Excerpt from "The Chronicle Review, " Jeffrey Berman

Excerpt from *The Chronicle Review*		Book Description
February 15, 2002 http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i23/23b00701.htm

Syllabuses of Risk

By JEFFREY BERMAN

I was sitting in my office, during my regularly scheduled summer-session office hours, when Olivia (I am using pseudonyms) walked hesitatingly in, appearing tired and somber. Something was wrong. She was one of 12 students taking English 447, "The Historical/Hysterical Imagination," which focused on the cultural and psychological implications of mental illness. Olivia had missed the previous three-hour class, her first absence. A few days before, she had been her usual animated self in class. An excellent student, she had turned in an A essay on Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening, a story about a young woman's depression, disillusionment, and suicide. Now she seemed as gloomy and incommunicative as Chopin's protagonist.

For a few seconds Olivia remained silent, and I looked at her, anticipating the worst. Was there a death in the family? A serious illness? A breakup in a relationship? When she finally spoke, she told me that she was feeling anxious and depressed, not for any of the reasons that I had guessed, but because of the two novels we had just read, The Awakening and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. She said they made her feel like she had received a one-two punch.

I had been expecting something like Olivia's response. Two months earlier, another student taking the same course during the spring semester, Chrissy, had told me that she had experienced nightmares and insomnia while reading D.M. Thomas's The White Hotel. Chrissy had been horrified by the novel's graphic description of the heroine's rape and murder at the infamous Babi Yar in Kiev, where many thousands were murdered during World War II. She told me that The White Hotel was not the first book to have had such an effect on her, and she agreed to my request to write a brief essay describing what had happened. In her paper, she noted that reading had always been one of her greatest pleasures, but that she had learned when she was young that she could not read certain books -- not because they were too difficult, but because they prevented her from sleeping at night. The first story that had evoked that response was The Diary of Anne Frank, which she read when she was 10. "As I read the book I noticed that I was more afraid of the dark than normal. I had trouble sleeping, and often had nightmares about being hunted and captured by the Nazis," she wrote. She never finished the book.

In junior high and high school, she was able to avoid texts with disturbing content, but when she went to college and began studying the Holocaust, the nightmares returned. Similarly, reading an account of the murder of the Romanovs literally made her sick. In Chrissy's words, "The authors ... went into minute detail of how these bodies must have looked, not leaving out one detail, making sure it was understood that no one could have possibly survived the carnage. For days after this I would be able to picture the bloated bodies with their matted hair turned black from all the blood, and feel like I might just hurl."

Chrissy's essay revealed that The White Hotel was wrenching because it made her participate in the heroine's gruesome death: "As Lisa tried desperately to save herself and her son, I was reminded of my nightmares where I was being hunted and I had to try to outwit and escape those who would capture and kill me. Every part of that section from the rape to the description of the layers and layers of murdered corpses in that ravine sickened and frightened me," Chrissy wrote. She finished the novel but was angry that she had been forced to read it.

We worry about the impact of books on young children, she told me, but "people do not often think of the consequences of reading violent disturbing material when you are older." Nor did she think that her response was unusual: "Anyone who can read a book as though they are seeing a movie in their mind could be similarly affected, and I think for this reason teachers ought to be careful in what they assign."

I have received written permission from the students whose writings appear here (as well as permission from the University at Albany Institutional Review Board, which must approve all human research) to use their cases. They are real, and I know that many readers could add similar experiences from their own classrooms. For, sooner or later, every literature teacher confronts the fact that the books we assign can trigger a student's crisis.

Chrissy's vivid imagination had allowed her to visualize every hideous detail in The White Hotel. Her identification with the doomed characters was so intense that she, too, felt hunted and trapped. It was as if the boundaries between self and other, and between life and art, had vanished. She must have known while reading The White Hotel that she could have closed the book at any time, but the story seemed to invade her unconscious mind, evoking a nightmare from which she could not escape. Reading the story literally sickened her, and she experienced intense anxiety, gastrointestinal symptoms, and agoraphobia. She observed elsewhere in her essay that reading novels or seeing films containing gratuitous violence was not nearly as troubling to her as reading books or watching films that depicted real, historical violence, like Schindler's List.

