Review: 'The Shutter of Snow' by Emily Holmes Coleman
Pub. Date: 02/02/2023
Publisher: Faber and Faber Ltd.
Listen to me she said, look at me do you hear. I have got to get out of this place.
Some days, Marthe Gail believes she is God; others, Jesus Christ. Her baby, she thinks, is dead. The red light is shining. There are bars on the window. And the voices keep talking.
Time blurs; snow falls. The doctors tell her it is a breakdown: that this is Gorestown State Hospital. Her fellow patients become friends and enemies, moving between the Day Room and Dining Hall, East Hall and West Side, and avoiding the Strong Room. Her husband visits and shows her a lock of her baby's hair, but she doesn't remember, yet – until she can make it upstairs, ascending towards release . . .
Emily Holmes Coleman's visionary portrait of motherhood and mental illness was inspired by her own experience suffering from postpartum psychosis in a mental asylum. Tragic and ecstatic, shocking and hilarious, poetic and unflinching, her novel from 1930 is a soul’s howl, a confessional talking-cure, a radical dissection of insanity and maternity and a timeless masterpiece.
I very much enjoyed Clare-Louise Bennet's Foreword to the novel because she dug into Coleman's connections with the Surrealist movement, but also into the way female madness continues to be employed within art. We are all, to some extent, I think, fascinated by women who lose their grip on reality. We see it in modern literature, such as Nightbitch or The Harpy, novels in which the grip on reality becomes tenuous for women and they find comfort in a more animalistic existence. It also explains some of the intensity with which women like Sylvia Plath continue to be studied and prodded. When women crack, even if we have an understanding for why they might, we still stop and stare, fascinated by the utter abandon of social norms it implies. Bennet tracks this as well through the display of female hysteria under Dr. Charcot in the Salpêtrière Asylum in Paris (see also The Mad Women's Ball) and how this was picked up by the Surrealist art movement. I have done quite a bit of reading in what I like to call the "female madness in women's words" sub-genre. Shutter shares a strong likeness with The Snake Pit by Mary Jane Ward, which really struck me and will feature in the discussion below. From a non-fiction aspect, Audrey Clare Farley's Girls and their Monsters is a fascinating insight into changing conceptions of mental health, its link to gender and race, and its dark ties to eugenics and right-wing Christianity.
Marthe thinks she is God, or Jesus, or a mother to a dead child who was taken from her. It depends on the days and the days themselves are not defined. Marthe is in a state hospital, where she was brought shortly after the birth of her son. Shutter begins in media res, so to say, with Marthe at the hospital and neither her nor the reader entirely sure of what is happening. I'll say more on the writing style below, but it is already worth saying that while Shutter is technically told chronologically, as a reader you are consistently unsure of how much time is passing and when things are, exactly, happening. It is part of Coleman's attempt to bring her experience of psychosis onto the page that much remains unclear. I find this very intriguing, but for some readers it might make it a little more difficult to connect to the book. The same is true for the character of Marthe herself who is, for much of the novel, moving between various stages of psychosis. At times she seems to regain her grasp on herself and the world around her, close to making serious improvements, and then she slips back, which includes bursts of violence. It might make her unlikeable to some, but for me, it was a sign of Coleman's honesty and the skill of her portrayal that she refuses the easy narrative of improvement as a straight line.
Shutter, in many ways, reminded me of The Snake Pit. Both are written by women who had a direct experience of not merely mental illness, but also institutionalization. Shutter came out originally in 1930, while The Snake Pit was published in 1946, and I think the two are in something of a conversation with one another, although I don't know whether Mary Jane Ward read or knew of Shutter. Both Coleman and Ward use a similar style in their attempt to capture the experience of mental illness, especially the active disconnect with reality. I'm not implying Ward copied this from Coleman at all. Rather, I am suggesting that the two are creating something of a shared language for this experience, something Bennet also addresses in her Foreword, though without mentioning Ward. In Shutter we experience a similar shifting in perspective, which Coleman expresses through a continuous switching between first and third person, or referring to Marthe by name. It shows Marthe's own loose grip on herself, while also serving as an example of how de-personified mental health patients can become in the system. Similarly, the unclear passage of time works to confuse, while also bringing the reader closer to Marthe's, and presumably Coleman's, experience. I do have to say that it didn't work quite as well for me here as it did in The Snake Pit. Thinking on it, Snake Pit has, even with its style, a clearer narrative structure, with Virginia's awareness of herself being more stable. As such, Shutter is more confronting with its depiction of psychosis and Marthe's conviction of her godly persona. This maybe made it a little more difficult to connect because it might require an acceptance on the reader's half that we're all capable of losing connection with ourselves this way. Shutter is a valuable insight into mental illness, but also into the way writing might provide a way of coping with and sharing those experiences.
I give this novel...
4 Universes!
The Shutter of Snow is a fascinating insight not just into the treatment of mental health, specifically women's mental health, in the twentieth century, but also into how we might be able to talk about it.
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