Wintering: a novel of Sylvia Plath PDF

Preview

Summary

BOOK REVIEWS World, with its highly descriptive, gets their own chapters, which allows cultural concerns, all in great detail. I elaborate, and detailed style, re- the reader to experience the found myself having to relive similar minded me of an Updikean life jour- thoughts, feelings, behaviors, an...

Description

BOOK REVIEWS World, with its highly descriptive, elaborate, and detailed style, reminded me of an Updikean life journey, using science research and the demands of health care to emphasize its message. I personally read the journey as a search for the meaning of statements such as “life is to be lived” and “all events, be they research or genetic discovery, suicide or even a basketball game, are an opportunity to learn.” The novel is written around three main families intertwined within the health care system, their friends, and their neighbors, all of whom live in Seattle. First and primary is the Moss family: Dr. Henry Moss, an internist and geneticist; his physician wife; and their children. Dr. Moss has specialized in the research of “Hickman disease,” the genetic defects of which promote premature aging (“No one has lived beyond age seventeen to my knowledge.”) There is also an Algerian family that lives in Detroit and has two children, one who has a diagnosis of the Hickman defect and is clearly near death, and Thomas, a teenager who appears “more than normal.” A third family lives in Seattle and has a young boy named William, a bright and engaging child, who has been under Dr. Moss’ care for a number of years and is in the end stage of his life with Hickman disease. The basic theme is woven around the research discovery that Thomas has all the Hickman genetic defects but has an enzyme that “blocks the aging process.” As readers of this novel we are drawn into the questions and issues presented: Could these enzymes be defined, processed, and used to prevent aging? Could the enzymes be used to save the life of William, who is loved by everyone involved? How would research protocols be involved? What role would the institutional review board play? And would going before the review board delay the research for years? Within these themes life goes on, and each family and each individual—both children and adults—are defined, studied, and followed. Each 1664

gets their own chapters, which allows the reader to experience the thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and decisions of each character as the dilemmas unfold. Thus we are challenged by the family dynamics, doctor-patient relationships, research questions and integrity, and many other socio-

cultural concerns, all in great detail. I found myself having to relive similar choices. And I found the dynamics of health care and caring for patients to be described in such a way that I really understood the politics and the concept of what we all have come to call moral hazard.

Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath by Kate Moses; New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2003, 272 pages, $23.95 Ellen B. Tabor, M.D.

I

n Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath, Kate Moses uses the poems of Sylvia Plath to underscore and describe the last weeks of the poet’s life. She describes the unraveling of her marriage, her conflicted bonds with her children, her complicated relationship with her mother, and her move from her marital home to London to live in Yeats’ house. Without being familiar with Plath’s poetry—although I suspect most readers of this book will be—one can follow the narrative, both psychologically and in time, of Plath’s depression, anxiety, creative struggles, and ultimate suicide. However, the author of Wintering has chosen an elegant guiding conceit: each chapter takes the title of one of Sylvia Plath’s poems and draws some thematic elements from it. Moses retells the story of Sylvia Plath by taking Plath’s poetical language and using it in her new story. The book is fiction drawn from real events, yet in a way it is also a rewriting of Plath’s poetry, especially the Ariel collection. In reviewing this book I am torn between commenting on the literary merits and on the psychological truth of it. These two analyzable elements are quite independent in Wintering. Certainly Moses, a literary editor and publisher, makes linguistic elisions that are both felicitous and clever. For example, in “Medusa,” Plath plays with the combined Dr. Tabor is medical director of inpatient psychiatry at Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn, New York.

PSYCHIATRIC SERVICES

image of the homicidal gorgon Medusa, with snakes for hair, as well as with the less common meaning of the word “medusa”—jellyfish. She continues with the combined image of the object of the poem as both mythologically dangerous, as the Medusa herself, and dangerous as a seductive aquatic creature, to which she is bound by an umbilicus. The poem hints—and the chapter makes clear—that this oceanic umbilicus is a trans-Atlantic telephone cable through which Plath’s controlling mother, Aurelia, attempts to control and also kill her. The action of the chapter is a phone call between Sylvia and Aurelia Plath. Moses’ writing is detailed and dense and can be made clearer by having a volume of Plath’s poems at one’s side for reference. The content of the chapters does not always mirror that of their respective poems, but Moses never fails to find acute synergies between the two. Amid the conceit and the poetry are Plath’s real relationships, with her husband, her mother, and her children. These relationships are all described richly and with tenderness, although some secondary characters, such as Dido, a neighbor, and Assia, Sylvia’s rival for her husband, are more clichéd than real. However, they serve to underscore Sylvia’s growing fear, rooted in her worsening depression, that her world was increasingly dangerous in every quarter as she approached the ultimate terror. Moses shows great empathy for Sylvia’s mother, deeply nar-

