She will be having a great time crying, so that anyone would think she was in the greatest grief, but if her eye happens to light on a piece of paper on the floor she immediately delays weeping until it is picked up. Her most violent grief doesn’t keep her from straightening her books on the desk if they seem to be the fraction of an inch out of place.

“At the end of this morning, I asked her once more how to spell sorry and she went through the same old performance, spelling it soory every time and insisting that was what she had written. At last I told her she could sit down beside me until she was ready to say it properly. After she had been sitting there a few minutes, I told Tom he could pick up his books and get ready to go home. I said, ‘Joana will have to stay here until she spells the word right.’ Immediately Joana said, ‘I think I know it now,?sorry.’ “

Miss Carroll, in time, overcame a good deal of this hysterical perversity by sending Joana outside the classroom door to sit quiet and think. Punishment and insistence usually increased her hysteria; quiet often restored her poise. Moreover, Joana disliked intensely the display of her tear-marred face in the corridor. Miss Carroll, furthermore, effectively increased Joana’s actual trainability in spelling by compelling her to make the most of her voco-motor and kinaesthetic images. She made Joana study her spelling words by writing each one again and again, and after each writing, shutting her eyes and spelling it aloud. With persistent patience on the part of her teacher, Joana did, indeed, make progress in spelling. Miss Carroll’s notes on September 14, 1916, were somewhat different from the July records:

“Joana has several times lately shown real initiative about work. Today, when I came to having her spell the words in her new reading lesson, she did almost all correctly the first time, with no hesitation whatever. She said, ‘Do you know why I knew all those words? I studied them ahead for you yesterday.’ ” On April 5, 1917, Joana acquitted herself very creditably in a written review of thirty-two fairly difficult words.1 In arithmetic alone, month after month, year after year, the most skilful and persistent drill seemed to produce no results. The very sight of an arithmetic book invariably precipitated a downfall of tears. One moment Joana would know a numerical combination well; the next, it would take tremendous effort to bring out a correct response to the same stimulus. One day, with a reward in view, she would present a page of correct examples worked independently; the next, she would declare, with sobs, that she had never seen examples like them.

For a year before Miss Carroll began teaching Joana, and for years before that with Miss Dascom, she had been drilled in subtraction and addition. In Miss Carroll’s first summer with Joana, she wrote, notwithstanding:

“July 20, 1916. Because we had subtraction today it was a day of agony. Following her usual method, Joana insisted upon i rogue?roug stifling wheel barrow?whee barel soldier color answer stretched?streched refreshing suffering dainty cloves daisies buttercups honeysuckle newspapers meadows Greece cruel careless careful rolled general rude voyage believe safety guard whirl wept farther orchard guide subtracting the upper number from the lower in cases where it was more convenient. She knew perfectly well how to do them right, for in some instances she did the borrowing correctly, and then, perhaps in the very next example, she would subtract the upper number from the lower. If she had kept consistently to the wrong way it would have been easier to deal with, but she did it first one way and then the other. If I sat over her and watched each step and asked her what step came next, she always could answer correctly and do it correctly, but as soon as she was left to work independently she went back to the same erratic way. As usual she wept a great deal and said constantly, ‘I didn’t think.’ and ‘I don’t know how.’ She asked senseless questions, such as ‘Does 3 and 4 make 11?’ Ever since I have been working with her, we have been doing this kind of subtraction examples, and every time she makes just the same fuss over them, although in the end, after a long struggle, she always gets them right.”

Even as late as February 26, 1917, the comment was no more encouraging: “She had this work all summer and fall and does not work them any better than she did then.”

In multiplication it was almost the same story. In June, 1916, Joana seemed fairly sure of the tables up to five, and in August was doing examples such as $3.50X3 and 74X4 without tears and facial contortions and with considerable accuracy. One day, however, she sat for one-half hour unable to tell how much money she would have if she had five 5-cent pieces until, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, she announced quietly, “Twenty-five cents.” By interminable drill she added the six and seven tables to her repertoire, but in the fall, during a two-months’ vacation with her parents, her unstable knowledge of all the tables evaporated, so that she had to re-learn them from the beginning. It took her six weeks to re-learn them up to the sixes, and even then Miss Carroll wrote on March 8, 1917: “Joana applies the counting method to all her multiplication and I cannot get any other method into her head. If she knows 4 X 8 is 32, she always counts up 4 to see what 4X9 will be. I have worked over the multiplication tables with her for months and cannot fix them in her mind. She has exactly the same difficulty in remembering them that she had when I began teaching her in June.”

She never advanced, even in this limping fashion, beyond the eight table.

