Literatures of Madness by Elizabeth J. Donaldson

Author:Elizabeth J. Donaldson
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783319926667
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Going Mad in Public: Postwar Culture and Psychiatry

The Snake Pit ’s success pushed Mary Jane Ward into the public eye, especially after the novel was adapted into a feature film starring the popular actress Olivia de Havilland . Under the direction of Anatole Litvak, the film took certain liberties with the plot of the original novel—the screen version of Virginia Cunningham was more of a muddled housewife than a muddled socialist writer, and the novel’s references to Virginia’s communist friends and her social justice work were scrubbed from the film. The film also added a tidy Freudian explanation for Virginia Cunningham’s illness—an unhealthy attachment to her father and guilt over the death of her fiancé. In the film, Virginia is released because she is cured. In the novel, Virginia is released primarily because her husband is moving out of state. (And this is actually what happened—Edward Quayle, Ward’s husband, moved back to Illinois, and out of the service area of the New York State mental health system. So Ward was paroled to his custody and moved away with him.)

The film takes a rather chaotic, almost surreal plot and makes it more orderly. But the film is hardly an antiseptic version of the novel. It does attempt to faithfully depict the treatments that Ward writes about—notably hydrotherapy , or the tubs, and Ward’s experiences of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). The film’s depictions are significant because they opened up the psychiatric patient experience to a wider audience, who previously had limited, if any, knowledge about the closed world of institutional mental healthcare. The film helped to shape public thinking about mental illness, and perhaps one of the most significant ways it did that was through de Havilland’s compassionate portrayal of Virginia Cunningham. The film was a critical success and de Havilland, already a full-fledged movie star at the time, earned an Oscar nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role. While the film was gritty, the cast was glamourous, and it didn’t hurt the cause to have good-looking people like de Havilland cast as psychiatric patients.

The Snake Pit , however, was just one element in a new national conversation about the care and treatment of patients with mental illness. One of the major factors contributing to this discussion was the employment of large numbers of conscientious objectors (COs) in state hospitals during the war. At the time of Ward’s hospitalization at Rockland State, large state medical institutions faced a staffing crisis as doctors and nurses also left for war work. Psychiatric aides —the backbone of the day-to-day custodial care for the hundreds of thousands of patients in these institutions—left for higher paying positions. In order to fill the pressing need for more attendants, about 3,000 conscientious objectors—people who refused to serve in the military for moral or religious reasons—were placed in state mental hospitals under the Civilian Public Service (CPS) program (Sareyan 14). These men, and often their wives who accompanied them as workers, had a substantial effect on the future of mental healthcare in the US.

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