The loss of their older son Buck in a boating accident a year and a half before the novel’s opening has already faded into the realm of the nearly unspeakable. Both parents, but especially Beth, are preoccupied with keeping up social appearances. His father Calvin is a successful tax attorney, and his mother Beth occupies her days in tennis, horseback riding, and keeping track of her husband’s golf game. The central character, Conrad Jarrett, is the eighteen-year-old scion of an upper-middle class Chicago family. Ordinary People was remarkable, among many reasons, for maintaining authenticity while also bringing mental illness-and suicide-squarely into the mainstream of contemporary American life.
Though Plath’s and Greenberg’s novels are far more authentic, however, their tone and narrative styles still left mental illness at least outside the realm of the everyday, if not actually darkly aberrational. Like other artistic treatments of mental illness-or insanity, to use the parlance common in its day-though, The Snake Pit’s popularity certainly derived from its luridly sensationalist elements, and its happy ending. The Snake Pit-by far the most commercially successful of the three books at the time it was written-was turned into a popular movie of the same name featuring actress Olivia de Havilland. Notably, each of these three earlier works features a female protagonist and includes deeply intense autobiographical elements. Kik appears as an all-knowing savior to the troubled central character.
Each novel was written during an era when Freudian psychoanalysis dominated the practice of psychology in the United States-in Ward’s book, the Freudian psychoanalyst Dr. Plath’s and Greenberg’s novels especially are works of tremendous literary merit and cultural significance. Novels on the subject published over the previous three decades included The Snake Pit (1946) by Mary Jane Ward The Bell Jar (1963) by Sylvia Plath and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964) by Joanne Greenberg.
Mental illness already occupied a distinct position in American literature when Ordinary People first appeared in bookstores in 1976.
0 kommentar(er)
