Book Review: ‘Beyond the Glass’ and ‘The Vet’s Daughter’

Following our call for book reviews from our readers back in February, Michelle Kopczyk contributed this post from Canada, which coincidentally builds on our recent In the Spotlight on novelist Antonia White:

“Clara Batchelor is twenty-two. Her brief, doomed marriage to Archie ended, she returns to her parents hoping for comfort. But theirs is a strict Catholic home, and its confines form a dangerous glass wall of guilt and repression between Clara and the outside world. Clara both longs for and fears what lies beyond, yet when she escapes into an exhilarating and passionate love affair, her fragile identity cracks. An extraordinary portrayal of a woman’s descent into madness.” May Quartet

Beyond the Glass is the last book in a trilogy-sequel to Frost in May (which I feel is White’s strongest novel).

The central theme in Beyond the Glass is the main character’s (Clara) mental deterioration–absence of identity, depression, great exultation, delusions, incarceration–and recovery. White experienced this in her early twenties, an affliction that revisited her a few times during her life.

The story is tragic. It is about loss and the reluctant acceptance of it. It also evokes a strange sense of hope, that Clara is moving towards developing a sense of self. In contrast, Barbara Comyn’s novel The Vet’s Daughter is similar in feeling, but it has a fantastical element that, unlike Beyond the Glass, mitigates the sense of tragedy for the central character and reinforces, what I believe to be the Vet’s Daughter‘s central theme, the sense of doom of being a human being. White’s novel is unbridled and hard to take in parts—on my third try, I got through it.

White, A. (1980) Beyond the Glass, Virago Press, London

Comyns, B. (1981) The Vet’s Daughter, Virago Modern Classics, London

Visit Michelle’s blog

Madness and Literature: I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

Remember we asked on this blog for your thoughts on books showing insight into mental health issues? We’d still love to hear from you, on this blog or by email, but here is our friends secretary’s review of one autobiographical novel.

First published in 1964, I Never Promised you a Rose Garden is a fictionalised account of the experiences of the author, Joanne Greenberg, portrayed in the novel as the character Deborah Blau. Aged just sixteen, Greenberg was admitted to the Chestnut Lodge Sanitarium in Rockville, Maryland, where she was treated by the (at the time) renowned psychoanalyst Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (the novel’s Dr Fried). The thoughtful insight into life at Chestnut Lodge, for patients and doctors, is one of the novel’s many qualities: indeed, the sympathetic treatment of those around Deborah (in stark contrast to, say, Sylvia Plath’s contemporaneous The Bell Jar) is perhaps one reason as to why the autobiographical nature of the book was for a long time debated (written under a pseudonym, it was not for several decades that Greenberg began to speak publicly about her work).

Of course, Greenberg’s positivity is understandable, given the conclusion of her story: discharged from Chestnut Lodge after three years as an in-patient in 1951, she continued a close friendship with Fromm-Reichman until the latter died in 1957. Indeed, the novel itself had originally been planned as a collaboration between Greenberg, her mother and doctor. What’s more, Greenberg has remained well since her discharge, leading to an incredible variety of re-interpretations of her illness following the novel’s publication. An increasing emphasis on psychotropic medication, and tendency to view schizophrenia as a purely biological disease, meant that many doctors denied Greenberg had ever had schizophrenia at all: for, they argued, she could not possibly have been cured of this disease with psychotherapy alone. On the other hand, the anti-psychiatry movement has obliterated in the minds of many the notions of “therapeutic community” that Chestnut Lodge claimed to represent: for many, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is the paradigm for the post-war psychiatric hospital, with its suggestion that illness is reinforced, not cured, by in-patient treatment.

While this is not to say that the experiences of many (we should, in particular, note that Chestnut Lodge was a private hospital) may certainly have been more Cuckoo’s Nest than Rose Garden (indeed, many elements of Deborah’s treatment may appear more disconcerting to us than they seem to have done to Greenberg, who portrays seclusion and “packing” as less constricting than her illness itself), this is rather to miss the point of the book. The account is, after all, one of survival: thus Greenberg emphasises the purpose of many aspects of mental ill-health, as well as their possible cure (something psychotherapy can indicate in a way drugs never can). Beautifully detailing Deborah’s refuge in the incredibly intricate world of Yr as a means of survival in an aggressively anti-Semitic post-war world, the importance of Dr Fried’s promises become clear: she will not have to give up her refuge until she is ready and, when she does, there will be something there to take its place. Cure cannot simply be a demolition of all that is perceived as unhealthy, it is something has to be created: a trust – in the world? In a future? It is clearly significant that the words of a Jewish doctor, forced to flee Nazi Germany in the 1930s, form the title of the book. Anyone who struggles to reconcile themselves to the realities of the twenty-first century world will find much of import in the words of both Dr Fried, Deborah Blau, and Greenberg herself.

Blog Readers’ Giveaway & Review Competition

Our enterprising Archivist has been chosen to be a World Book Night Giver (see here for details) and would like to give readers of this blog a no-strings-attached chance to participate. 25 copies of Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time have been reserved on a first-come first-served basis for anyone who emails their postal address to bethlembookgiveaway@gmail.com. Your details will not be used for any purpose other than putting a copy of the book in the post, entirely free of charge.

The Archivist writes:

“Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is at once funny, accessible for readers aged 9 to 99, and profound. It is a sensitively-written account of the world as seen from the perspective of someone living with Asperger’s Syndrome. It charts both the social dislocation and the unique possibilities that this perspective opens up, not in the dry way a textbook might, but by a fast-paced narrative that engages and sustains the imagination.”

