COMMENT
"
reservation that it can be terminated by divorce. Daisy Miller was a
misunderstood virgin, and her modern granddaughter is a self-con–
fessed nymphomaniac who insists that promiscuity is a civil liberty, or
perhaps one of the rights secured through woman's suffrage. And if
she is reproached for being suspicious of men and of existence, she
answers that she is really being "realistic," or motivated by honesty,
candor, and intelligence.
One reason for the character of the modern heroine is obviously
the revolution in sexual mores which has occurred and continued
since the first World War. Another reason is the natural delight a
woman may enjoy in undressing and the equal pleasure of the reader
in looking at her as she takes off all her clothes. It was possible for
the hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel to feel damned forever
because he had slept with a chorus girl, and the popular success of
Fitzgerald's early work was partly based on curiosity, to the point of
fascination, in reading about necking parties. But the radical shift
in sexual morality and the ubiquity of the peeping Tom are hardly
the whole story.
THE PSYCHIATRIST AS HERO
T . S. Eliot in
The Waste Land
invoked Tiresias, the priest
and seer, to judge the act of making love. Twenty-six years after, in
The Cocktail Party,
his priest and seer must play the part, or use the
methods of a psychiatrist, in order to judge three love affairs and
an unhappy marriage. There are two more Broadway plays and in–
numerable films in which the psychiatrist is a supreme judge and
healer. At the same time the vocabulary of psychoanalysis dominates
ordinary conversation. People are now "neurotic," not unhappy,
personal relationships are full of "tensions," "resentments," and "inse–
curity"; an intimate friendship is interpreted as the result of "identi–
fication" with a father image or a mother image when it is not sus–
pected of being "repressed homosexuality." Human beings are not
said to be evil and immoral, but "destructive," "narcissistic," "in–
fantile" or "regressive," while being good is described as being
"normal," "functioning well," "being mature," or "adjusted." Guilt
and self-accusation are more popular and more voluble than they
have ever been except in Dostoevsky's fiction. This fondness for a
