The Snake Pit

The Snake Pit is a book in the form of a novel about a mentally sick woman in a mental hospital. There has been a flood of such books and movies and stories recently. Most of them represent the grim business very inaccurately and tend to misguide the reader or the onlooker while entertaining him.

Mary Jane Ward is a partial exception; she tells the truth with no embroidery. Her Virginia Cunningham is a lost soul in a mental institution. Virginia’s mental conflicts, the inner complexities of her thoughts and feelings, are not brought out here. This apparent defect is actually the merit of The Snake Pit, for it is not the detailed description of Virginia’s mental illness that makes the book, but the excellent rendition of the mechanical, almost automatic, shadowy quality of the institution. There is no individualization of the “cases”; there is no picture of what goes on in the minds of those who have lost their minds; there is just the constant “functioning” of the institution. The majority of the nurses and doctors are very busy, but they are busy with the problems of administration and organization of the hospital as a whole. People, the sick people, move about like shadows or are shoved about like so many neglected boxes in a well-established institutional routine.

Mary Jane Ward paints a horrible and unfortunately all too true picture. She also offers a few telling side lights on shock therapy — the treatment favored by those to whom man is just a machine, and the human mind a system of brain cells.

The psychiatrist is loath to go into details in discussing a book such as this, because the patient who wrote it, or the patient from whom the material came, is still living, and one is reluctant to discuss a patient, even if not one’s own, in public. Mary Jane Ward has written a good, albeit uneven, book. It is too photographic in places, but it is touching and gripping in many others, despite its two-dimensional quality.

GREGORY ZILBOORG, M.D.