Joana’s absolute inability to make change and her consequent frank and critical exclamations in the shops were almost the only factors in her general behavior which betrayed to the public her mental retardation. To remedy this, Miss Carroll began in September, 1916, a determined and, as it proved, a prolonged campaign. With the actual coins, Joana could do almost nothing. With paper and pencil, she was no more successful.1 In January, however, she was able to work in her note-book examples such as, “I bought apples for 10^, pears for 15^ and oranges for 20cl. How much change will I have from a fifty-cent piece?” As she worked she continued to assail the impassive silence of her teacher with innumerable questions, “Do I add up all I spent? Then what do I do?” “Does Obadiah know how to do examples like this?” “If these are not right you’ll know it wasn’t my fault, won’t you?” Morning after morning, she sat at her desk, screwing her face into frightful grimaces. ” I don’t know how to do them. I never saw one like this. I know they won’t be right. These are too hard. I’ve never had the forty table.” Yet when no attention was paid to her, she would often present at the end of an hour a page of perfect examples.

The severest tax, however, was laid upon Joana’s unstable mental capacity when she was asked to choose the process to be used in the solution of a problem. The notes for March 27, 1917, read: “If I spend a morning on addition examples, or subtraction ones, she gets them right, but if on the same morning I give her an addition one and then a subtraction one, she wants to do them both exactly alike and can see no reason why she shouldn’t.” On a particularly calm day, Joana would prove, however, that she had, somewhere, recessive, but intact, the ability to do the work asked of her. These days became more and more frequent, until her teacher reported, on April 27, 1917:

“Four problems,2 every one correct the first time without help. Joana is really doing what for her is remarkable arithmetic. Three months ago she couldn’t possibly have done the problems she is doing now. And whereas she used to cry every day over number work, she now does so only once in a while.”

The fact that she did such examples as these accurately and quietly day after day indicated a very genuine gain in poise. How 135c. 50c. 25c. was her assay at computing the change to be received after paying for a thirty-five cent purchase with & fifty cent piece. J I. John bought a pad for 10c, pencils for 8c., pens for 7c., and an eraser for 11c. If he gave the man two 25c. pieces, how much change did he get? II. A boy had 15 marbles. He lost 8 of them and found 4. How many had he then? III. If I buy 10 yds. of cloth at 6c. a yard, and 6 yds. of ribbon at 6c. a yard, how much change will I get from a dollar bill? IV. I bought a dozen oranges for 5c, apiece, half a dozen lemons at 6c. apicce, and a dozen bananas at 4c. apiece. What did I pay for all?

easily her emotional equilibrium was upset, appears, nevertheless, in the description of Joana’s behavior in the classroom, after an unexpected early morning call from her father: “June 5, 1917. She sat with the tears streaming down her cheeks, saying every few minutes, ‘I miss my father. I can’t help missing my father. I’m trying not to miss him, but I do.’ Then she would blow her nose gently, mop her eyes and make some little attempt to work, but after a few minutes she would desist and start herself off again, ‘I miss him still.’ ” ” In her reading lesson, she began at p. 104, and by the time she had reached p. 106 she was reading pretty well, not stopping to sniffle and wipe her eyes at all. After this she found it easier to go on with her diary and forget her troubles. Her grief returned violently, however, when I started the oral spelling which she dislikes.” Joana’s advance in arithmetic and in general poise continued none the less, till, in October of 1917, her teacher was able to write of her: ” Joana has amazed me by her school work. She has improved, not in one study alone, but in everything, to a really remarkable degree. It was this general impression of increased ability and awakening power to think which first struck me; then, on closer watching, I found that it was evident along every line of her work and in her behavior and interests outside the schoolroom. Joana is showing real reasoning power in the work she is doing. She does arithmetic examples that require actual reasoning for their solution, and sits down and works them out by herself, scarcely ever appealing to me for help, or making any fuss over them. Several times when she has had an unusually hard one, instead of crying about it, she said: ‘This is a hard one. I’ll have to think this out.’ The following are some of the examples she has done in the last week or two: “If I buy a dozen apples at apiece, eight oranges at 6^ apiece, a dozen eggs at apiece, and three lbs. of butter at 30j? a pound, and give the man a $2 bill, how much change will I get? “A farmer had eighty-four sheep. Thirty ran away. He got twenty-three of them back. How many had he then? “A boy earned $1 a day for six days. He bought a cap for 50^, a shirt for $1, a tie for 750 and a collar for 25^. How much did he have left?

“A lady bought six yds. of cloth at $1 a yard, and paid a dressmaker $8 for making it into a dress. She paid $1.75 for trimmings. How much did her dress cost her?

“A housekeeper bought eight quarts of blackberries at 12f a quart and used two lbs. of sugar at 10j? a pound to can them. How much did it cost her to can the berries? “All of these Joana did correctly the first time without help.”

