All this had a profound effect upon Sona, the ugly little stranger over whose lustreless eyes cataracts were already beginning to form. “Her sister” has no use for marriage; neither had she, Sona. Essentially unfeminine in outlook, dominated by ambition, she bolstered up her preference for the society of girls and a career by citing the example of her beautiful, wilful cousin. Without such a sanction she might have wavered in her ambitions, made so difficult by her already failing eyesight. As it was she went forward, blatantly proclaiming her pursuit of ends different from those approved by her fellows. Sona and Lita were not friends; the difference in their sanctions was too great; their proficiency at school and an intense rivalry divided them. Sona was not a church member. It would not have interfered with her behaviour in the least but it was part of her scheme of life to remain a school girl as long as possible and thus fend off responsibilities. So she, as often as the others, would answer, Laititi a’u (“I am but young”). While Lita attached herself to her cousin and attempted to learn from her every detail of another life, Sona identified herself passionately with the slightly more Europeanised family of the pastor, asserting always their greater relationship to the new civilisation, calling Ioane’s wife, Mrs. Johns, building up a pitiable platform of papalagi (foreign) mannerisms as a springboard for future activities.
There was one other girl church member of Siufaga, Ana, a girl of nineteen. Her motives were entirely different. She was of a mild, quiescent nature, highly intelligent, very capable. She was the illegitimate child of a chief by a mother who had later married, run away, married again, been divorced, and finally gone off to another island. She formed no tie for Ana. Her father was a widower, living in a brother’s house and Ana had been reared in the family of another brother. This family approximated to a biological one; there were two married daughters older than Ana, a son near her age, a daughter of fourteen and a crowd of little children. The father was a gentle, retiring man who had built his house outside the village, “to escape from the noise,” he said. The two elder daughters married young and went away to live in their husbands’ households. Ana and her boy cousin both lived in the pastor’s household, while the next younger girl slept at home. The mother had a great distrust of men, especially of the young men of her own village. Ana should grow up to marry a pastor. She was not strong enough for the heavy work of the average Samoan wife. Her aunt’s continuous harping on this strain, which was prompted mainly by a dislike of Ana’s mother and a fear of the daughter’s leaving home to follow in her mother’s footsteps, had convinced Ana that she was a great deal too delicate for a normal existence. This theory received complete verification in the report of the doctor who examined the candidates for the nursing school and rejected her because of a heart murmur. Ana, influenced by her aunt’s gloomy foreboding, was now convinced that she was too frail to bear children, or at least not more than one child at some very distant date. She became a church member, gave up dancing, clung closer to the group of younger girls in the pastor’s school and to her foster home, the neurasthenic product of a physical defect, a small, isolated family group and the pastor’s school.
These girls all represented the deviants from the pattern in one direction; they were those who demanded a different or improved environment, who rejected the traditional choices. At any time, they, like all deviants, might come into real conflict with the group. That they did not was an accident of environment. The younger girls in the pastor’s group as yet showed fewer signs of being influenced by their slightly artificial environment. They were chaste where they would not otherwise have been chaste, they had friends outside their relationship group whom they would otherwise have viewed with suspicion, they paid more attention to their lessons. They still had not acquired a desire to substitute any other career for the traditional one of marriage. This was, of course, partly due to the fact that the pastor’s school was simply one influence in their lives. The girls still spent the greater proportion of their waking time at home amid conventional surroundings. Unless a girl was given some additional stimulus, such as unusual home conditions, or possessed peculiarities of temperament, she was likely to pass through the school essentially unchanged in her fundamental view of life. She would acquire a greater respect for the church, a preference for slightly more fastidious living, greater confidence in other girls. At the same time the pastor’s school offered a sufficient contrast to traditional Samoan life to furnish the background against which deviation could flourish. Girls who left the village and spent several years in the boarding school under the tutelage of white teachers were enormously influenced. Many of them became nurses; the majority married pastors, usually a deviation in attitude, involving as it did, acceptance of a different style of living.
So, while religion itself offered little field for conflict, the institutions promoted by religion might act as stimuli to new choices and when sufficiently reinforced by other conditions might produce a type of girl who deviated markedly from her companions. That the majority of Samoan girls are still unaffected by these influences and pursue uncritically the traditional mode of life is simply a testimony to the resistance of the native culture, which in its present slightly Europeanised state, is replete with easy solutions for all conflicts; and to the apparent fact that adolescent girls in Samoa do not generate their own conflicts, but require a vigorous stimulus to produce them.
These conflicts which have been discussed are conflicts of children who deviate upwards, who wish to exercise more choice than is traditionally permissible, and who, in making their choices, come to unconventional and bizarre solutions. The untraditional choices which are encouraged by the educational system inaugurated by the missionaries are education and the pursuit of a career and marriage outside of the local group (in the case of native pastors, teachers and nurses), preference for the society of one’s own sex through prolonged and close association in school, a self-conscious evaluation of existence, and the consequent making of self-conscious choices. All of these make for increased specialisation, increased sophistication, greater emphasis upon individuality, where an individual makes a conscious choice between alternate or opposing lines of conduct. In the case of this group of girls, it is evident that the mere presentation of conflicting choices was not sufficient but that real conflict required the yeast of a need for choice and in addition a culturally favourable batter in which to work.
