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The Shutter of Snow
Introduced by Claire-Louise Bennett, experience one new mother's psychological journey in this lost 1930 foremother of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar.
'Extraordinary. A fascinating and unexpected delight.' Lucy Ellmann
'Haunting and evocative, this is a timeless portrayal of madness.' Catherine Cho
'A startling, luminous and magnetic novel about the complexity of motherhood.' Yiyun Li
'With its deep musicality, Coleman's unforgettable voice was years ahead of its time.' Sinead Gleeson
The only thing to do is to put hammers in the porridge and when there are enough hammers we shall break down the windows and all of us shall dance in the snow.
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 say 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, 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 ...
Shocking and hilarious, tragic and visceral, this experimental portrait of motherhood and mental illness written in 1930 has never felt more visionary.
'Extraordinary. A fascinating and unexpected delight.' Lucy Ellmann
'Haunting and evocative, this is a timeless portrayal of madness.' Catherine Cho
'A startling, luminous and magnetic novel about the complexity of motherhood.' Yiyun Li
'With its deep musicality, Coleman's unforgettable voice was years ahead of its time.' Sinead Gleeson
The only thing to do is to put hammers in the porridge and when there are enough hammers we shall break down the windows and all of us shall dance in the snow.
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 say 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, 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 ...
Shocking and hilarious, tragic and visceral, this experimental portrait of motherhood and mental illness written in 1930 has never felt more visionary.
168 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1930
37 people are currently reading
2008 people want to read
About the author
Emily Holmes Coleman
5 books10 followersEmily Holmes Coleman, American poet and novelist, was born in 1899, in Oakland, California. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1920 and soon thereafter left for Paris where she worked as the society editor for the Paris Tribune. As an expatriate writer, Coleman continued to live in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s.
Although Emily Coleman's papers reveal her to be a prolific writer, her only published works were her contributions to little magazines, such as transition and New Review, and her autobiographical novel, The Shutter of Snow (1930). She kept a close friendship with Djuna Barnes, Edwin Muir, Peggy Guggenheim, Beatrix Wright, and Antonia White.
From 1944 until her death the focus of Coleman's attention and activities was her religious life. She became involved with the Catholic left, developed friendships with Dorothy Day and Jacques and Raissa Maritain, and lived in a number of Catholic communities. At the time of her death in 1974, Coleman was being cared for by Catholic nuns at The Farm in Tivoli, New York.
Although Emily Coleman's papers reveal her to be a prolific writer, her only published works were her contributions to little magazines, such as transition and New Review, and her autobiographical novel, The Shutter of Snow (1930). She kept a close friendship with Djuna Barnes, Edwin Muir, Peggy Guggenheim, Beatrix Wright, and Antonia White.
From 1944 until her death the focus of Coleman's attention and activities was her religious life. She became involved with the Catholic left, developed friendships with Dorothy Day and Jacques and Raissa Maritain, and lived in a number of Catholic communities. At the time of her death in 1974, Coleman was being cared for by Catholic nuns at The Farm in Tivoli, New York.
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December 16, 2022
A welcome republication of The Shutter of Snow Emily Holmes Coleman’s only novel, here presented with an insightful introduction by author Claire-Louise Bennett. Published in 1930, it’s an oblique depiction of a particularly traumatic series of events that worked just as well for me as it did the first time I read it. It's based on the author's own experiences of her time in a psychiatric institution, not long after giving birth to her son. The Shutter of Snow’s primarily presented in a strikingly vivid, stream-of-consciousness style. The story’s told from the perspective of Marthe Gail, an inmate in a New York asylum; it’s often fragmented, elliptical, punctuated by drips and bursts of Marthe’s thoughts, her delusions mixing with memories and blurred perceptions of her surroundings. Shards of information rise to the surface and have to be pieced together, mirroring Marthe’s fractured, confused consciousness. I thought this tight focus on Marthe’s perspective worked brilliantly to convey the character’s shifting states of mind, what it might be like to be in her situation.
The end result’s a powerful piece of writing, moving from visceral to lyrical, with passages that have a slightly surreal, dream-like aspect. I was surprised too by the feminist narrative that slowly emerged. Men appear to hold all the cards here, the asylum doctors, Marthe’s husband, her forbidding father, but Marthe’s gradually woven into a diverse community of women and their collective isolation from a wider, patriarchal society, enables a subversive, unanticipated freedom and new forms of power.
Reading this, inevitably, reminded me of other representations of women and madness I’ve encountered, from Perkins Gilman’s earlier The Yellow Wallpaper, to later books like The Snake Pit, and Antonia White’s Beyond the Glass but Coleman’s treatment still felt fresh and unique. I can’t help wondering why she never published another novel, her life sounds as if it provided enough material for several: she worked with Emma Goldman, was part of a circle that included Djuna Barnes and Peggy Guggenheim, was close to writers like Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot and Antonia White, had an affair with poet George Barker, an unlikely, late marriage to a rancher from Arizona, and a final retreat into Catholicism - in her last days, cared for by nuns embedded in another cloistered community of women.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Faber Editions for an ARC
The end result’s a powerful piece of writing, moving from visceral to lyrical, with passages that have a slightly surreal, dream-like aspect. I was surprised too by the feminist narrative that slowly emerged. Men appear to hold all the cards here, the asylum doctors, Marthe’s husband, her forbidding father, but Marthe’s gradually woven into a diverse community of women and their collective isolation from a wider, patriarchal society, enables a subversive, unanticipated freedom and new forms of power.
Reading this, inevitably, reminded me of other representations of women and madness I’ve encountered, from Perkins Gilman’s earlier The Yellow Wallpaper, to later books like The Snake Pit, and Antonia White’s Beyond the Glass but Coleman’s treatment still felt fresh and unique. I can’t help wondering why she never published another novel, her life sounds as if it provided enough material for several: she worked with Emma Goldman, was part of a circle that included Djuna Barnes and Peggy Guggenheim, was close to writers like Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot and Antonia White, had an affair with poet George Barker, an unlikely, late marriage to a rancher from Arizona, and a final retreat into Catholicism - in her last days, cared for by nuns embedded in another cloistered community of women.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Faber Editions for an ARC
September 28, 2023
“She and Christopher and the baby went into shifts and coils and clouds, round and round in the same spot. There he was, her father, he came in the door and she didn’t know he was coming. She gave a loud cry to him. He was very tall and he breathed the stream where they had made the dam at the Devil’s Hole.”
Another Virago Modern Classic. This is a novel about a woman (Marthe) who has a breakdown following the birth of her child: “post-partum psychosis”. It describes her time in the institution into which she is admitted and her interactions with staff and other internees. Coleman is writing of what she knows. She spent two months in an institution following the birth of her own child.
“The window was closed and the bars went up and down on the outside. She could hear the wind sliding the snow off the roof. An avalanche of snow gathered and fell and buried the sun beneath. There were six bars to the back of her bed.”
Coleman provides a picture of the daily routines and interactions between different sections of the institution and looks at some of the idiosyncrasies of the other inmates. There is a sense of enclosure of being fenced in and of helplessness:
“She stared at the shining room white with sunlight. Can’t I stay here a little while? I’m sorry, said Dr Halloway, but this room is busy all the time. We had an operation for appendicitis here this morning and we’re expecting a delivery tonight.She was wheeled back, past the man, past the billiard table, down the dark hall, past the piano and into the Day Room. Can’t I stay in the Day Room? She begged, just to look at that flower pot? I will be good, O I will be good.”
Coleman wrote a great deal, but this was her only novel. She does document the effects of physical confinement rather well. At the time (1930) it was certainly experimental. It is another exploration of the “madwoman”, but this time not from Victorian literature, rather modernist. As it can be described as a modernist novel, it has an element of experimentation and uses stream of consciousness to some extent. Coleman uses punctuation (or more particularly lack of it) to make the reader feel like they are in Marthe’s head.
Marte’s relationship with her body changes throughout the novel as she becomes more at ease with it. There is an awful lot of bathing in the novel as well and its nature seems to chart the trajectory of the illness:
“Marthe danced lifting her legs and leaning to the spray. Brunmark bent to the turning of her bright nickel spigots, leaned to hold the hose that rushed at Marthe’s spinal column, played it up and down the middle of her back, holding her out and erect like a stone majesty. Brunmark’s cap fell to one side and she shifted her feet to the changing of the waters. Dance dance Brunmark, throw away your cap and dance. Come out from under your stiff legs and float about the spray.”