In a very quiet way, Joana had taken a quite estimable place in her small social circle. At thirteen, she was a quiet, sober, dependable little girl, neat and helpful around the house. She could be counted on to go all alone to mail letters at the post office, to the tailor’s to call for a garment, and even to the bank to cash checks. In the evening she would sit under the light, conversing amiably with her good friend, Donald, while she placidly plied her needle, crossstitching a delicately colored design on one of her small gift towels. This child now appeared less a sporadic incarnation of the absolute feminine type, for her environment had developed in her the recessive traits, which, in the actual woman modify typical femininity. She was receding from the absolute and approaching the standard norm of her sex. She had not indeed lost any of her femininity. She had rather counterbalanced some part of it by developing other interests and impulses. We have only to turn again to the following extracts from her diaries and letters to find evidence of this deepening of old interests and this gradual awakening to new ones:

“We have good times playing tennis, teacher ball, and still pond no more moving and bean bag and tossing the basket ball and batting balls with a tennis racket. Miss Carroll took me to buy some things with my money and I got a little doll and a sewing basket and three pine pillows. Donald got two cap pistles and a picture album.?The fish market man called us in to see a big fish and he said it was caught in this bay.? All of our flower gardens are coming up very nicely.?On our way to school we saw a little colt and his mother.?We found some wild roses on our drive to Lobster Point. I wore my new dress. After dinner we played soldier and Donald was a doctor and I was his wife and Tom and John and Gordon were soldiers and I nursed them and we had a fort maid of rocks and we had a flag on the fort. When we were going back home in the sail boat, I saw a school of little fish and Donald saw a seal. ? Miss Shannon is teaching me how to make rag dolls. I found a four leaf clover.?I had a new page in my reader yesterday.?On the picnic yesterday I cleaned the cups and forks and a knife and a platter.?Miss Carroll made fudge and I helped her stir it.?I saw a gull swimming around in the water. John and Kathryn and I made some sandcakes. ? After supper we played we were camping and Donald put on his boy scout suit. Before dinner I cut out some very pretty paper dolls. Wednesday we went to town with Miss S. to see a play called Ben-Hur. It was some Greek thing. We went to the Muszum and we saw a lot of Indian things. Tell mother I am very sorry to hear that she has had endegeston.?Friday I went in town to get my hair washed. On our way in town I saw the first submarine that was ever built. It is called the Holland.?After supper we gave a play and Donald invited Miss Carroll and Miss S. to come to see it and it lasted till bed-time. The first act was Charlie Chaplin and the second was a duel and the third was some poems.?We al went to a moving picture show of Jack and the Bean Stalk and we all liked it very much. After the show we went into a restaurant and got some supper. ?I received from mother the program about people and music.? Last night I looked at a book called Life.?Before I went to bed I looked at Donald’s scrap book. I am helping him cut out pictures to paste in’it.?After we had finished dancing, I read the story of black beauty to Donald.?This afternoon we played that the porch was a boat.?Miss Carroll is teaching me to weave some beads. I am making a necklace of pink and white beads. Will you please tell Julia Ann that I am very glad that she has some new dresses? ?Will you please ask Miss Dascom to have a picture taken in her new spring suit and hat and send it to me? ?We went on a picnic to Adams Cove. We had a nice time playing in an old sail-boat that was on the beach and we played that it was a big battleship and we had two cannons on it and we played that we were going to America.? Wednesday we went on a picnic to Saddle Island and I steered the boat a little bit. We had a fort made of stones. Then we cooked some clams on a big flat stone and we covered them with seaweed.?Will you please ask Uncle Henry to send me a picture of himself in his new uniform? ?Last night we found a little bird and put him in a little bird house. This morning when we went to look for him he was gone.?Donald and I played hospital and he made some medicine.?Miss B. took me in town and bought me a dark blue straw hat and it has a dark blue ribbon around it. We got it at Embicks. Then we went to another store and I got a pair of tan gloves.?We all went to the Catholic Garden Party and I got some little chairs and a table and a horn and a little boudoir cap and a little apron and a pillow cover.?Thursday morning I manicured Obadiah’s nails. The other day we played bank.?Last Tuesday Miss Carroll took me in town to have lunch with Mrs. Witmer. After dinner Mrs. Witmer played the victrola. Then we went to Embick’s to get me a dress. The dress is blue and it has white smocking on each side and it has a blue belt. We went to see a play called Treasure Island. Now I will tell you what I liked best of all the acts. I liked where Jim found Ben Gun and I liked the fight in the log house. I will send you a program and a black spot.?I have finished three little towels with cross-stitching and I have only two more to finish.”

Wholesome companionship with Donald and the other boys had so changed this hysterical, too feminine child that on the ninth of October, 1917, she wrote, displaying at least a pretense of interest in masculine pursuits: “After school Donald came out and I asked him if I could borrow his knive so I could whittle some sticks.” Yet, in her diary I find this feminine note in the last line Joana ever wrote in our house: “I looked at a cook book until bedtime.”

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