Greenberg, Joanne (Goldenberg) - R. V. Cassill
R. V. CASSILL
Deborah Blau's psychosis—the focus of ["I Never Promised You a Rose Garden"]—is the flowering, in the second American-born generation, of her family's social and domestic pathology. The illness is, at the same time, an expedient, for survival amid the contradictions with which her inherited world is furnished, and an irrationally cunning search for the mental health which would be a fit culmination of a flight from the Old World to the New….
In mid-adolescence, the other world, which [Deborah] calls Yr, is ready to receive her. She has no language left to protest her half-chosen abduction into this glamorous and tormenting world except an attempt at suicide. The present drama of the novel begins when her parents are forced to interpret this bloody appeal correctly and take her to a mental hospital.
In the hospital, Deborah's symptoms get spectacularly worse…. When standard therapies are of no avail, she is transferred to a "locked...
[The entire page is 502 words long]
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