Classics Corner: I Never Promised You A Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg; Disturbing But Memorable Novel About A Woman Struggling With Schizophrenia
By Julie Sara Porter
Bookworm Reviews
Spoilers: No this book has nothing to do with the classic country song of the same name by Lynn Anderson except sharing a title.
Instead I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, shows what happens when a highly creative person has schizophrenia. The hallucinatory world that they create in their mind could be a peaceful retreat one minute and a walking nightmare of frightening creatures and self-destruction, the next.
16-year-old Deborah Blau is being taken to a psychiatric hospital. She has hallucinations of a fantasy world of her creation called Yr and has lately been cutting herself in punishment because the Yrian creatures order her to. At first her parents are in denial. They are a typical suburban family. They worked hard to get to where they were and to avoid prejudice from their Antisemitic neighbors. This shouldn't happen to them. But it does and when Deborah keeps harming herself, they realize that they have no choice but to send her to the hospital.
The book is fascinating as we get into possibilities of the cause of Deborah's schizophrenia and why it began so early. After all schizophrenia doesn't usually begin until one reaches their late teens or early twenties. There are many probable causes such as an operation to remove a tumor from Deborah's brain, the family going through a period of poverty and having to live with a strict Old World grandfather, and a stint in summer camp where she was bullied by anti-Semitic campers and teachers. There wasn't one specific reason, but several.
Of course psychological studies marched past the book's 1962 published date and it's late 1940’s setting. We now realize that exterior situations may not be the only causes for psychiatric disorders. Sometimes it's neurological or genetic reasons that are the cause.
However, it is human nature to look for reasons and explanations behind the unexplained. Why would a bright talented young woman suddenly withdraw into herself and succumb to hallucinations? There must be a reason and Deborah, her family, and psychiatrist Dr. Fried are determined to find it.
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden also shows how the mind of a schizophrenic works by using their delusions to protect oneself and create barriers and prohibitions from the outside world. It also shows the difference between creative imagination and psychological hallucination and delusion. Nowhere is this most prominent than in Deborah's brain creating Yr.
When she's a child, Yr is a place that she retreats to in times of comfort. She believes that the characters protect and love her. She created little interesting details like a language called Yrian and the world's separate time frame. She has a strong creative artistic mind that could write fantasy stories if properly used. However, when Yr takes on a sinister tone is when the depths of Deborah's mental illness reveals her private Paradise is instead a private Hell.
As she grows older, Deborah's delusions become more terrifying as Yrian characters threaten her with punishments as she cuts and burns herself to acquiesce to their rages. This shows that while there is nothing wrong with creating an imaginary world, what made Deborah's world a product of insanity is that they wanted to hurt her or rather her own fears and insecurities manifested themselves as beings to hurt her.
Fried helps her recognize the monsters found in Yr were created by her own psyche. For example, she reveals that one of the Yrian characters is actually a stand-in for Deborah's strict grandfather.
Since Deborah's fantasy life is such a large part of her mental illness, Fried has to help Deborah see through her delusions by using reality. Once, Deborah reveals that the Yrians are punishing her because she almost threw her baby sister out of a window. Dr. Fried uses simple logic to help her realize that since Deborah was five years old at the time, she could not have lifted the baby and opened the large heavy window by herself.
Above all, Deborah receives the courage to silence her hallucinations and to accept a world beyond them. In the psychiatric hospital, Deborah makes friends with other patients who also have mental illnesses such as one who believes that she is married to the abdicated King Edward. Deborah and the other patients call themselves “nuts” and “sickos” and mock the orderlies and patients who aren't as mentally ill as they are or worse than them.
However, they want lives outside the hospital. The patients look on with envy at Doris, a patient who left the hospital and started a new life. When Doris returns after a relapse, they react with fear that if that happened to her, it could happen to anyone. However, Deborah wants to recover to succeed when Doris did not.
When Deborah strives to recover, she has to take the good and bad of the real world around her. When she argues about a friend's punishment, Fried quotes the book's title and says that she never promised life would be perfect or fair. There will always be hardships, violence, and hatred. People will mess up and sometimes the wrong people will get in trouble.
The difference is that Deborah can choose to live in that world instead of one ruled by her mental illness and the fear it represents.