To be sure, history cannot be banished from literature or from literature classrooms simply because it is disturbing. Nor can we avoid books that delve into depression or suicide or anxiety. Isn't one of the very strengths of literature that it engages our emotions? But should we teachers take special precautions when assigning novels like The White Hotel? Should we warn our students that some might find class readings painful, even traumatic? I had neglected to do so in Chrissy's class. But how representative is her response? Do a significant number of college students find reading so upsetting that they actually become physically and psychologically ill?

I decided to pursue the question further. When teaching the same course in summer school, I informed the students that some books on the syllabus might place them at risk, and I urged them to speak to me if that occurred. I also told them that they could write the formal essay assigned not on a book but on how it was upsetting them, if they did find themselves becoming at risk. Within a few weeks, two of the 12 undergraduates in the class came to my office, separately, and revealed that they were feeling anxious and depressed while reading The Awakening and The Bell Jar.

One of the students, Justine, wrote an essay that began by noting that she had been depressed and lonely the preceding summer: "My grandmother's death, being isolated in the dorm, attempting to write at the time what seemed the most impossible paper to make up an incomplete, most of the summer away from my boyfriend, and fear that I had a sexually transmitted disease drove me to putting an iron in the bathtub in an attempt to electrocute myself (grateful then and now that the cord could not reach an outlet). I turned my incomplete in on time and it turned out I did not have a sexually transmitted disease." With her mother's help, Justine had recovered, but, this summer, she had started to feel depressed again -- particularly when she identified with Esther Greenwood's symptoms in the Plath novel. She noted the similarities between Esther and herself: their age, their English majors, the difficulties they had writing, and more. "The Bell Jar made me think about suicide more clearly because of its realness in terms of Esther's suicide attempts," Justine wrote. "I laughed when Esther looked up depression and saw her symptoms matched. Looking up illnesses got the better of me last summer when I thought I had a sexually transmitted disease."

The knowledge that Sylvia Plath had committed suicide shortly after writing The Bell Jar only made the novel more frightening. Justine never romanticized suicide in the paper she wrote for me, but she described how depression led to constricted thinking, making her worry that she would share Esther's fate. Rather than broadening her perspective, as literature often does, reading the book seemed to have narrowed her vision, at least temporarily.

Justine allowed me to read her essay anonymously to her classmates, and she later observed that she was glad she had written the paper, despite the fact that it was painful to hear her words read aloud. "I believe that I am stronger after writing," she later wrote.

Olivia was the other student who found herself at risk in my summer-school course, and, as she sat in my office on that day she came to see me, she told me that The Awakening and The Bell Jar unexpectedly reminded her of the depression she had experienced five years earlier, when she was 16. The old feelings of melancholy had returned in the last two weeks, engulfing her in sadness. Alarmed by her appearance, I suggested that she visit the university counseling center, but she replied, "My parents would kill me if they knew I was seeing a therapist. I don't stigmatize mental illness in others, but I do in myself." We spoke for a few minutes, and then I asked her whether, instead of taking the final examination, she would prefer to write a new essay, describing how the two novels had placed her at risk. I told her that the reader-response essay would probably require more work than the final exam, but that it might enable her to understand the novels' impact on her life. I didn't know whether writing about that topic would help or hurt her, but she readily agreed to my suggestion and, a week later, submitted a detailed account of her reading experience.

Olivia's essay described her growing fear that her past depression was returning. Reading The Awakening, she found her sleep patterns disturbed. Nor did the mood lift by sunrise: "I felt claustrophobic, though I was in the middle of the room, with nothing around me. Sitting there quietly, I felt cornered, cramped, suffocated. Suddenly, I thought of Esther's bell jar, her type of 'indescribable oppression.' I could sense the boundaries of the transparent bell-shaped glass; within it, I was trapped in this feeling, this mood of unsettlement and extreme anxiety. This was the way I felt in high school, not even comfortable in my own skin."

Olivia's mood had lasted for the two weeks that our class discussed The Awakening and The Bell Jar. She believed that everything she felt during her reading -- insomnia, confusion, loneliness, hopelessness, nothingness -- was condensed by Plath into two words: bell jar. She added that, as the course was ending, she began to feel the bell jar lift. She said she was thankful that she was taking the class in the short summer session. And she was grateful that I had warned her about the readings, and that she had had the opportunity to write about her response. She felt that writing the essay was therapeutic, because it enabled her to discover not only the similarities but also the differences between her own situation and those of the fictional characters. "Though I experienced such haunting things, I am glad to have read the material," she concluded. "I know that I am not alone. Nor does this hinder me from putting The Awakening on my shelf as one of my favorite novels."

