Review: 'The Snake Pit' by Mary Jane Ward

In my recent foray into literature on female mental health and asylums, I was reminded of Mary Jane Ward's The Snake Pit, which I still hadn't gotten around to. As it was mentioned in the upcoming Girls and Their Monsters by Audrey Clare Farley, I decided it was finally time to get started on it. I was blown away from the very first chapter and have rarely had such an immersive and affecting reading experience. Thanks to Library of America and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review. My sincere apologies for the delay.

Pub. Date: 6/01/2021
Publisher: Library of America

A 75th anniversary edition of the landmark novel that forever changed the way we think about mental illness and its treatment

Do you hear voices? Virginia Stuart Cunningham, a journalist and novelist with a wicked sense of humor, is sitting on a park bench waiting for her husband when an intrusive stranger begins to pester her with nonsensical questions. Is he mad? Or is she? So begins this brilliant literary exploration of mental illness, a novel that asks us to reconsider what counts as sanity in a crazy world. 

Suffering a breakdown in 1941, thirty-five-year-old novelist Mary Jane Ward was diagnosed, or perhaps misdiagnosed, with schizophrenia and committed to a psychiatric hospital in upstate New York. From that horrific experience came this gripping story.

Inspiration for the 1948 film starring Olivia de Havilland, The Snake Pit sparked important investigative journalism and state legislation to reform the care and treatment of people with mental illness. It belongs in the company of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—two books it influenced.

This authoritative Library of America edition includes an afterword by Ward’s cousin, Larry Lockridge, and a Reading Group Guide featuring additional material about Ward and the real-life roots of the novel.

The Snake Pit was a bestseller upon its publication 75 years ago and caused its author, Mary Jane Ward, to become something of an advocate for mental health reform. In an afterword, Larry Lockridge, Ward's cousin, describes how she would visit hundreds of asylums in the years after the novel's publication and how she engaged with countless of officials to promote the better treatment of patients. And yet the novel was one that has been out of print for a while and which is not listed amongst the classics it inspired, like The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath or Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I wonder why that was. In a way, The Snake Pit feels like a fever dream, full of stunning imagery and the oddest scenes, rather than a harsh take down or overly pointed social criticism. And yet it is through this almost dreamlike quality that Ward is able to depict the way in which the asylum system within which she landed threatened to destroy her spirit. The novel is based on Ward's own experience of being in an asylum after various nervous breakdowns and the way she combines this dreamlike distance with hard reality is stunning. The novel is full of human beings, some of whom have utterly lost touch with reality and others whose strictness and dismissal of the patients' humanity makes them seem utterly cold. The ingenuity of the novel's approach and style makes this an utter masterpiece and Ward's work afterwards emphasises the real suffering which underlies the novel's plot.

Virginia Stuart Cunningham is talking to a man about voices she may or may not be hearing. Or perhaps she is in a park, talking to a young woman. Or is she in prison? Surely she hasn't done anything deserving of a prison sentence? But she doesn't know where she is, why she doesn't have her glasses, or why she is led to a room for an electric shock. She slowly comes to realise she is in an insane asylum and that something is wrong with her. From there begins her journey back to the outside world, marked by various cycles of improvement and regression, and journeys from one ward to another. The one thing that remains stable is her relationship with her husband, who faithfully visits her whenever he is allowed and has full faith in her soon-to-come recovery. But he has no idea of the reality inside the asylum and of the dread filling Victoria at both the prospect of never getting out and the prospect of having to face the "real world" again. The Snake Pit has, when you put it very bluntly, a rather limited plot, in the sense that not a whole lot seems to happen. And yet, under the surface of the action, mostly Virginia moving from ward to ward, there is a whole world of characterisation, observation, and development. I was utterly gripped by the way Ward allows the reader entry into Virginia's mind and of Ward's description of the various women she meets. It is such a complex portrayal of personhood and sanity and womanhood. I am so glad that Library of America has decided to reprint this novel, especially with the added material such as Larry Lockridge's Afterword, a letter by Ward herself, and discussion prompts. It is a truly comprehensive edition that way, which allows readers to enjoy the fiction but also get to know the facts behind it.

Mary Jane Ward had written several novels before she sat down to write The Snake Pit. While originally it was marketed as pure fiction, Ward quickly convinced her publisher that they should not stigmatise or hide her own experience with mental illness. The compromise saw them explain that while many elements of The Snake Pit were fictionalised, it rested upon real experience. Personally I have no desire to puzzle out which elements may or may not be entirely real. Rather, I took the entirety of the novel as the experience it was, the chance to visit a mind which was at once fractures and also fighting its way back towards independence. The most stunning thing Ward does is how she writes from Virginia's perspective. She consistently switches between first, second, and third person narration, often within a paragraph and definitely within a page. While this initially takes some getting used to, I quickly found it to be a genius way of letting the reader experience how Virginia's sense of self has been fractured, both by her breakdown but also by the "treatments" she experiences, such as shock therapy, baths, and wet wraps. From the very first chapter, which an editor once dared suggest she cut, the reader becomes aware that something isn't entirely right. And yet the novel is so funny! The way Virginia thinks, the almost snarky comments she makes to herself, and some of the characters she meets are incredibly funny and were meant to be. Ward complained about the lack of humour in the film adaptation of the book, managing to squeeze a few of the jokes back into the script. For her, it was important that readers get to laugh with the patients, rather than at the patients and I believe she strikes this balance incredibly well. I very much look forward to reading more by Mary Jane Ward and will be doing my own personal best to re-establish this book as a clasic.

I give this novel...

5 Universes!

The Snake Pit truly blew me away. It is an utterly captivating story, told with such pathos and literary ingenuity that I couldn't tear myself away. I'm very grateful to Library of America for bringing this novel back into circulation.

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