“WE”

The attractive young man of good character, good parts, good family, and good expectations, who nevertheless takes dismayingly great pleasure in the company of chambermaids and such, is quaintly familiar to us, irrelevant anachronism though he may be in this era of Woodstock. Oliver Goldsmith (1773/1969) was counting, 200 years ago, on reader (or playgoer) identification with him; and so vigorous did the type remain that Freud (1912/1957), tracing the dynamic development of the phenomenon, allowed himself to suggest that it might be universal among us, existing as oedipal traces to some degree in any male development. Indeed, if we understand Freud's formulation as describing a special and limiting case of exogamy, then Woodstock notwithstanding, the type is alive and well in the person of Portnoy (Roth, 1969).

But Goldsmith's Marlow and Roth's Portnoy represent at best only half our population. What about the heiress who runs away with the grocery boy? It is evidently a more complex situation than merely the obverse of the other, as one may infer from the fact that nobody has elected to cash in on sure reader identification, and there are no dynamic studies with the cachet of Freud's name to give them luster. The probable explanation of the unequal treatment may lie in the lack of universality. If you’ve seen one Portnoy, you’ve seen them all; but every heiress is different.

I shall use the piquant situation—that is, the repeated appearance of “grocery boys” in the life of an adolescent “heiress”—as a point of biographical entry into an inquiry where the goal is shaped by a pair of brief statements of Sullivan and Clara Thompson. In a discussion of repetitive

behavior, Thompson (1964) remarks: “To call it a simple, automatic reliving is to overlo