The cases of my three students raise several important pedagogical questions. All of the students who came to see me about their responses to the books we were reading were female. Does that mean that female students -- who typically experience higher incidences of depression than their male counterparts -- are at greater risk when reading psychologically dark stories, particularly when those stories are about vulnerable female characters? How does the act of reading contribute to a student's feelings of isolation and hopelessness? Should teachers receive special training so that they can identify those students who might become at risk when reading stories about depression? Should they encourage students, as I did, to write about these experiences?

The essays I have cited are cautionary tales. Their message is not so much that we should avoid asking students to read emotionally charged texts, but that we need to give more thought to how we do so. Most college teachers assume that only severely disturbed students might become at risk from a reading assignment. Yet serious psychological illnesses among college students are far more prevalent than most teachers believe. Indeed, a Harvard Medical School researcher has estimated that 37 percent of Americans age 15 to 24, many of whom are college students, have a diagnosable mental illness.

It should not be surprising that reading can become painful, even traumatic. As I discussed in my book Surviving Literary Suicide (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), literature can, in an Aristotelian sense, "purge" readers of toxic emotions and lead to catharsis, but it can also, in a Platonic sense, "infect" readers and lead to illness. I don't mean to suggest here a simple stimulus-response model of reading. Rather, a reader's identification with a fantasy, fear, or conflict in a text may be so powerful and disturbing that it threatens to overwhelm his or her defenses. The most striking example of the "infection," or "contagion," theory of literature is The Sufferings of Young Werther, Goethe's confessional novel about a passionate young man who kills himself because of unrequited love. When the book was published, many readers, dressed like Werther, committed suicide in imitation; some had copies of the novel in their pockets. The sociologist David Phillips, who coined the expression "the Werther effect," estimated that if a celebrity commits suicide, suicides go up an average of 1 percent in the following month.

Moreover, there is ample evidence that young people who come to our classrooms today are more at risk for depression and even suicide than they once were. As Kaye Redfield Jamison, who is a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, noted a few years ago in Night Falls Fast, "Suicide in the young, which has at least tripled over the past 45 years, is, without argument, one of the most serious public health problems." She went on to say that a 1995 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had found that one in 10 college students had seriously considered suicide in the previous year. "Most," she said, "had gone so far as to draw up a plan."

Gender also plays a role in both attempted and completed suicide. According to Jamison, women in the United States are two to three times more likely to attempt suicide than men, although men are four times as likely to actually kill themselves. We also know that women are more likely to suffer from depression than men. Small wonder, then, that women in my literature and writing classes are far more likely to write about depression and suicide than the men in the class. And that, at least in my experience, the female students are more likely to find themselves becoming anxious or depressed when reading.

There are no easy solutions to enable us to challenge students with difficult texts, without shattering their identity. But my own experience suggests that, to begin with, we can and must alert students to the possibility that some of them might respond to a classroom reading or writing assignment in a way similar to how some people react to a flu vaccination: namely, by developing symptoms of the illness against which they have been inoculated. Generally, in the case of reading, as in the case of vaccination, the symptoms are mild to moderate in intensity and disappear in a few days. But, for a period, a novel like The Bell Jar may be so real to certain readers that they cannot help imagining themselves suffering from the protagonist's fears and maladies. Just as physicians and pharmacists routinely inform their patients of possible adverse reactions to a drug, so might teachers alert their students to the untoward consequences of a novel or a writing assignment. It doesn't require much time or effort to alert students to the possibility that they might become at risk. The present strategy of "Don't ask, don't tell" is no more effective in education than in the military.

Even then, it will not always be possible to detect when -- and which -- students are at risk. Reading Olivia's first A essay on The Awakening without benefit of her second, more personal one, I did not infer that she was at risk. Nor would I have known that Justine was at risk had it not been for my conversation with Chrissy, who sensitized me to risky reading. Yet it is not unusual for students to tell a teacher that they are "having problems" with a reading or writing assignment, and a simple question might help open up whether those are intellectual or emotional difficulties.

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