The Snake Pit

Mary Jane Ward began a movement in America to examine mental health facilities’ far from adequate care.  Her novel, The Snake Pit (The Library of America, 2021), did for those imprisoned in these facilities what Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle, did for the meat-packing industry.  Her work influenced generations of writers who came after, including two who wrote the most famous novels of mental illness, Sylvia Plath’s, The Bell Jar, and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  In its newest incarnation, the 75^th anniversary edition published by The Library of America with an afterword by Larry Lockridge, readers once again have the chance to immerse themselves in the frightening world of this autobiographical novel complete with a Reader’s Guide and documents from the notable film version of the book in 1948 starring Olivia de Havilland.

Virginia is the central figure and narrator of the novel.  Other characters are shadowy ghosts on the stage of multiple wards.  Each is distinct in behavior and attributes, but they are not fully developed characters.  They flit in the shadows.  Their indistinctness is a hallmark of Virginia’s view, one clouded by shock therapy and drug-induced lethargy.  Larry Lockridge writes in the afterword that “In someone for whom the center doesn’t hold, other people…are insubstantial and disappearing.”  Even Robert, Virginia’s long-suffering husband is “shadowy.”  In consultation with the doctors, he is Virginia’s advocate, but we get only fragments of his life outside of the institution.  What is he up to?  Is he her advocate, or is he colluding with the doctors?

The book shifts the narrative with Virginia sometimes speaking in first person, sometimes in second or third person, often within a single paragraph.  Her mental state is constantly in flux, and her illness makes her an unreliable narrator.  Occasionally, she confuses her thoughts with her vocalization—is she speaking aloud or just thinking in her head?  The interior monologue might have been voiced or not; her shattering realizations about her condition may be limiting her speech or allowing her to speak all too candidly.  She is locked in the confusion of mental suffering, merging back and forth from clear light and a shadowy netherworld.  For the first fifty pages of the novel, she is unsure where she is:  a hospital, a school?  Only in a moment of clarity does she realize she is in a ward of “women who were insane and she was one of them.”

In this place, the patients wear the soiled rejected clothing of previous patients.  Virginia’s coat has a stain that appears to be vomit.  She asks for her things, her clothes, her glasses, but she is repeatedly denied.  When she is given her glasses, it is a reward she is told she has earned.  The patients have few rights, few privileges, no privacy, and little comfort.  They are treated like animals by the staff; the good nurse is an exception, never the rule.  Every evening, patients are forced to drink paraldehyde, a hypnotic with a strong odor that lingers in their pores and permeates the wards.  Each patient is assigned a job.  Virginia must mop the floor but continually confuses the wet, dirty mop with the clean, dry one.  She is too addled by her illness and treatment to remember which is which.  The patients must line up to use the toilet booths.  These are wooden closets with no toilet seats, toilet paper that must be requested from a nurse, and no privacy.  Virginia is literally afraid of falling in.  Time becomes fragmented in this surreal environment, and she is no longer sure when she arrived at Juniper Hill.  Often these gaps in memory are the result of electro-shock therapy.

Virginia empathizes with her fellow inmates in their shared plight, even as they take cigarettes and food from her.  She progresses from one ward to another, eventually landing in Ward One.  Is this the last stage before she is set free?  She is moved yet again to another ward.  Nothing is clear except that she is a prisoner.

One patient Virginia connects with is Gloria, a friend and companion.  But in the shifting of patients between wards, she loses track of Gloria until towards the end of the novel when she encounters her on the hospital grounds. She is changed, a gruesome shadow of the person she was.

In treatments and daily existence, the patients hope the nightmare will soon be over.  But the suffering feels endless, a prison of one’s worst fears.  Virginia comes to believe that “You could say anything here so long as you did not say the truth.”  The patients try to act and say what they think their custodians want to hear just to be set free.  Their efforts fail.

What has caused Virginia’s breakdown that leads to her incarceration?  The answers come in fragments of Virginia’s shattered psyche.  A fiancé who died, Robert’s best friend:  did her substitute marriage to Robert lead to her downfall?  Was the death of Gordon Timberlake the cause of the psychic implosion?  Her treatment fails to get to the bottom of the situation.  Virginia must try to heal herself.

Ward has some beautiful writing in all of this darkness.  One night finds Virginia gazing at the night sky.  “And the stars had been shining for the first time since last February.  You can go along for weeks maybe months without thinking about the stars,” she says.  “They are there, on clear nights, and you can look at them and say there is the Big Dipper.  You may, if you are not in a hurry, hunt for the Pleiades; but you do not think much about the stars.  They are always there.”

Virginia was a published novelist before her hospitalization, but when she is finally allowed pen, paper, and a typewriter, she can only imitate others:  Hemingway and O. Henry.  She has lost her own words in a kind of internal aphasia.  She ponders the edge of the abyss upon which she stands, asking, “was there a time when you saw, as if at the end of a dark hallway, the light of the outside, a time when you knew you hung at a balance and that such a little push, one way or another, would determine your life?”

Mary Jane Ward’s summation of the plight of the mentally ill is so precise, so spot on.  They are excluded from a world “in which sanity was taken for granted.  In the world outside, people longed desperately to be millionaires, movie actors, club presidents and even…novelists.”  Virginia was somebody once, and she can only hope to return to that life again.  For now, though, she is trapped in the snake pit.  Ward includes the source for her title:  “Long ago they lowered insane persons into snake pits; they thought that an experience that might drive a sane person out of his wits might send an insane person back into sanity.”  Virginia has been thrown into such a pit of vipers, but the shock is her discovery that she could get well.

In such bleak darkness, hope.