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Little Essays of Love and Virtue by Havelock Ellis
page 14 of 141 (09%)
seemingly harsh. Parents no longer whipped their children even when grown
up, or put them in seclusion, or exercised physical force upon them after
they had passed childhood. They felt that that would not be in harmony
with the social customs of a world in which ancient feudal notions were
dead. But they merely replaced the external compulsion by an internal
compulsion which was much more effective. It was based on the moral
assumption of claims and duties which were rarely formulated because
parents found it quite easy and pleasant to avoid formulating them, and
children, on the rare occasions when they formulated them, usually felt a
sense of guilt in challenging their validity. It was in the nineteenth
century that this state of things reached its full development. The sons
of the family were usually able, as they grew up, to escape and elude it,
although they thereby often created an undesirable divorce from the home,
and often suffered, as well as inflicted, much pain in tearing themselves
loose from the spiritual bonds--especially perhaps in matters of
religion--woven by long tradition to bind them to their parents. It was on
the daughters that the chief stress fell. For the working class, indeed,
there was often the possibility of escape into hard labour, if only that
of marriage. But such escape was not possible, immediately or at all, for
a large number. During the nineteenth century many had been so carefully
enclosed in invisible cages, they had been so well drilled in the
reticences and the duties and the subserviences that their parents
silently demanded of them, that we can never know all the tragedies that
took place. In exceptional cases, indeed, they gave a sign. When they
possessed unusual power of intellect, or unusual power of character and
will, they succeeded in breaking loose from their cages, or at least in
giving expression to themselves. This is seen in the stories of nearly all
the women eminent in life and literature during the nineteenth century,
from the days of Mary Wollstonecraft onwards. The Brontës, almost, yet not
quite, strangled by the fetters placed upon them by their stern and
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