There is a sort of movement in the nature of the way Marthe moves throughout the novel as well. One of the lessons of the novel is the importance of persistence as a way of being empowered and fighting back.
It’s an interesting novel, the whole is a little disjointed and for me felt a little too short, but it’s worth looking at.
Another Virago Modern Classic. This is a novel about a woman (Marthe) who has a breakdown following the birth of her child: “post-partum psychosis”. It describes her time in the institution into which she is admitted and her interactions with staff and other internees. Coleman is writing of what she knows. She spent two months in an institution following the birth of her own child.
“The window was closed and the bars went up and down on the outside. She could hear the wind sliding the snow off the roof. An avalanche of snow gathered and fell and buried the sun beneath. There were six bars to the back of her bed.”
Coleman provides a picture of the daily routines and interactions between different sections of the institution and looks at some of the idiosyncrasies of the other inmates. There is a sense of enclosure of being fenced in and of helplessness:
“She stared at the shining room white with sunlight. Can’t I stay here a little while? I’m sorry, said Dr Halloway, but this room is busy all the time. We had an operation for appendicitis here this morning and we’re expecting a delivery tonight.She was wheeled back, past the man, past the billiard table, down the dark hall, past the piano and into the Day Room. Can’t I stay in the Day Room? She begged, just to look at that flower pot? I will be good, O I will be good.”
Coleman wrote a great deal, but this was her only novel. She does document the effects of physical confinement rather well. At the time (1930) it was certainly experimental. It is another exploration of the “madwoman”, but this time not from Victorian literature, rather modernist. As it can be described as a modernist novel, it has an element of experimentation and uses stream of consciousness to some extent. Coleman uses punctuation (or more particularly lack of it) to make the reader feel like they are in Marthe’s head.
Marte’s relationship with her body changes throughout the novel as she becomes more at ease with it. There is an awful lot of bathing in the novel as well and its nature seems to chart the trajectory of the illness:
“Marthe danced lifting her legs and leaning to the spray. Brunmark bent to the turning of her bright nickel spigots, leaned to hold the hose that rushed at Marthe’s spinal column, played it up and down the middle of her back, holding her out and erect like a stone majesty. Brunmark’s cap fell to one side and she shifted her feet to the changing of the waters. Dance dance Brunmark, throw away your cap and dance. Come out from under your stiff legs and float about the spray.”
There is a sort of movement in the nature of the way Marthe moves throughout the novel as well. One of the lessons of the novel is the importance of persistence as a way of being empowered and fighting back.
It’s an interesting novel, the whole is a little disjointed and for me felt a little too short, but it’s worth looking at.
March 14, 2022
This was a strange novel, and hard to read, because we see the world through the eyes of a woman, Marthé Gail, who is suffering from a manifestation of puerperal fever —toxic exhaustive psychosis—after giving birth to her son. She’s in a mental hospital with a number of other patients who have a variety of mental problems.
She at times thinks she is Jesus Christ. At times is violent. As far as I can tell the attendants at the hospital at times have to tie her in some sort of straitjacket (because she could attack other patients or them). They give her hydrotherapy (long hot baths...we’re talking 6 hours...), a treatment used back in the day for some mental illnesses (https://www.theatlantic.com/health/ar... ).
It was a hard novel to comprehend I would say over 50% of the time, because there would be a good deal of word-salad gibberish presented to the reader using either the first-person (Marthé) or third-person point of view.
I’ll give this one 2.5 stars (which elevates it to a good read as opposed to a meh read) for the following reasons:
• It was definitely unique & novel.
• This was semi-autobiographical...Coleman wrote this 6 years after she herself was committed for two months to a mental hospital after giving birth to her son and being diagnosed with the same malady as the protagonist in this novel, Marthé Gail.
• An author who I really admire and plan on reading lot more of her oeuvre — Winifred Holtby —liked this novel.
• I guess in 1930 this was considered experimental writing.
• She lived in Paris for a time and wrote for the society column of the Chicago Tribune...and counted as her acquaintances and friends Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, Edwin Muir, Peggy Guggenheim. Antonia White, William Gerhardi, and Djuna Barnes. I should mention that she lost her job at the Tribune because she bonked someone over the head with a Lexicon typewriter. Ouch! 😮
• It’s a Virago Modern Classic....and I love Virago editions. 🙂 🙃
There was humor (sometimes) in the novel:
• Mrs. Glope lifted up her head and threw it back against her neck with closed eyes and mouth in prayer. ...Dear Lord she prayed, I pray Thee to watch over this my sister here beside me who has been led astray form Thy paths. She has come up here into a group of refined persons from a wicked and adulterous generation... Marthé: They are not adulterous, they don’t get the chance to be.
Wikipedia entry on Emily Holmes Coleman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_C...
Reviews
• Very well written review.... she’s good! https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2019/...
• This reviewer, Kirsty, says it reminds her of “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman https://theliterarysisters.wordpress....
• This reviewer also says it reminds her of “The Yellow Wallpaper” https://theblankgarden.com/about/
She at times thinks she is Jesus Christ. At times is violent. As far as I can tell the attendants at the hospital at times have to tie her in some sort of straitjacket (because she could attack other patients or them). They give her hydrotherapy (long hot baths...we’re talking 6 hours...), a treatment used back in the day for some mental illnesses (https://www.theatlantic.com/health/ar... ).
It was a hard novel to comprehend I would say over 50% of the time, because there would be a good deal of word-salad gibberish presented to the reader using either the first-person (Marthé) or third-person point of view.
I’ll give this one 2.5 stars (which elevates it to a good read as opposed to a meh read) for the following reasons:
• It was definitely unique & novel.
• This was semi-autobiographical...Coleman wrote this 6 years after she herself was committed for two months to a mental hospital after giving birth to her son and being diagnosed with the same malady as the protagonist in this novel, Marthé Gail.
• An author who I really admire and plan on reading lot more of her oeuvre — Winifred Holtby —liked this novel.
• I guess in 1930 this was considered experimental writing.
• She lived in Paris for a time and wrote for the society column of the Chicago Tribune...and counted as her acquaintances and friends Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, Edwin Muir, Peggy Guggenheim. Antonia White, William Gerhardi, and Djuna Barnes. I should mention that she lost her job at the Tribune because she bonked someone over the head with a Lexicon typewriter. Ouch! 😮
• It’s a Virago Modern Classic....and I love Virago editions. 🙂 🙃
There was humor (sometimes) in the novel:
• Mrs. Glope lifted up her head and threw it back against her neck with closed eyes and mouth in prayer. ...Dear Lord she prayed, I pray Thee to watch over this my sister here beside me who has been led astray form Thy paths. She has come up here into a group of refined persons from a wicked and adulterous generation... Marthé: They are not adulterous, they don’t get the chance to be.
Wikipedia entry on Emily Holmes Coleman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_C...
Reviews
• Very well written review.... she’s good! https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2019/...
• This reviewer, Kirsty, says it reminds her of “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman https://theliterarysisters.wordpress....
• This reviewer also says it reminds her of “The Yellow Wallpaper” https://theblankgarden.com/about/
December 25, 2022
If Virginia Woolf had written The Bell Jar it might have turned out like this. Coleman’s prose is also threaded with a surreal vein akin to Anna Kavan’s ‘nighttime language’ found in the masterful Sleep Has His House. The main character, Marthe, is somewhat of a smart-ass, which offers occasional comic relief from the bleak fact that she’s been forcibly locked in an asylum following a postpartum breakdown. We feel her change over time, the shifts in her perceptions of her surroundings. To leave she must conform; she must submit to the asylum power structure. But she bristles at authority and so it’s one step forward–two steps back for much of the novel. Stay in the tub, all sewn up, for the full six hours and you might go home. Now that you can eat in the dining room, if you manage to eat enough to gain 23 pounds, you might go home. But make trouble with your floormates or strike out at the nasty nurse and you’ll get strapped into the canvas sheet, or worse yet, you might end up in the Strong Room. And yet it is the seeming arbitrariness of it all that is the most haunting…
June 25, 2013
God damn this world she prayed. God damn the people in it, the priests in red lace boxes and the lunatics in white wound sheets. God dam that piece of the sun that first swung away in lonely gas and trembled to cool itself to make a star. There is not a well of green stunk seaweed that does not bury its curse of sunlight and there are days of revelry in the bead-dripping basements of churches when rats run maudlin through chilled platters of song and the one-eyed draughtsmen mark grave arrows. God damn everything that cannot be made up into cheeses for Sunday lunches.