It will now be necessary to discuss another type of deviant, the deviant in a downward direction, or the delinquent. I am using the term delinquent to describe the individual who is maladjusted to the demands of her civilisation, and who comes definitely into conflict with her group, not because she adheres to a different standard, but because she violates the group standards which are also her own.[9]
[9] Such a distinction might well be made in the attitude towards delinquency in our own civilisation. Delinquency cannot be defined even within one culture in terms of acts alone, but attitudes should also be considered. Thus the child who rifles her mother’s purse to get money to buy food for a party or clothes to wear to a dance hall, who believes stealing is wrong, but cannot or will not resist the temptation to steal, is a delinquent, if the additional legal definition is given to her conduct by bringing her before some judicial authority. The young Christian communist who gives away her own clothes and also those of her brothers and sisters may be a menace to her family and to a society based upon private property, but she is not delinquent in the same sense. She has simply chosen an alternative standard. The girl who commits sex offences with all attendant shame, guilt, and inability to defend herself from becoming continually more involved in a course of action which she is conscious is “wrong,” until she becomes a social problem as an unmarried mother or a prostitute, is, of course, delinquent. The young advocate of free love who possesses a full quiver of ideals and sanctions for her conduct, may be undesirable, but from the standpoint of this discussion, she is not delinquent.
A Samoan family or a Samoan community might easily come to conceive the conduct and standards of Sona and Lita as anti-social and undesirable. Each was following a plan of life which would not lead to marriage and children. Such a choice on the part of the females of any human community is, of course, likely to be frowned upon. The girls who, responding to the same stimuli, follow Sona’s and Lita’s example in the future will also run this risk.
But were there really delinquent girls in this little primitive village, girls who were incapable of developing new standards and incapable of adjusting themselves to the old ones? My group included two girls who might be so described, one girl who was just reaching puberty, the other a girl two years past puberty. Their delinquency was not a new phenomenon, but in both cases dated back several years. The members of their respective groups unhesitatingly pronounced them “bad girls,” their age mates avoided them, and their relatives regretted them. As the Samoan village had no legal machinery for dealing with such cases, these are the nearest parallels which it is possible to draw with our “delinquent girl,” substituting definite conflict with unorganised group disapproval for the conflict with the law which defines delinquency in our society.
Lola was seventeen, a tall, splendidly developed, intelligent hoyden. She had an unusual endowment in her capacity for strong feeling, for enthusiasms, for violent responses to individuals. Her father had died when she was a child and she had been reared in a headless house. Her father’s brother who was the matai had several houses and he had scattered his large group of dependants in several different parts of the village. So Lola, two older sisters, two younger sisters, and a brother a year older, were brought up by their mother, a kindly but ineffective woman. The eldest sister married and left the village when Lola was eight. The next sister, Sami, five years older than Lola, was like her mother, mild and gentle, with a soft undercurrent of resentment towards life running through all her quiet words. She resented and disliked her younger sister but she was no match for her. Nito, her brother, was a high-spirited and intelligent youth who might have taught his sister a little wisdom had it not been for the brother and sister taboo which kept them always upon a formal footing. Aso, two years younger, was like Sami without Sami’s sullen resentment. She adopted the plan of keeping out of Lola’s way. The youngest, Siva, was like Lola, intelligent, passionate, easily aroused, but she was only eleven and merely profited by her sister’s bad example. Lola was quarrelsome, insubordinate, impertinent. She contended every point, objected to every request, shirked her work, fought with her sisters, mocked her mother, went about the village with a chip upon her shoulder. When she was fourteen, she became so unmanageable at home that her uncle sent her to live in the pastor’s household. She stayed there through a year of stormy scenes until she was finally expelled after a fight with Mala, the other delinquent. That she was not expelled sooner was out of deference to her rank as the niece of a leading chief. Her uncle realised the folly of sending her back to her mother. She was almost sixteen and well developed physically; and could be expected to add sex offences to the list of her troublesome activities at any moment. He took her to live in his own household under the supervision of his very strong-minded, executive wife, Pusa. Lola stayed there almost a year. It was a more interesting household than any in which she had lived. Her uncle’s rank made constant calls upon her. She learned to make kava well, to dance with greater ease and mastery. A trip to Tutuila relieved the monotony of life; two cousins from another island came to visit, and there was much gaiety about the house. As consciousness of sex became more acute, she became slightly subdued and tentative in her manner. Pusa was a hard task master and for a while Lola seemed to enjoy the novelty of a strong will backed by real authority. But the novelty wore off. The cousins prolonged their visit month after month. They persisted in treating her as a child. She became bored, sullen, jealous. Finally she ran away to other relatives, a very high chief’s family, in the next village. Here, temporarily, was another house group of women folk, as the head of the house was in Tutuila, and his wife, his mother and his two children were the only occupants of the great guest house. Lola’s labour was welcomed, and she set herself to currying favour with the high chief of the family. At first this was quite easy, as she had run away from the household of a rival chief and he appreciated her public defection. There were only much younger or much older girls in his household. Lola received the attention which she craved. The little girls resented her, but secretly admired her dashing uncompromising manner. But she had only been established here about a month when another chief, with a young and beautiful taupo in his train, came to visit her new chief and the whole party was lodged in the very house where she slept. Now began an endless round of hospitable tasks, and worst of all she must wait upon the pretty stranger who was a year younger than herself, but whose rank as visiting taupo gave her precedence. Lola again became troublesome. She quarrelled with the younger girls, was impertinent to the older ones, shirked her work, talked spitefully against the stranger. Perhaps all of this might have been only temporary and had no more far-reaching results than a temporary lack of favour in her new household, had it not been for a still more unfortunate event. The Don Juan of the village was a sleek, discreet man of about forty, a widower, a matai, a man of circumspect manner and winning ways. He was looking for a second wife and turned his attention toward the visitor who was lodged in the guest house of the next village. But Fuativa was a cautious and calculating lover. He wished to look over his future bride carefully and so he visited her house casually, without any declaration of his intention. And he noticed that Lola had reached a robust girlhood and stopped to pluck this ready fruit by the way, while he was still undecided about the more serious business of matrimony.