♦ http://ps.psychiatryonline.org ♦ December 2003 Vol. 54 No. 12

BOOK REVIEWS cissistic, unable to appreciate Sylvia except as an extension of herself, and bent on trying not to offend yet offending in the very act of self-sacrifice. In turn, Sylvia must distance herself from her engulfing mother if she is to live at all. The children, very young at the time of the story, nevertheless command attention and concern from the reader. Finally, Ted Hughes, the not terribly supportive husband, comes off as a heartless cad, either ignorant of or uncaring about his wife’s illness. The title of the book derives from a poem that describes taking honey from bees. Bees are a constant theme throughout the book: extracting honey, the creation of the queen, having to care for bees during the winter by feeding them sugar, and so

on. The sequence of chapters in Wintering follows that of poems that Sylvia Plath had intended to have published and had left for her husband in a notebook before his death, yet which he did not publish as she intended. This information is provided by Moses in a postscript. However, the chapters that precede the end are titled “The Bee Meeting,” “The Arrival of the Bee Box,” “Stings,” “The Swarm,” and, finally, “Wintering,” which in this book is the prelude to Plath’s suicide and in the poem combines images of death, life, and life after death. It is clear that Plath intended the bees as a metaphor for her own fragility, transience, and conflict over her roles: the queen cannot fly and depends on the drones for her life and posterity.

Your Loving Arms by Gwendolyn Bikis; New York, Alice Street Editions, Harrington Park Press, 2001, 247 pages, $17.95 softcover Barbara M. Rohland, M.D.

I

n the author’ preface to Your Loving Arms, Gwendolyn Bikis states that she writes about what she seeks to understand rather than believing that people write what they understand. This novel, written by a white woman in the voice of both a white woman and a black woman, seeks understanding between women— specifically, more mutual understanding between black and white women. The novel is published by Alice Street Editions, which publishes work by lesbian writers to bring lesbian perspectives to a wider audience through “enlightening, illuminating, and provocative writing.” The author of Your Loving Arms has a master’s degree in sociology as well as in writing and literature and is a lesbian who lives and teaches in Oakland, California. This novel describes love—want-

Dr. Rohland is associate professor and chair in the department of psychiatry at Texas Tech University School of Medicine in Amarillo.

PSYCHIATRIC SERVICES

ing it and fearing it, seeking it and running away from it, losing it and finding it. Although primarily the story of romantic love between two women, it describes love—and the absence of love—in the context of family (loving or rejecting), cultural experience (black or white), and place (south or north). The book’s unique perspectives are presented in the context of a relationship of two women, Beth and Tammy. Beth is a white woman from Baltimore who comes from an abusive home and, because she has not known love, does not recognize it, understand it, or trust it. Tammy is black and comes from a loving family in South Carolina. The novel portrays the intrinsic difficulty in accepting and expressing “different” love—that is, love between two women and love between two persons of different ethnicity. It describes the pain and conflict that occurs when loves are in conflict with one another—love of family and love of partner, love of partner and love of place. It is a story of making choices,

♦ http://ps.psychiatryonline.org ♦ December 2003 Vol. 54 No. 12

making compromises, and making changes in one’s worldview, and, ultimately, one’s view of oneself. The thing I found most compelling about this book was its exploration of universal themes in the specific context of an interracial lesbian relationship—for example, the loneliness of not wanting to be known and not being able to trust while longing to love and be loved. Being neither black nor lesbian, when I finished reading the book I felt that I understood—or at least understood better—the emotions and conflicts experienced by the novel’s characters. Thus I believe that the author was successful in achieving her stated goal not only of enhancing mutual understanding between white women and black women but perhaps also encouraging a wider mutual understanding between lesbian and straight women. This novel will be of interest to practitioners who seek to understand cultures and experiences that are different from their own for their own growth as well as in the interests of achieving better understanding of their patients or clients. The book may also be helpful as a resource for clients who are experiencing personal, social, or familial conflict in samesex or interracial relationships.

Seizure by Robin Cook; New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2003, 464 pages, $24.95 Mark H. Backlund, M.D.

W

ith the debate over stem cell research and latter-day abortion politics at its core, Robin Cook’s newest medical thriller draws out a plausible—okay, possible—scenario to immediately demonstrate the many facets of this new frontier. At center stage are Daniel Lowell, M.D., Ph.D., stem cell researcher and would-be entrepreneur, and southern senator Ashley Butler, crafty Dr. Backlund lives in Anacortes, Washington. 1665...