What have I done to deserve this? The Shutter of Snow begins with a birth. The kind that takes from more of your life than you have to feed it.
They are never going to believe you. There's a scene in the 1990s film Freeway when Reese Witherspoon's juvenile little red riding hood explains that once you are in the system no one is ever going to believe you again. Marthe is locked up in an asylum, behind walls of truth stealing shadows. There was a baby and a husband. The husband returns as a solid specter like castle walls of shoulders you can't cry on or not be seen smiling secretively because you got your way. It is a prison of what have I done to deserve this and never ending staircases of unbeatable systems.
Marthe believes that she is God.
I don't believe Marthe. I don't believe that she is God.
There are other women in the asylum. There are hundreds of men too, across the hall, lined up in bed rows. They must be mumbling thoughts inside for no one to hear.
I felt like when babysitting a small child and they SWEAR that they are allowed to eat lots of sugary treats before dinner time. It is something that happens every day. The faces of the inmates looked like they knew what they were and weren't allowed to have. It is can't beat the system. If you move a little you will be feeding more than you can give. These shadows are so hungry. The minutes of the day look for cracks, a chance for something new. When Marthe's husband Christopher visits another woman inserts herself into Marthe's supposed to haves and urges him to see that she needs more. But this is my time, my husband, I'm supposed to be asking. It is something that is supposed to happen. He's another wall. They will look further and further away, these walls. Less like security and a lot more impenetrable.
There's a curious power to Emily Holmes Coleman's writing. I don't know how she did it. Have you ever focused on something without really seeing it? Maybe you are zoning out a little or trying not to look at someone who is getting on your nerves. I do this a lot. After you are doing this for a while the sounds are hard to tell where they are coming from. What you pick up from far off takes on a dream like quality and doesn't seem like people near you talking about something. Someone will speak to me and I am surprised that they are right in front of me and not in the doorway as I had first thought. Marthe's asylum perspective feels like this. It is from her eyes and yet she is looking at something else. People move by like actresses in celluloid. I see what it looks like if someone gets up and walks in front of the projector. They have big black shapes that are massive and they move fast, hoping no one will see them. What was mysteriouser and mysteriouser to me was that I felt like I was someone over them, maybe like that babysitter being beseeched for the forbidden snack. I wanted to help as Marthe only saw fake people. It is out of body out of body. If you were out of your body to see yourself out of your body. Marthe doesn't have this second out of body. This must be Coleman herself. I read that The Shutter of Snow was autobiographical. Coleman was institutionalized after an illness. I can't account for the truth that she also had delusions of grandeur. I was the least interested in her belief in a God self. It was only an extension of what everyone there shot off from their skin like invisible tattoos. I want, supposed to, need. Don't have, what have I done to deserve this? so cold.
Marthe's convictions are not real to me. I don't feel it when she must take off her night gown. I wouldn't want to be there with someone who took off their nightgown. I was creeped out by the mandatory in winter time long underwear. Someone will come along to tell her that she must put it back on. I felt frustrated and wished that I felt why she had to take off the underwear. It looked like someone making trouble, as if I were one of the doctors who doesn't believe her. There are from far away quality voices warning about other parts of the hospital she could go. There is the "strong room" for trouble-makers. I felt scared of the "strong-room", as if I were the maker of trouble. Her baby boy is not real to her. I've had fevers in the past and felt that immediate concerns were not real or did not matter. If everyone were dolls she would have as much pity for their plight. It is all supposeds to have. See a ribbon and wind it around your finger, hope it is fate you have tied to your design. I don't feel a gut feeling about anything in Marthe's life. I wanted to. There is something going on outside of her. What is happening to her is awful. I felt that there should be something else the other inmates are supposed to have. A real feeling, that you have outside of that place. That is the nightmare of the asylum, I guess. It takes away gut feelings. You are only making trouble. You begin to sleepwalk....
My copy is the 1980s Virago Modern Classics edition and not the Dalkey American Literature Series edition. Virago used Tamara de Lempicka's painting "Girl at the Window". I loved this choice of image. A red-headed woman (like Marthe) is large as you can see. Her eyes are diamond cut tears above a chin rested on a large arm. My favorite part are the large arms. I feel this way about Marthe when she keeps taking off her night gown. I felt this way that her body had given birth to a baby. She's so big that I can't see anything else. The look on the face could be sleepwalking. It could want something not real. I really liked the bigness. I feel contagious about big images. I feel contagious about Marthe. That is what it feels like when people are hungry and they are around you. They could be by your feet, or at your elbows, knees. It is supposed to be like this.
March 20, 2023
Marthe is in a psychiatric hospital following the birth of her son. She can’t see her baby, she’s often physically restrained and told to shut up. Time blurs, the writing is surreal, no speech marks and often I wasn’t sure if the characters named were other patients, nurses or delusions. The treatments used last century for women with psychiatric illness always seem barbaric to me , it’s no wonder the patients seem to get worse. An intense read.
January 8, 2023
Brutally confronting and torturous but so very significant. Arguably the most perturbing and distressing prose I’ve ever read.
Unbelievably original, perceptive and courageous – boundary-shattering writing for 1930. Yet this work has defied time and stands as dramatic, disturbing, excruciating, and poignant as anything yielded by contemporary authors.
My thanks to NetGalley and Faber and Faber Ltd for granting this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Unbelievably original, perceptive and courageous – boundary-shattering writing for 1930. Yet this work has defied time and stands as dramatic, disturbing, excruciating, and poignant as anything yielded by contemporary authors.
My thanks to NetGalley and Faber and Faber Ltd for granting this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.
sampled
September 2, 2016Cast my ever-thickening lenses over the first three chapters, plus a cheeky peek at the climax. Couldn’t read a full 125pp of this early modernist mental illness novel—where internal monologue, dialogue and third-person poeticised narration all commingle—but I can see its appeal for those seeking a convincing artistic depiction of (in this case) postpartum psychosis, or psychoses in general. Early modernist prose isn’t usually within my purview—I’ve given Beckett, Eliot et al a wide berth for a reason, usually their willed obscurity, dour outlook and arch poeticising. Coleman seems like a swell lady, despite making something of co-editing botch-up of Barnes’s Nightwood. Her only other publication is an expensive, out-of-print book of diaries. One for the hardcore ravers.
February 18, 2024
Zelf had ik dit boek niet zo snel uitgekozen, maar we lazen dit met de complete Schwob Young groep, om het tijdens ons weekend weg te bespreken.
Ik vond het best pittig om te lezen. Wat meteen opvalt is het gebrek aan aanhalingstekens, dus is het soms niet duidelijk of iets daadwerkelijk gezegd wordt of dat het wordt gedacht. In het begin van het boek voelde ik me net zo verward als het hoofdpersonage zelf, die in een psychiatrische inrichting belandt. Het is een hobbelige strijd, waarbij het soms beter lijkt te gaan met Martha om het volgende moment weer volledig in te storten. Ook lijkt het af en toe alsof ze niet beter zou willen worden, ze kan het duidelijk beter vinden met de mensen op de afdeling beneden, waar de ergste gevallen zitten.
Dit boek voelt als een soort van waas waarbij je niet weet wat echt is en wat niet. Het blijft veelal speculeren. Het is puur vanuit de beleving van de patiënt. En ik merk dat ik dat persoonlijk best lastig vond. Toen ik het boek uit had, dacht ik: tsja wat vind ik nou eigenlijk? Ik had even geen idee, alsof ik zelf nog in die waas zat. Daarom vond ik het wel fijn om het met de groep te bespreken. Ik kwam tot de conclusie dat het waarschijnlijk gewoon niet helemaal mijn soort boek is, maar dat ik wel blij ben dat ik het heb gelezen voor een boekenclubavond.
