Summary: The
Prelude to Ice Cream
McLean Hospital has hosted many famous patients, including
Ray Charles, James Taylor, Robert Lowell, and Sylvia Plath. Kaysen wonders
whether poets are particularly vulnerable to mental illness. McLean
boasts a beautifully landscaped campus and sits on a hill outside
the affluent town of Belmont, Massachusetts. Occasionally, the girls
are taken into town for ice cream, a field trip that requires a
complex system of chaperones and privileges. Patients can be restricted
to the ward, as Lisa is. Others require one or two nurses to accompany
them off the ward. Better-behaved patients travel in groups or even,
though rarely, by themselves. The nurses are nervous as the group
makes its way into Belmont, whether because of the complexity of
the duty or embarrassment, Kaysen is unsure.
Summary: Ice Cream
On a spring day soon after Daisy’s suicide, the nurses
decide to take the girls into town. Kaysen muses that good weather
gives people the courage to commit suicide. On the way to Belmont,
Kaysen reflects on the natural beauty flowering around her; even
the nurses seem less on edge. Kaysen finds that the tile pattern
on the floor of the ice cream parlor troubles her. The alternating
black and white pattern makes her think of indecision, as though
the irregular tiles represent too many choices. The girls order
their ice cream in typical fashion, playing suggestive word games
with the flavor names. The boy behind the counter inadvertently
asks the girls an innocent question with a sexual undertone. Perhaps
because of the high spirits of the day, no one takes advantage of
the opportunity.
Summary: Checks
Days on the ward are punctuated by “checks,” periodic
inspections by the nurses. The checks, which occur every five, fifteen,
or thirty minutes, are intrusive, interrupting the girls’ activities.
The familiar sound of the turning doorknob “murder[s]” time, in
Kaysen’s opinion. When time is quantified in such small measurements,
it moves by too quickly.
Summary: Sharps
The girls are forbidden to possess anything remotely sharp
for fear that they might injure themselves. Scissors, razors, pins,
earrings, and even belts are prohibited. Patients struggle to eat
with plastic or cardboard cutlery. Shaving one’s legs is a particularly
trying experience. Nurses need to check permission forms and supervise
the shaving. Kaysen is eighteen and supervised by a nurse only four years
older than she. Perhaps because of the humiliation, many of the
girls on the ward have hairy legs. Kaysen jokes that her fellow patients
are “early feminists.”
Analysis
Ray Charles, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and other famous
former residents of McLean Hospital share a gift for poetry. Poetry
is often distinguished from prose by its structure, a mosaic of
rhythm, meter, and highly ordered composition. Although poetry can
be free form, it is typically governed by a complex series of interior
rules. Kaysen, who admits to a fascination with patterns and order,
believes that the mentally ill are drawn to poetry’s insistence
on organization, perhaps as a form of relief from the chaos of their
minds. The appeal of “meter and cadence and rhythm” seems to “make
its makers mad,” in Kaysen’s eyes. Kaysen draws a comparison between
the chaotic but ordered nature of poetry to the occasional trips
the ward takes to an ice cream parlor in town. Town residents see
only an unruly gaggle of nurses and mental patients making its way
through the streets, but the procession is actually as carefully
ordered as a sonnet. The complexity of the nurse-to-patient ratios
that govern the size of the group corresponds to the internal systems
of poetry.
The punishing “checks” system illustrates the numbing
intrusiveness of life in confinement and reveals the nature of the
girls’ concept of time. The nurses conduct their checks with robotic
regularity, determining how much time passes between checks in accordance
with the likelihood that a patient will harm herself. The most grueling
check schedule doesn’t permit “enough time to drink a cup of coffee,
read three pages of a book, [or] take a shower.” The process underscores
the girls’ helplessness in the face of the nursing authorities and
the impossibility of even momentary reprieve; Kaysen discovers that
her graduation to half-hour checks is meaningless, as her roommate
remains on a fifteen-minute schedule. When time is quantified so
minutely, one’s awareness of its passing is acute and painful. Kaysen
describes checks as like a “pulse,” a neverending reminder of life
slipping away.
Confiscation of “sharps,” any possessions that the nurses
deem potentially dangerous to the girls, further infantilizes the
patients. The confiscations can be deeply personal, from graduation
pins to favorite earrings, and even absurd, as in the removal of
belts because of the spike in the buckle. The girls are both at
the mercy of their guardians and profoundly dependent on them, unable
to make any decisions without the consent of authority. This infantilization reaches
its peak in the act of shaving. Kaysen can only use a razor on her
legs in the presence of a nurse, who is only a few years older than she.
The patients are humiliated by their state of confinement in the most
personal aspects of their lives.
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