If you’re among the first 25 to email your postal address to bookgiveaway@googlemail.com, you can expect to receive a copy of the book in the second week of March. The closing date for entries is Monday 28 February 2011.

Mental health issues have often been sensitively explored in literature, and we’d be very interested to hear your thoughts on any book (including, if you wish, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) you think has provided thoughtful insight.  The best short review we receive (up to 3 paragraphs), as judged by Archives & Museum staff, will be published on this blog on World Book Night, 5 March 2011.  There is no obligation on World Book Night recipients to take part. Equally you don’t have to have been a recipient of a book to join in; anyone with whom any book chimes can send us a review. Please send your reviews to bethlembookgiveaway@gmail.com, by 28 February.

Art in Madness: New Book on Nineteenth Century Collections

One of the most famous former Bethlem patients was artist Richard Dadd, committed to Bethlem’s Criminal Lunatics Department in 1844, after murdering his father in the belief that he was the Devil. During his twenty years in the Hospital (before transfer to the newly-built Broadmoor Hospital), Dadd was encouraged to continue painting, and many of his most famous works were painted there, including Contradiction: Oberon and Titania.

Dadd was not the only patient in Bethlem who painted in this period; casebooks record that both male and female patients were frequently occupied in painting and drawing. Dadd was also not the only artist treated in the Hospital. For example, 25-year-old Henry Hudson, admitted in April 1888, exhibited four paintings at the Royal Academy in 1889, despite the fact that his occupation was deemed, in part, to blame for his illness, for he had ”fallen violently in love with a lady whose portrait he was painting. Was so emotionally disturbed that he could not go on with the work.” Painting was regarded as occupational, preventing patients from dwelling on their troubles. It could also help to make the galleries more “cheerful”, providing an environment regarded as conducive to cure. In 1883, George Savage wrote:

“During the past year we have been engaged in painting artistically one of the male Infirmaries … on the whole the result has been satisfactory … [and] we have had several patients among the ladies who have developed quite a taste for the work, and next year I hope to carry this decorative work into several of the other wards.”

In such an instance, the occupational content of the “decorative work” was regarded as most important – thus suggesting why much patient artwork of the period was not kept by asylums. One collection, however, does remain. A new book, published by the Dumfries & Galloway Health Board, allows fascinating access to the collection of Dr. W.A.F. Browne, former Physician Superintendent of the Crichton Royal Institution. Maureen Park, Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Glasgow, gives extensive historical context and notes on the artworks, created by at least thirty-six men and ten women at the asylum between 1839 and 1857. The full colour prints are thus accompanied by notes on the artists, and their experiences in the hospital, making for an insightful volume. Park regards the collection as a “testament to Browne’s commitment to moral treatment, his dedication to patient care and his belief in the therapeutic power of art.” Yet, as art continues to retain strong links with treatment, and the possible connections between creativity and mental illness remain a topic of considerable debate, the collection surely holds a much broader interest than the simple biographical.

The art collection is now housed in the Dumfries & Galloway Archives. Art in Madness by Maureen Park costs £25, and is available from the Dumfries & Galloway Health Board.

Richard Dadd: Sketch to Illustrate the Passions – Brutality

Madness and Literature 2: “A Hideous Torture on Himself”

When not working at the Archives and Museum, the part-time Friends Secretary is also researching the nineteenth century casebooks. She presented at the Madness and Literature conference, examining representations of self-mutilation (a term introduced and defined by psychiatrists, including Bethlem superintendents George Savage and Theo Hyslop, in the 1880s) in nineteenth century literature and psychiatry. The title bears reference to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, first published in 1850. Set in puritanical seventeenth-century Massachusetts, the novel tells the story of the punishment of Hester Prynne, forced to wear an embroidered “A” on her chest (the “scarlet letter” of the title) as punishment for having borne an illegitimate child. At the close of the novel, this “A” is exhibited burnt into the chest of the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, publicly revealing him to be the child’s father, made physically and mentally ill through the long-guarding of his guilty secret. In Hawthorne’s work, the origins of the wound are debated, although to late nineteenth and early twentieth century psychiatrists, as well as certain of the spectators described by Hawthorne, the only “rational” explanation was that Dimmesdale’s self-punishment had been “followed out by inflicting a hideous torture on himself.”

Although Hawthorne’s representation of Dimmesdale was certainly not intended as a medical case history, the case was referenced by medical writers who had no problems with what some later authors, including Henry James, saw as a crude use of symbolism in an otherwise psychologically interesting novel. Indeed, many nineteenth century medical writers on self-mutilation expected their patients’ acts to be similarly symbolic, analysing motives and “hidden meanings” in a manner often starkly at odds with that in which other problematic behaviours were portrayed (in the Bethlem casebooks, refusal of food or persistent removal of clothes, for example, is usually simply dismissed as troublesome).

We can find many examples in the Bethlem casebooks of these attempts – by patients and practitioners – to give meaning to self-damaging actions such as face-picking, hair-plucking and self-cutting. In 1889, James Hipwood’s attendant stated that the former had cut his face because “he liked to see the blood that followed.” To his mother, meanwhile, Hipwood said that he cut himself because “he wanted to see if he could feel anything.” Yet, in Bethlem, an alternative explanation was implied. Although the doctors found it hard to get anything out of their patient at all, he did tell them “that he does not want to live & hints at something dreadful that is going to happen & at great suffering which he will have to bear.” The medical officers suggested that “he is apparently trying to prepare himself [for this] by inflicting pain on himself now.”

Photograph of Mary Stoate, admitted to Bethlem in 1895