There is a wall around the town of Boyville, says White,[12] in substance, which
is impenetrable when its gates have once shut upon youth. An adult may peer
over the wall and try to ape the games inside, but finds it all a mockery and
himself banished among the purblind grown-ups. The town of Boyville was old
when Nineveh was a hamlet; it is ruled by ancient laws; has its own rulers and
idols; and only the dim, unreal noises of the adult world about it have changed.
In exploring such sources we soon see how few writers have given true pictures
of the chief traits of this developmental period, which can rarely be ascertained
with accuracy. The adult finds it hard to recall the emotional and instinctive life
of the teens which is banished without a trace, save as scattered hints may be
gathered from diaries, chance experiences, or the recollections of others. But the
best observers see but very little of what goes on in the youthful soul, the
development of which is very largely subterranean. Only when the feelings erupt
in some surprising way is the process manifest. The best of these sources are
autobiographies, and of these only few are full of the details of this stage. Just as
in the mythic prehistoric stage of many nations there is a body of legendary
matter, which often reappears in somewhat different form, so there is a floating
plankton-like mass of tradition and storiology that seems to attach to eminence
wherever it emerges and is repeated over and over again, concerning the youth
of men who later achieve distinction, which biographers often incorporate and
attach to the time, place, and person of their heroes.
As Burnham[13] well intimates, many of the literary characterizations of
adolescence are so marked by extravagance, and sometimes even by the struggle
for literary effects, that they are not always the best documents, although often
based on personal experience. Confessionalism is generally overdrawn,
distorted, and especially the pains of this age are represented as too keen. Of
George Eliot's types of adolescent character, this may best be seen in Maggie
Tulliver, with her enthusiastic self-renunciation, with "her volcanic upheavings
of imprisoned passions," with her "wide, hopeless yearning for that something,
whatever it was, that was greatest and best on this earth," and in Gwendolen,
who, from the moment she caught Deronda's eye, was "totally swayed in feeling
and action by the presence of a person of the other sex whom she had never seen
before." There was "the resolute action from instinct and the setting at defiance
of calculation and reason, the want of any definite desire to marry, while all her
conduct tended to promote proposals." Exaggeration, although not the
perversions of this age often found in adult characterizations, is marked trait of
the writings of adolescents, whose conduct meanwhile may appear rational, so