Ik vond het best pittig om te lezen. Wat meteen opvalt is het gebrek aan aanhalingstekens, dus is het soms niet duidelijk of iets daadwerkelijk gezegd wordt of dat het wordt gedacht. In het begin van het boek voelde ik me net zo verward als het hoofdpersonage zelf, die in een psychiatrische inrichting belandt. Het is een hobbelige strijd, waarbij het soms beter lijkt te gaan met Martha om het volgende moment weer volledig in te storten. Ook lijkt het af en toe alsof ze niet beter zou willen worden, ze kan het duidelijk beter vinden met de mensen op de afdeling beneden, waar de ergste gevallen zitten.
Dit boek voelt als een soort van waas waarbij je niet weet wat echt is en wat niet. Het blijft veelal speculeren. Het is puur vanuit de beleving van de patiënt. En ik merk dat ik dat persoonlijk best lastig vond. Toen ik het boek uit had, dacht ik: tsja wat vind ik nou eigenlijk? Ik had even geen idee, alsof ik zelf nog in die waas zat. Daarom vond ik het wel fijn om het met de groep te bespreken. Ik kwam tot de conclusie dat het waarschijnlijk gewoon niet helemaal mijn soort boek is, maar dat ik wel blij ben dat ik het heb gelezen voor een boekenclubavond.
February 5, 2019
I have wanted to read Emily Holmes Coleman's The Shutter of Snow for years, but had never got around to doing so, as copies proved difficult to find, and rather expensive. Only the selection of the novel for my online book club pushed me to source a (thankfully free) copy from OpenLibrary, and I began it way ahead of time.
This novella, the only work published by American author Emily Holmes Coleman, is semi-autobiographical. It focuses on a period of her life in which she was institutionalised due to contracting puerperal fever following the birth of her son in 1924, and suffering a nervous breakdown as a result. Our protagonist, Marthe Gail, has postpartum psychosis, and is forced to spend her time away from her baby son in a mental hospital in New York. Here, she tries, with varying levels of success, to persuade others that she is well.
Marthe's condition, and its manifestation, is startling. She believes herself to be a sort of amalgamation of God and Jesus Christ. From the outset, The Shutter of Snow is unsettling, and quickly establishes a sense of the place in which Marthe is trapped: 'The voice on the other side of her wall was shouting for someone. It never stopped all night. It became entangled in the blankets and whistled the ice prongs on the wind. The rest of the voices were not so distinct. It was very still out in the hall when the voices stopped.' There is a sense, for Marthe, of being completely alone and adrift, whilst also being surrounded by many other people.
The imagery which Holmes Coleman creates often has a shock value to it: 'She had been a foetus and had knitted herself together in the bed', and 'Clean cheeks and a little river in her teeth. Pine needles dripping in the Caucasus', stood out particularly to me. I also found the following nightmarish scene incredibly chilling: 'How could they expect her to sleep when she was going through all of it? They didnt [sic] know. She had swung about the room from the ceiling and it was a swinging from the cross. There had been the burial. She was lying quietly in the bed and being covered over her face. She was carried quietly out and put in the casket. Down, down she went in the rectangle that had been made for her. Down and the dirt fell in above. Down and the worms began to tremble in and out. Always she had kept telling of it, not one word of it must be forgotten. It must all be recorded in sound and after that she could sleep.'
As well as the horror which permeates it, there are moments of strange beauty in Holmes Coleman's descriptions; for example, when she writes: 'The only thing to do is to put hammers in the porridge and when there are enough hammers we shall break down the windows and all of us shall dance in the snow.' The use of recurring motifs within the novella was highly effective - for instance, Marthe's dancing, and the unusual imagery of orange peel in the snow.
The Shutter of Snow presents a striking character study of a woman in the depths of mania. Holmes Coleman's prose is effective; she uses a stream-of-consciousness-esque style, with the subconscious and unconscious embedded within its omniscient perspective. I'm not sure that I would categorise this as a stream-of-consciousness work, per se, but it certainly can be recognised as a Modernist work. There is a real urgency to her writing. I can see why her style, with its omission of speech marks and no clear delineation between what is real and imagined, might be off-putting to many readers, but as a huge fan of Modernist writing, I found it immediately immersive. The mixture of reality and psychiatric episodes are chilling, and blend into one another seamlessly.
Given that The Shutter of Snow was published in 1930, it feels startlingly modern. I agree entirely with the two reviews I read prior to beginning the novella. Fay Weldon remarked that is an 'extraordinary and visionary book, written out of those edges where madness and poetry meet', and The Nation commented that 'The Shutter of Snow is a profoundly moving book, supplying as it does a glimpse of what a temporary derangement and its consequences mean to the sufferer.' I found the entirety of this book to be poignant and affecting, and it has become a firm favourite of mine. I expected that it might be difficult to read, and whilst there are some shocking incidents at work in the novella, the constantly shifting prose works perfectly to demonstrate the fog in Marthe's brain.
There are relatively few novellas that say so much as Holmes Coleman does so fluidly and fluently in The Shutter of Snow. She speaks volumes about the human condition, and the frailty and fragility which go hand in hand with it. The Shutter of Snow is a literary whirlwind, a completely absorbing and often quite frightening story. An obvious comparison to give is its similarities to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, which deals with similar themes in that the narrator is forced to undertake a rest cure following childbirth. There are flashes here of a similar beguiling style as Djuna Barnes', and some of Virginia Woolf's more complicated scenes - in Orlando, for example. In some ways, however, The Shutter of Snow is quite unlike anything which I have ever read, and it is all the stronger for this unusual quality. There is so much within it which is all its own, and it is a real shame that Holmes Coleman never again put her pen to paper following the publication of this staggeringly powerful and phenomenal novella.
This novella, the only work published by American author Emily Holmes Coleman, is semi-autobiographical. It focuses on a period of her life in which she was institutionalised due to contracting puerperal fever following the birth of her son in 1924, and suffering a nervous breakdown as a result. Our protagonist, Marthe Gail, has postpartum psychosis, and is forced to spend her time away from her baby son in a mental hospital in New York. Here, she tries, with varying levels of success, to persuade others that she is well.
Marthe's condition, and its manifestation, is startling. She believes herself to be a sort of amalgamation of God and Jesus Christ. From the outset, The Shutter of Snow is unsettling, and quickly establishes a sense of the place in which Marthe is trapped: 'The voice on the other side of her wall was shouting for someone. It never stopped all night. It became entangled in the blankets and whistled the ice prongs on the wind. The rest of the voices were not so distinct. It was very still out in the hall when the voices stopped.' There is a sense, for Marthe, of being completely alone and adrift, whilst also being surrounded by many other people.
The imagery which Holmes Coleman creates often has a shock value to it: 'She had been a foetus and had knitted herself together in the bed', and 'Clean cheeks and a little river in her teeth. Pine needles dripping in the Caucasus', stood out particularly to me. I also found the following nightmarish scene incredibly chilling: 'How could they expect her to sleep when she was going through all of it? They didnt [sic] know. She had swung about the room from the ceiling and it was a swinging from the cross. There had been the burial. She was lying quietly in the bed and being covered over her face. She was carried quietly out and put in the casket. Down, down she went in the rectangle that had been made for her. Down and the dirt fell in above. Down and the worms began to tremble in and out. Always she had kept telling of it, not one word of it must be forgotten. It must all be recorded in sound and after that she could sleep.'
As well as the horror which permeates it, there are moments of strange beauty in Holmes Coleman's descriptions; for example, when she writes: 'The only thing to do is to put hammers in the porridge and when there are enough hammers we shall break down the windows and all of us shall dance in the snow.' The use of recurring motifs within the novella was highly effective - for instance, Marthe's dancing, and the unusual imagery of orange peel in the snow.
The Shutter of Snow presents a striking character study of a woman in the depths of mania. Holmes Coleman's prose is effective; she uses a stream-of-consciousness-esque style, with the subconscious and unconscious embedded within its omniscient perspective. I'm not sure that I would categorise this as a stream-of-consciousness work, per se, but it certainly can be recognised as a Modernist work. There is a real urgency to her writing. I can see why her style, with its omission of speech marks and no clear delineation between what is real and imagined, might be off-putting to many readers, but as a huge fan of Modernist writing, I found it immediately immersive. The mixture of reality and psychiatric episodes are chilling, and blend into one another seamlessly.
