I have not winced, nor cried aloud
Kathleen Quinlan
(actress who played Deb in movie of
"I Never Promised You A Rose Garden")
(credit: Wikipedia)
Here’s a post that gets its point from a work of literature. Art is safer to talk about than real life. After all, a novel is fiction, right?
One of the great novels of the last century is called “I Never Promised You A Rose Garden”. It is about a period during the life of a teenaged girl named “Deb”, who suffers a serious mental illness and ends up in an asylum for nearly three years. She does get better, due partly to her family’s support, but even more to some brilliant and compassionate work by her psychiatrist whose name is "Dr. Hannah Fried".
It’s a brilliant novel and deserves to be rated as one of the best ten
or so American novels ever written. Written by a woman about a woman being
healed by a woman, with the love and support of her mom, who’s also – how gratifying! – a woman. Which is all beside the point.
It’s
a brilliant novel, period, regardless of which gender, class, or race it focuses
on. Universal, which seems to be rated of little importance these days. But all
drivel aside, my post today focuses on one scene from that novel.
Deb’s
story happens during World War Two. A lot of the men are far away fighting the
Japanese and the Germans, which means that jobs are hard to fill. Some of the
staff in Deb’s hospital are very caring and professional, but some definitely
are not. In better times, they would not even have been there. They hate the job and
hate the insane, who can be pretty trying at times, which is only what one
would expect.
In
one scene in the novel, the strongest woman on Deb’s ward, who has in the past
done serious, physical injury to other patients and to staff, has been tied
down on a gurney in a wet sheet pack, a measure which was used to calm violent patients.
The point is that Helene, the patient in question, is helpless, and she is in a
separate room off the main hallway of the ward. Almost soundproof. 3 a.m. There
are two patients in there in wet sheet packs on this night, the other being Deb.
A
seriously neurotic attendant named ‘Ellis’ is on duty for midnight shift. He
has come in to check their pulses to see whether they have calmed down enough
to be allowed to go to sleep in their beds. He is indifferent to Deb, but he
despises Helene. It soon shows. When he turns her head to get easier access to
her carotid pulse, he emphasizes his power over Helene with some unnecessary
roughness. She is not to be toyed with, even strapped down helpless. She curses
at him. He slaps her. She spits at him. He slaps her again.
Slap.
Spit. Slap. Spit. Fist.
As
Deb watches, helpless, humiliated, ashamed, he punches Helene ten or a dozen
times hard, while she, of course, can’t do anything but spit at him. She spits
blood, then blood and chips of teeth. She gives up when she is almost beaten unconscious.
He takes her pulse, picks up his clipboard, writes something, and leaves.
The
scene is ugly and infuriating. Even more for Deb, it is humiliating. She must
witness this ugliness and see Helene broken by violence at the hands of a
dysfunctional male who never should have been in such a position of power. She
feels secretly ashamed that she didn’t scream, which was, of course, because she
was scared. Helene would not cry out because of her own “hard girl” code. So in
the end, what gets done about the matter is nothing.
My
point today, by a bit of a lateral leap, is that we are witnessing in these
times, the social parallel of Helene’s suffering. People – or we should say,
whole peoples, whole tribes – in some dire circumstances, become just as tough,
just as determined as Helene to endure no matter what. Right into the grave.
The
Palestinians have become that. They have suffered for seventy years. Robbed, beaten,
humiliated, starved, killed. Abandoned even by other Arab states. They didn’t
get the kind of despairing, numb, cynical, and hard they are now in a decade or
even a generation. It took years and years. But they’re there now.
The
Israelis could kill ninety nine percent of the people in Gaza and the West
Bank. The remaining one percent – under fifty thousand – would keep spitting
blood and chips of teeth. From all over the earth.
Deb
got better. A good doctor. A supportive family, both due, at least in part, to
their having money. She went back to the world.
Did
Helene ever get better? The book does not say. She might have. Or she might
have died there. She just gets dropped out of the story.
Her character no longer shapes or informs the narrative.