payment page
“I'm stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers -- goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves. I thought it must be the worst thing in the world.”
This quote is located in the novel’s opening chapter. Here, Esther recalls the way it made her sick to her stomach to imagine Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s execution. She is horrified by the concept of electrocution and imagines that it must be the “worst thing in the world.” Esther’s electrocution phobia tragically foreshadows the barbaric electroshock therapy that she is forced to endure while being “treated” for mental illness under Dr. Gordon and Dr. Nolan’s care.
“I focused more closely, trying to pry some clue from their stiff postures. I made out men and women, and boys and girls who must be as young as I, but there was a uniformity to their faces, as if they had lain for a long time on the shelf, out of the sunlight, under siftings of pale, fine dust. Then I saw that some of the people were indeed moving, but with such small, birdlike gestures I had not at first discerned them…The figures around me weren't people, but shop dummies, painted to resemble people and propped up in attitudes counterfeiting life.”
Esther makes this observation while she assesses the other patients at the mental health facility. She is struck by their dull, minimalistic movements and vacant expressions. All of the people that Esther is looking at have likely undergone perilous psychiatric “treatments” such as electroshock therapy, which accounts for their odd behavior. Through Esther’s observations, Plath condemns 1950s psychiatric medicine and exposes it for the dangers that it poses to people who are already vulnerable. Plath argues that these so-called treatments wear a person down until they become automatons that simply “counterfeit” life.
“Then something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world. Whee-ee-ee-ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light, and with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant. I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done.”
Here, Esther recounts her first traumatic experience with electroshock therapy. Plath herself received electroshock therapy during her six-month stay at McLean Hospital ,and she uses her semi-autobiographical novel to condemn the practice for the damage it does in the name of medicine. The heartbreaking moment in which Esther questions what “terrible thing” she had done in her life to deserve such pain forces readers to question how a medical professional could refer to electroshock therapy as a “treatment.”
"'I'm not angry any more. Before, I was always angry. I was in Wymark before, and now I'm in Caplan. I can go to town, now, or shopping or to a movie, along with a nurse.'
'What will you do when you get out?'
'Oh, I'm not leaving… I like it here.'"
The above exchange occurs between Esther and Valerie, a woman Esther meets while they are both residing in Caplan, a mental health facility. Valerie is “not angry any more” because she has had a lobotomy, a dated and barbaric surgical procedure that involves severing connections in the brain's prefrontal cortex. Valerie is not prone to violent outbursts anymore because her personality has been surgically altered, likely without her consent. Furthermore, Valerie’s ominous statement that she is “not leaving” Caplan exposes how many psychiatric patients were too damaged by their perilous treatments to ever become rehabilitated, or enter back into society.
“In front of Caplan I said good-bye to Valerie's calm, snow-maiden face behind which so little, bad or good, could happen, and walked on alone, my breath coming in white puffs even in that sun-filled air. Valerie's last, cheerful cry had been ‘So long! Be seeing you.’”
The above quote is Plath’s final indictment of 1950s psychiatric medicine. Before Esther leaves Caplan, she says goodbye to Valerie who, as always, is concealed behind a surgically induced calm. Valerie may be “cheerful” instead of angry now, but that is because doctors stripped her of any substance. As Esther correctly surmises, “so little, bad or good” can happen to Valerie in her empty, vacant state. In one of the novel’s final pages, Plath condemns inhumane psychiatric medicine and argues that Valerie, and the rest of her fellow lobotomy victims, are imprisoned in a void that they do not even realize they are in.
