Childhood and adolescence has a big impact on how someone will develop into a fully functioning adult. There are important implications for their future success. These implications are especially important if a traumatic event occurs, because this can have both immediate and lasting effects on a person’s social functioning in areas of moral development, peer play, and academic achievement. We have seen direct examples of how a person’s childhood directly influences how they will identify themselves in two works from class: “Felicia’s Journey” and Waterland. In Waterland, Mary goes through a relatively life that lead up until traumatic events in her adulthood that cause her to become a criminal. She causes her husband Tom, an almost-retired …show more content…
He allows her to glimpse the possibility that he might help her, and then, secure in the knowledge that sooner or later she will come running to him, he waits. Like a spider awaiting a fly. Mr. Hilditch had his skills set to a T, and watching his mother’s videos seemed to be the only thing keeping him stable as he awaited his chance to pounce. In Waterland, Mary’s bizarre life ends with her kidnapping a baby. She has an aborting and later finds out that she can no longer bear any children with Tom. The transformation of her personality following the aborting and her increasing mental instability shows the fragility of the human mind. Swift shows us that fragility through Mary’s guilt. The beginning of her madness starts when Dick kills Freddie, because Mary told him that Freddie impregnated her. Later when she finally realizes the harm that her manipulating can do Tom says: “Curiosity’s gone…seems three years older than me, as if she’s become a hard featured woman with a past.” This transformation in her personality marks the beginning of her insanity, but her madness isn’t evident after Freddie’s death. What we know is that the abortion is the breaking point, however it isn’t described in full (it seems as if it was