Given that The Shutter of Snow was published in 1930, it feels startlingly modern. I agree entirely with the two reviews I read prior to beginning the novella. Fay Weldon remarked that is an 'extraordinary and visionary book, written out of those edges where madness and poetry meet', and The Nation commented that 'The Shutter of Snow is a profoundly moving book, supplying as it does a glimpse of what a temporary derangement and its consequences mean to the sufferer.' I found the entirety of this book to be poignant and affecting, and it has become a firm favourite of mine. I expected that it might be difficult to read, and whilst there are some shocking incidents at work in the novella, the constantly shifting prose works perfectly to demonstrate the fog in Marthe's brain.
There are relatively few novellas that say so much as Holmes Coleman does so fluidly and fluently in The Shutter of Snow. She speaks volumes about the human condition, and the frailty and fragility which go hand in hand with it. The Shutter of Snow is a literary whirlwind, a completely absorbing and often quite frightening story. An obvious comparison to give is its similarities to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, which deals with similar themes in that the narrator is forced to undertake a rest cure following childbirth. There are flashes here of a similar beguiling style as Djuna Barnes', and some of Virginia Woolf's more complicated scenes - in Orlando, for example. In some ways, however, The Shutter of Snow is quite unlike anything which I have ever read, and it is all the stronger for this unusual quality. There is so much within it which is all its own, and it is a real shame that Holmes Coleman never again put her pen to paper following the publication of this staggeringly powerful and phenomenal novella.
January 7, 2020
I've read my fair share of tales of mental institutionalization written by those who actually experienced such and lived to tell the tale. Frame, Plath, Kaysen, and now Coleman: different times, different continents, different levels of pathos and creativity and skill involved in the expression of their individual experiences. While I read Plath at a key moment in my life and nearly broke myself upon her words, Frame is definitely my preferred, with Kaysen and Coleman roughly on level with each other. There's a great deal that could be written on the intersection of history with medicine with gender, along with some very small mentions of races and religions outside of the WASP norm, but I should have taken it as a clear and present sign when the introduction spent a great deal of time on the author's bio, and much of that namedropping various famous early 20th century Euro figures (I will admit to being very keen on the mentions of E. Goldman and D. Barnes, but I can't say Coleman is comparable to either of them). There is definitely much experimental text to be found, which gorgeously blooms at least once in my estimation, and I did find the main character's sympathy towards her institutionalized compatriots (in addition to her husband's sympathy towards her), especially during the endgame narrative, to paint an unorthodox, and likely all the more accurate, picture of mentally ill comradery. However, the words for the most part went by with very little in regards to spikes in quality in either high or low, so, in terms of a first 2020 read, this could've been better, but it also could've been a lot worse.
As ill-fitting such a treatment may be, in the common convention of Virago Modern Press publications at any rate, I feel this would have benefited a tad from some kind of more in depth inclusion of the context of postpartum infection, as the history of that pretty little tale of obscene pride and gendered suffering bears worth repeating whenever anyone thinks themselves too high and mighty to ever be the cause of abject misery and death. In terms of institutionalized medical history horror stories, this is comparably horrific to the history of gynecology, with the added irony that the man who most notably, leastwise in historical record, was the earliest in proposing a solution to the largely man-made plague was widely ridiculed to the point of him entering a mental institution himself. In light of that, I think this work suffers from having such widely esteemed comrades, both in terms of its history and the writer's own contemporaries. Both would be extremely hard to measure up to, and Coleman, honestly, is no Frame, or even Plath. So, to anyone who's interested in older works by women that cover some more unconventional themes (although all my namedrops have been women, and there's something to be said about that too) regarding mental illness with little to no neurotypical nonsense, save when it is rightfully derided and even rebelled against, here's a good book to peruse. Thanks to my reading challenges, I'll be reading a great deal of 1930's women's lit, so I'm looking forward to exploring any commonalities that I happen to pick up on. For now, it's time to move on.
Now she knew she must be well, she wanted to be alone.Acquiring this was quite the bit of luck, as I was at a sale that I've only been to twice in the last few years that, apparently, had been recently donated to by someone who was a regular subscriber to Virago Modern Classics. In terms of the work itself, it took me a bit to center myself in the narrative, but I suppose being disoriented by a novel centered around the experience of mental illness is par on course. Beyond that, the organization was rather conventional, chronologically speaking, and the number of characters wasn't too unwieldy, especially when the main character's trajectory from the more dehumanizing sections of the institution to another cut the regularly appearing cast down to size. The story itself was a series of snapshots of six hour baths, a baby that may or may not be dead, disregard of public nudity, trips to the cinema, and reflection on the self as Jesus Christ, plus a rather regular cycle of quick escalations into violence that don't always, judging by the narrative's trajectory, indicate a backsliding in the estimation of the institute's employees. Experimental text abounds, especially when it comes to disregarding punctuation, and the dynamic between main character and husband is rather more sexually charged, and in a positive, mutually affirming sense to boot (leastwise as was allowable by the husband's observation of the main character's compromised state of mind), than I'm used to in a story hailing from this period. So, definitely a unique work, and it's hopefully already spawned some interesting analysis in the literary realms of academia. However, Coleman's status definitely rides the coattails of some of her compatriots a tad hard when juxtaposing her current literary status and her accomplishments. So, with this, her one and final novel, under my belt, I'd say my time with her is through.
As ill-fitting such a treatment may be, in the common convention of Virago Modern Press publications at any rate, I feel this would have benefited a tad from some kind of more in depth inclusion of the context of postpartum infection, as the history of that pretty little tale of obscene pride and gendered suffering bears worth repeating whenever anyone thinks themselves too high and mighty to ever be the cause of abject misery and death. In terms of institutionalized medical history horror stories, this is comparably horrific to the history of gynecology, with the added irony that the man who most notably, leastwise in historical record, was the earliest in proposing a solution to the largely man-made plague was widely ridiculed to the point of him entering a mental institution himself. In light of that, I think this work suffers from having such widely esteemed comrades, both in terms of its history and the writer's own contemporaries. Both would be extremely hard to measure up to, and Coleman, honestly, is no Frame, or even Plath. So, to anyone who's interested in older works by women that cover some more unconventional themes (although all my namedrops have been women, and there's something to be said about that too) regarding mental illness with little to no neurotypical nonsense, save when it is rightfully derided and even rebelled against, here's a good book to peruse. Thanks to my reading challenges, I'll be reading a great deal of 1930's women's lit, so I'm looking forward to exploring any commonalities that I happen to pick up on. For now, it's time to move on.
They came like fluttering phantoms out of dimly lighted corridors, and all at once she plunged with two hands into the keys and came swiftly from beneath her hands the portion of the dream she had been keeping. Gold and black and even, the full crescendo of the dream, up the keys and into the black beyond. She leaned her body to the keys and bent her head above them and from the wide spaces between her fingers burst forth yellow birds to the sun.
July 2, 2023
This short novel follows a woman's stay in an 'insane asylum' (1930) after post partum psychosis (we gather slowly). She is murderous, loving, rebellious. Distressing but funny, weird yet somehow true, this book was perfect for me. Maybe because I read it while ill, on strong antibiotics - I would read a couple of chapters, fall asleep/half asleep, wake up and read the same chapters again, and later again. So the reading was a re-reading at the same time and while some paragraphs still failed to give up their meaning, it didn't matter: I was in thrall to the book's poetry and minutely focused hypnotic gaze. Every page had gems sewn into them, usually two or three.
Take this paragraph:
'It was a song, a perfect song, a note of clean and fixed control. It came to her in that moment, and in the drunkenness of sound she was in a trance of silver goblets and all her body became that song. She lay and was an instrument and poured forth from her still throat a single needle-pointing cenotaph.'
Cenotaph? needle pointing? - but somehow you know what she means, you know what the song sounds like (I should mention she is singing during a strange water therapy where patients are sewn into sheets and floated in hot tubs for six hours). I think also she must have read Henry Green's Living (1929) where there is a similar singing scene in a factory and is my favourite novel ever.
Anyway here's a couple more beautiful/cruel instances:
'She sat in the chair and her body became a hot iron to brand Miss Wade with ashes. She was a furnace and Miss Wade would be burned in her, howling and helpless, arms and legs. Her legs would curl up like dying newspapers, crisp and billowing. I will burn her, I will burn her heart.'
