Theodore Roethke (Modern Critical Views Series) Book

If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression'a slight hysterical tendency'what is one to do? This may not be a ghost story, but it is a tale of horror just the same. The most frightening books do not make me cower underneath my covers in the dark. They give the feeling of despair, they make the reader empathize with the darkness and emotional turmoil of the narrator. They make one feel claustrophobic.

Women's mental problems have always been dismissed as hysteria, from the beginning of time. It is this overwhelming diminution of mental problems that led to so many being institutionalized in the past, and it is the reason why the repressed Victorian woman was such a tremendous symbol of the age.

That mentally unsound character recurs again in this little short story, an exceptionally fine example of how a woman, neglected, belittled, dismissed, descends into insanity.