brilliant description of mental illness
By sally tarbox on 26 Dec. 2011
Format: Paperback
Set in an American mental hospital in the 1920s, this is the story of a young woman suffering a bout of insanity following the birth of her child. Written in the third person, yet simultaneously as if by the patient herself, it tells of everyday life; interchanges with the staff and patients, activities in the hospital, and in paragraphs of poetic prose takes us inside the mind of Marthe.
The title refers both to the snow that features throughout as Marthe looks out of the window; and of course to her state of mind. A brilliant attempt to describe mental illness, Coleman was prompted to write this following her own time in such a hospital. ( )

very good profile(i think) of a mental breakdown. ( )

This short stream-of-consciousness novel was first published in 1930. It records the thoughts and feelings of a woman in a mental hospital, following a nervous breakdown. At the beginning, it feels disjointed, but the reader soon gets into the flow, and then the idiosyncrasies of the style work really well for the subject. By the end of this short novel, I was completely immersed, a participant in this woman’s experience. She’s no victim, even though she does harbor a few delusions. Why shouldn’t a woman be Jesus Christ this time around? ( )

As a young woman, in the 1920's, Coleman, after suffering a very high fever, became convinced she was Christ (all this is autobiographical) and spent a few months in Rochester State Hospital. [The Shutter of Snow] is her remarkable fictionalization of the experience. How to say this? With exquisite writing - I hesitate to say 'poetic' as this will condemn the book as 'too hard' for some - she captures the dissociated state of someone who has lost hold of acceptable reality. The style of writing, flowing and strange, conveys the fluid state of psychosis. A reader needn't attend to every word, it's best taken in as a series of felt images. After reading books like [One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest] it is a relief that this asylum, or the part Marthe Gail, the protagonist, is in anyway, is peopled with reasonably competent and kind (or at least, not unkind) staff for the most part and also with only the half-mad; everyone here experiences moments of total sanity, friendship, even a kind of gaiety; all are vulnerable, however, to losing it in the blink of an eye. It might irritate some that there is a minimum of punctuation, but I think it works with the situation. Here's an example of the writing, Coleman describing a new patient: Mrs Kemp had a badly used face. Her hair was pulled back from a red and uncomprehending forehead. Her mouth fell into her chin. She marched up and down the hall. Now she was no longer a symbol, she was a cello accompaniment to a dirge. She came like a tiger thieving and walked away from the theft. She came like a panther back and forth, raising a head at the end of the bars. And on the very last page, when Marthe is leaving the next morning, when she goes to collect her rings: The diamond sputtered in the sun going back, and she had it large upon her finger as she had had it long ago when she had first worn it and went self conscious down the street in the sun. ****1/2 ( )

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. ( )