'The keys jangled from the waists of the nurses. They rattled like silver dishpans and swung chanting high like death songs. They were brittle and ice cold and had faces of stagnant riders from the snow. They were proud and deliciously ate their indifference.'
Take this paragraph:
'It was a song, a perfect song, a note of clean and fixed control. It came to her in that moment, and in the drunkenness of sound she was in a trance of silver goblets and all her body became that song. She lay and was an instrument and poured forth from her still throat a single needle-pointing cenotaph.'
Cenotaph? needle pointing? - but somehow you know what she means, you know what the song sounds like (I should mention she is singing during a strange water therapy where patients are sewn into sheets and floated in hot tubs for six hours). I think also she must have read Henry Green's Living (1929) where there is a similar singing scene in a factory and is my favourite novel ever.
Anyway here's a couple more beautiful/cruel instances:
'She sat in the chair and her body became a hot iron to brand Miss Wade with ashes. She was a furnace and Miss Wade would be burned in her, howling and helpless, arms and legs. Her legs would curl up like dying newspapers, crisp and billowing. I will burn her, I will burn her heart.'
'The keys jangled from the waists of the nurses. They rattled like silver dishpans and swung chanting high like death songs. They were brittle and ice cold and had faces of stagnant riders from the snow. They were proud and deliciously ate their indifference.'
June 12, 2011
This book was a bit hard to read. Told from the point of view of a person suffering postpartum psychosis, much of the time it simply didn't make any sense. There were no quotation marks or even apostrophes, and often no line breaks when different people spoke. But that all made sense, given Marthe's thought processes.
Comparisons to The Yellow Wallpaper are definitely warranted, but unlike that protagonist, Marthe receives good care (or what passed for good care in the 1920s), her husband is kind and supportive of her, and the book ends on a hopeful note.
I think this book is much more a "niche" sort of thing than for the general reader; given the style of writing, without a special motivation the reader may find it too frustrating to finish. I would suggest the niches of women's literature and history of psychiatry as good niches.
Comparisons to The Yellow Wallpaper are definitely warranted, but unlike that protagonist, Marthe receives good care (or what passed for good care in the 1920s), her husband is kind and supportive of her, and the book ends on a hopeful note.
I think this book is much more a "niche" sort of thing than for the general reader; given the style of writing, without a special motivation the reader may find it too frustrating to finish. I would suggest the niches of women's literature and history of psychiatry as good niches.
March 20, 2025
Coleman (1899–1974), an expatriate American poet, was part of the Paris literary milieu in the 1920s and then the London scene of the 1930s. (She worked with T.S. Eliot on editing Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, for instance.) This novella, her only published work of fiction, was based on her experience of giving birth to her son in 1924, suffering from puerperal fever and a mental breakdown, and being incarcerated in Rochester State Hospital. Although the portrait of Marthe Gail is in the omniscient third person, the stream-of-consciousness style – no speech marks or apostrophes, minimal punctuation – recalls unreliable first-person narration. Marthe believes she is Jesus Christ. Her husband Christopher visits occasionally, hoping she’ll soon be well enough to come home to their baby. It’s hard to believe this was written a century ago; I could imagine it being published tomorrow. It is absolutely worth rediscovering. While I admired the weird lyrical prose (“in his heart was growing a stern and ruddy pear … He would make of his heart a stolen marrow bone and clutch snow crystals in the night to his liking”; “This earth is made of tar and every morsel is stuck upon it to wither … there were orange peelings lying in the snow”), the interactions between patients, nurses and doctors got tedious.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
January 28, 2024
Oef, zware kost, deze Amerikaanse , grotendeels autobiografische roman uit 1930 over hoe een vrouw met een zenuwinzinking - na bevalling van haar eerste kind - behandeld wordt in een New Yorks ziekenhuis op een gesloten afdeling. Huiveringwekkend hoe dichtbij je door de taal van Emily Holmes Coleman bij de gekte komt, maar ook hoe invoelbaar zij de totaal mensonterende omstandigheden weet te maken die hoofdpersonage Marthe Gail ondergaat. Geen wonder dat dit boek als één van de grote voorlopers van The Bell Jar wordt gezien. Ik ben helemaal leeshongerig geworden naar de poëzie die Coleman schreef in haar Parijse periode - aan de beeldspraak in deze roman is te zien dat er hier een groot schrijver aan het werk was.
January 21, 2025
Icy & piercing, but often darkly, existentially funny too. An apprehensive reading experience, always tip-toeing upon a knife-edge of terror as we follow Marthe navigating her experience in a psychiatric institution, which postpartum psychosis has rendered into a labyrinth with potential traps laid at every turn. There were stretches where this vaguely evoked for me the experience of reading a detective novel, trying to suss out, sentence-to-sentence, what is a red herring & what is a clue to propel movement forward.
Eliot is often treated as the hero that "rescued" the great Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, but Coleman is more deserving of the credit. Through her friendship, advocacy & editorial insistence, Coleman helped shapes Barnes' original manuscript into something publishable (she was the one who initially contacted Eliot). And if anything can be said to anticipate the singular Nightwood, well, a case could certainly be made for this.
"In the late afternoon when the trees were growing into deserted stalks of winter she began to groan, not as other had groaned but wearily. She groaned and expanded her lungs and out again it came. She lay on her back and there was no movement only the sound of her lungs. She is going to die they said. I know that sound said Mrs. Welsh."
Eliot is often treated as the hero that "rescued" the great Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, but Coleman is more deserving of the credit. Through her friendship, advocacy & editorial insistence, Coleman helped shapes Barnes' original manuscript into something publishable (she was the one who initially contacted Eliot). And if anything can be said to anticipate the singular Nightwood, well, a case could certainly be made for this.
"In the late afternoon when the trees were growing into deserted stalks of winter she began to groan, not as other had groaned but wearily. She groaned and expanded her lungs and out again it came. She lay on her back and there was no movement only the sound of her lungs. She is going to die they said. I know that sound said Mrs. Welsh."
October 15, 2015
Once I got used to the stream of consciousness style of writing (a style which I don't particularly care for), I was moved by just how beautifully written this book is. I became completely enamored. In parts it's very funny and at other times very sad. But what an incredible glimpse into the world of mental illness.
April 15, 2023
I felt like I was just reading and nothing was actually going in but I refuse to give female authors one star reviews
January 18, 2023
3.25 stars ✨
With natural comparisons to The Bell Jar, this is a must read for Plath fans as well as those of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water (a personal favourite), or frankly anyone interested in the female psyche or the experiences of women who’ve been institutionalised. There’s also a movie night scenario recounted towards the end of this book which had echoes of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest for me, although I can’t actually remember if there was such a scene in that book…
Anyway, I should have loved this, and thought I was going to, but it didn’t take very far in for me to realise that stylistically, this just didn’t work for me for a large chunk of the book. Undoubtedly poetic and beautiful at times, the writing was ultimately too surreal for my tastes. As you might expect from the title, there is lots of imagery and metaphors to do with snow, the cold, being frozen etc. There’s also quite a lot of religion in this book, mostly because as part of her psychosis developed after a traumatic childbirth, the protagonist, Marthe, believes herself to be God, or Jesus Christ, or some form of the second coming. My grasp of the narrative, alongside my interest and investment, almost ebbed and flowed depending on how lucid and coherent Marthe was. Furthermore, the narrative constantly flits between first and third person. We are privy to some of Marthe’s internal monologue but otherwise it’s like we are witnessing interactions and events from a distance. This is made even more confusing as dialogue isn’t clearly shown with traditional speech marks. If I’d have just let the language flow over me, I’d probably have enjoyed this book more, but I felt there was just so much to unpack, so it was hard not to do a close read of this and turn off the analytical part of my reading brain.
The links to surrealism are highlighted by Claire-Louise Bennett in her fantastic introduction, written for this reissue by Faber Editions (this novel being heavily autobiographical and having first been published in 1930.) I actually read the introduction first this time (I usually read it at the end of a book as I feel it often spoils too much) and I’m very glad I did as it definitely helped contextualised the writing and gave enough background information on the author and time period to set the scene. In the intro, Bennett makes a comparison between this work and Leonora Carrington’s Down Below, which I have owned for ages and now have a renewed interest to pick up soon.
I’ve read quite a few reviews of this one and was very surprised that none I came across mentioned there are multiple instances of racial slurs and anti-Semitic language used. Now, even though this is a heavily autobiographical narrative set in the late 1920s and such language might well have been common place, as a modern reader at least, it still makes you wince to read it. There’s a fair amount of fat phobic language littered throughout too. I guess some modern readers wouldn’t take issue with such details and can read historical texts in the context of their time, but admittedly I’m not very good at that. I see an audio version of this book is set to release alongside the printed reissue, and I’d be interested to know whether the slurs were removed or replaced for the recording.
Ultimately, as with all books really, this just comes down to personal taste. Overall, I liked this story, I’ve read many like it and will continue to do so, but I just didn’t gel with the way it was told. I’d still recommend this to anyone who likes to read introspective, women centric narratives, focusing on mental health.
Many thanks to Faber & Faber for providing an ebook via Netgalley for review!
With natural comparisons to The Bell Jar, this is a must read for Plath fans as well as those of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water (a personal favourite), or frankly anyone interested in the female psyche or the experiences of women who’ve been institutionalised. There’s also a movie night scenario recounted towards the end of this book which had echoes of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest for me, although I can’t actually remember if there was such a scene in that book…
Anyway, I should have loved this, and thought I was going to, but it didn’t take very far in for me to realise that stylistically, this just didn’t work for me for a large chunk of the book. Undoubtedly poetic and beautiful at times, the writing was ultimately too surreal for my tastes. As you might expect from the title, there is lots of imagery and metaphors to do with snow, the cold, being frozen etc. There’s also quite a lot of religion in this book, mostly because as part of her psychosis developed after a traumatic childbirth, the protagonist, Marthe, believes herself to be God, or Jesus Christ, or some form of the second coming. My grasp of the narrative, alongside my interest and investment, almost ebbed and flowed depending on how lucid and coherent Marthe was. Furthermore, the narrative constantly flits between first and third person. We are privy to some of Marthe’s internal monologue but otherwise it’s like we are witnessing interactions and events from a distance. This is made even more confusing as dialogue isn’t clearly shown with traditional speech marks. If I’d have just let the language flow over me, I’d probably have enjoyed this book more, but I felt there was just so much to unpack, so it was hard not to do a close read of this and turn off the analytical part of my reading brain.
The links to surrealism are highlighted by Claire-Louise Bennett in her fantastic introduction, written for this reissue by Faber Editions (this novel being heavily autobiographical and having first been published in 1930.) I actually read the introduction first this time (I usually read it at the end of a book as I feel it often spoils too much) and I’m very glad I did as it definitely helped contextualised the writing and gave enough background information on the author and time period to set the scene. In the intro, Bennett makes a comparison between this work and Leonora Carrington’s Down Below, which I have owned for ages and now have a renewed interest to pick up soon.
I’ve read quite a few reviews of this one and was very surprised that none I came across mentioned there are multiple instances of racial slurs and anti-Semitic language used. Now, even though this is a heavily autobiographical narrative set in the late 1920s and such language might well have been common place, as a modern reader at least, it still makes you wince to read it. There’s a fair amount of fat phobic language littered throughout too. I guess some modern readers wouldn’t take issue with such details and can read historical texts in the context of their time, but admittedly I’m not very good at that. I see an audio version of this book is set to release alongside the printed reissue, and I’d be interested to know whether the slurs were removed or replaced for the recording.
Ultimately, as with all books really, this just comes down to personal taste. Overall, I liked this story, I’ve read many like it and will continue to do so, but I just didn’t gel with the way it was told. I’d still recommend this to anyone who likes to read introspective, women centric narratives, focusing on mental health.
Many thanks to Faber & Faber for providing an ebook via Netgalley for review!
December 15, 2023
The Shutter of Snow by Emily Holmes Coleman is a lesser-known predecessor of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath insofar as it is a fictionalised story of institutionalisation from an author with first hand experience of having been institutionalised. In The Shutter of Snow, which was first published in 1930, Marthe Gail finds herself separated from her baby and locked away within Gorestown State Hospital due to post-natal psychosis. Marthe's story is presumably autobiographical given its similarly to Coleman's own experience of being shut away in a mental asylum following the birth of her child.
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The Shutter of Snow documents Marthe's stay at Gorestown State Hospital. I was fascinated by Coleman's lifting the lid on the practices of the day, and surprised by some of the treatments such as prolonged bathing, wrapping in sheets, and long periods of restraint. The main success of the novel in my view, however, is in its depiction of the primarily female world of the hospital. The hospital and its goings on take centre stage in Coleman's narrative, with Marthe's pre-illness life remaining firmly on the periphery. The result is an engaging portrayal of a group of women who, at their darkest moments, are forced to eat, sleep and live together whether they like it or not (and, reader, they do not like it one bit). Within the hospital these women form their own hierarchies, friendships and rivalries, and it's difficult to read of their plights without feeling moved, especially given the story's presumed basis in fact.
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Whilst interesting, The Shutter of Snow is a difficult book to read. It's told in a third person stream of consciousness so it sticks closely to Marthe, who is only sometimes sane, making it hard to tell what is going on and what is delusion. That's fairly standard in novels with mentally unwell protagonists but something about this one - perhaps its dated writing style - made the reading experience feel oddly like a chore. I also thought it was interesting that the book was presented as purely a series of events, being almost devoid of any explucit insight into mental health care or motherhood,
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Overall I did think this book would have benefited from some changes to the narrative structure, but I liked it as a window into the treatment of 1920s mental health issues, and appreciate it as a product of its time.
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The Shutter of Snow documents Marthe's stay at Gorestown State Hospital. I was fascinated by Coleman's lifting the lid on the practices of the day, and surprised by some of the treatments such as prolonged bathing, wrapping in sheets, and long periods of restraint. The main success of the novel in my view, however, is in its depiction of the primarily female world of the hospital. The hospital and its goings on take centre stage in Coleman's narrative, with Marthe's pre-illness life remaining firmly on the periphery. The result is an engaging portrayal of a group of women who, at their darkest moments, are forced to eat, sleep and live together whether they like it or not (and, reader, they do not like it one bit). Within the hospital these women form their own hierarchies, friendships and rivalries, and it's difficult to read of their plights without feeling moved, especially given the story's presumed basis in fact.
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Whilst interesting, The Shutter of Snow is a difficult book to read. It's told in a third person stream of consciousness so it sticks closely to Marthe, who is only sometimes sane, making it hard to tell what is going on and what is delusion. That's fairly standard in novels with mentally unwell protagonists but something about this one - perhaps its dated writing style - made the reading experience feel oddly like a chore. I also thought it was interesting that the book was presented as purely a series of events, being almost devoid of any explucit insight into mental health care or motherhood,
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Overall I did think this book would have benefited from some changes to the narrative structure, but I liked it as a window into the treatment of 1920s mental health issues, and appreciate it as a product of its time.
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April 26, 2025
Oh man I was so disappointed in this one. I've had it on my to read list for a while and was so looking forward to it.
The subject matter sounded so interesting but the writing style, a disjointed, stream of consciousness surrealist mess just ruined it for me.
The introduction to the book points out all the things that the novel is supposed to highlight and represent, the subjugation of women, the mishandling of mental health patients, the
misunderstanding of post-natal depression and psychosis; however the story never really gets it together enough to form a coherent look at these issues.
A real 1 star shame.
The subject matter sounded so interesting but the writing style, a disjointed, stream of consciousness surrealist mess just ruined it for me.
The introduction to the book points out all the things that the novel is supposed to highlight and represent, the subjugation of women, the mishandling of mental health patients, the
misunderstanding of post-natal depression and psychosis; however the story never really gets it together enough to form a coherent look at these issues.
A real 1 star shame.
May 1, 2022
Coleman's fictionalised account of the postpartum psychosis for which she was confined for two months in an asylum fits the 'madwoman in the attic' stereotype of difficult women misunderstood and incarcerated by ignorant men. In the introduction to the Virago edition, Callil and Siepman commend the author's 'marvellous eye for the modes of speech of the mad companions, the hearty nurses and silly doctors who inhabit Marthe's madhouse', a cohabitation to which they and many reviewers pay insufficient attention. The doctor in charge of Marthe's case is a woman whose alleged 'silliness' seemingly resides in her pedantic lack of creativity and in her conspiracy with Christopher, Martha's colourless husband, providing him with psychiatric textbooks to read. Writers and artists invariably distinguish themselves from their untalented, fat, flabby fellow inmates with bad teeth and hair, and especially from those 'fat smug inefficient little fools' in positions of authority: 'I must not strike her, nor hurt her, only humiliate her to the end.' (202) It's a forerunner of the romanticised image of the tortured genius, a post-Plath genre from which Janet Frame alone emerges with her admirable ordinariness intact. For a case-study in conventional psychiatric treatment, Charlotte Perkins Gilman is perhaps more informative because less allusive and less convinced of her own genius. Marthe's perspicuous intelligence, imagination and refinement supposedly mark her out as an exception to the rule of the asylum: 'She was God she was God. If it could not be known by her singing this at least was proof. She could write again.' (107) 'I could walk in the water if they could show me the water and it would be very easy.' (108) Marthe may have had in mind the image of herself walking on the water. The subject's soaring stream of consciousness abides by its own rules of punctuation, mostly omitting commas and discarding those apostrophes indicating contraction except where she wishes to avoid misunderstanding ('doesnt', 'mustnt, 'wont', 'Im', but 'we'll') yet retaining all those of personal possession. Ownership is important: letters, personal effects and, above all, appropriations of other inmates' foolish lives: 'I took your pictures you silly old fool because you pray so much.' (151) An imaginative flight of fancy, alternately lyrical and ludic, not to be taken literally!
June 26, 2025
You feel the protagonist’s pain and experience her grief and confused state of mind with her- it takes tremendous writing to make this happen.
Also i hope all men just pull their shit together and stop undermining the toll it takes on women to give birth.
Also i hope all men just pull their shit together and stop undermining the toll it takes on women to give birth.
November 13, 2022
It is a kind of flow. Dreams, reality, memories, illusions - all mingled.
At the beginning I had to get used to this narration but when I done it it was a pure pleasure.
The world of a patient of a psychiatric hospital in the beginning of XX century (in USA) is described here through the eyes of a patient. It is the world where the keys on the waist of the nurses have almost magical power (because they allow to go through the always locked doors). It is the world where one can reply normal (correct) answers (where one is, why one is in a hospital and so on) but in the other hand one still believes in delusions.
Emily Holmes Coleman had a mental breakdown and she spent a period in a psychiatric hospital and her experience makes the book so real and so poignant. There is tenderness but also violence, there is friendship but also loneliness.
Coleman knew a human nature, especially the people with mental illness but also the staff of the psychiatric hospital in her times.
If you are open for the different narration and you want to understand better what it is to be mentally ill - you should read this book.
[I have had some knowledge of this topic and in my opinion there are really good examples of the minds of the people with delusions]
At the beginning I had to get used to this narration but when I done it it was a pure pleasure.
The world of a patient of a psychiatric hospital in the beginning of XX century (in USA) is described here through the eyes of a patient. It is the world where the keys on the waist of the nurses have almost magical power (because they allow to go through the always locked doors). It is the world where one can reply normal (correct) answers (where one is, why one is in a hospital and so on) but in the other hand one still believes in delusions.
Emily Holmes Coleman had a mental breakdown and she spent a period in a psychiatric hospital and her experience makes the book so real and so poignant. There is tenderness but also violence, there is friendship but also loneliness.
Coleman knew a human nature, especially the people with mental illness but also the staff of the psychiatric hospital in her times.
"They were proud, and deliciously ate their indifference."
If you are open for the different narration and you want to understand better what it is to be mentally ill - you should read this book.
[I have had some knowledge of this topic and in my opinion there are really good examples of the minds of the people with delusions]
October 15, 2024
Quiero empezar diciendo que creo que mi nota no es representativa de la realidad. Me llamó mucho la sinopsis de este libro, semi-autobiográfico, acerca de una mujer nacida en 1930 que tras sufrir una fiebre acompañada de una crisis nerviosa al dar a luz es ingresada en una planta psiquiátrica de la época. Creía que iba a encontrarme con una prosa quizás más informativa, y no es para nada lo que esperaba. Por esto mismo, creo que mi nota se debe más a las expectativas que tenía creadas que a la calidad de la historia.
Lo cierto es que aunque la idea general del libro no es demasiado complicada de seguir, es un galimatías de historia, lo cual era la intención y está muy conseguido. Transmite perfectamente el estado de confusión, surrealismo e incomprensión que experimenta la protagonista. Como consecuencia, la historia ha sido muy difícil de seguir y en muchos momentos carecía de sentido, había muchas incongruencias (insisto en que sé que esta era la intención).
No me ha gustado, sin embargo, que se cambie de primera a tercera persona indiscriminadamente y la amplia libertad en el uso de la ortografía, porque, insisto, se ha hecho difícil de seguir.
En momentos, me he reído mucho y me han llegado a sorprender ciertas prácticas, y a darme mucha pena y rabia, pero lo cierto es que me ha costado la vida leer escasas 100 páginas y me he aburrido un poco...
Lo cierto es que aunque la idea general del libro no es demasiado complicada de seguir, es un galimatías de historia, lo cual era la intención y está muy conseguido. Transmite perfectamente el estado de confusión, surrealismo e incomprensión que experimenta la protagonista. Como consecuencia, la historia ha sido muy difícil de seguir y en muchos momentos carecía de sentido, había muchas incongruencias (insisto en que sé que esta era la intención).
No me ha gustado, sin embargo, que se cambie de primera a tercera persona indiscriminadamente y la amplia libertad en el uso de la ortografía, porque, insisto, se ha hecho difícil de seguir.
En momentos, me he reído mucho y me han llegado a sorprender ciertas prácticas, y a darme mucha pena y rabia, pero lo cierto es que me ha costado la vida leer escasas 100 páginas y me he aburrido un poco...
October 5, 2023
sevmedim. sanirim bu kitabi sevmek icin gerekli olan gidik kizlik seviyesinde degilim ya da kitap cidden olmamıs
bi kere kim konusuyo kim dusunuyo anlayamıyon bi 1. agız bi 3. agıza donuyo tırnak isareti falan hak getire asla yok o yuzden inanilmaz karısık sanki aklına ne geldiyse arka arkaya yazmıs gibi. belki bunun da alıcısı vardır bu arada bana pek hitap etmiyor sadece
marthe ablamızla biraz relateledim sayılır cunku gercekten kafası parca parca dagılmıs oraya buraya ve toplayamıyo yani okuduklarimizin ruya mı konustukları mi gercekten dusunduklerimi dusundukleriyse ne kadari gercek ne kadari degil sanki kendi de bilmiyo gibiydi kendisini cok iyi anliyor ve acısını paylasıyorum onun haricinde yok benlik degildi
ben baska gidik kiz kitaplari okuyacagim iyi geceler
bi kere kim konusuyo kim dusunuyo anlayamıyon bi 1. agız bi 3. agıza donuyo tırnak isareti falan hak getire asla yok o yuzden inanilmaz karısık sanki aklına ne geldiyse arka arkaya yazmıs gibi. belki bunun da alıcısı vardır bu arada bana pek hitap etmiyor sadece
marthe ablamızla biraz relateledim sayılır cunku gercekten kafası parca parca dagılmıs oraya buraya ve toplayamıyo yani okuduklarimizin ruya mı konustukları mi gercekten dusunduklerimi dusundukleriyse ne kadari gercek ne kadari degil sanki kendi de bilmiyo gibiydi kendisini cok iyi anliyor ve acısını paylasıyorum onun haricinde yok benlik degildi
ben baska gidik kiz kitaplari okuyacagim iyi geceler
July 26, 2021
Although there is some interesting writing here, I struggled to really get into this book. It was too fragmented and abstract. I realise this style suits the story a woman in a mental asylum but it left me cold. If you want to read a great book about a woman's experiences in a mental asylum, read "Faces in the Water" by Janet Frame.
July 29, 2015
This book is beautifully constructed, wonderfully written and was thoroughly enjoyable to read. It was the only book Coleman published, which is shame, but also a boon. Especially in these days where everything has to be a series of at least fifteen books.
August 8, 2023
This novel was surreal. Most of the time I couldn’t tell what was reality, what was a memory, and what was a delusion. The vivid imagery made it all the more confronting. I can only imagine how troubling it would have been, being a woman experiencing mental health problems in the 1930s.
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