55 pages • 1 hour read
Joanne Greenberg (Hannah Green)I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1964A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Joanne Greenberg
Joanne Greenberg was born in 1932, and her semi-autobiographical novel I Never Promised You a Rose Garden addresses Greenberg’s own experiences of antisemitism, depression, creativity, and a thirst for life against all odds. The novel takes place just after World War II (WWII). The protagonist, Deborah, is largely shaped by both the war itself and the post-war era, as well as the antisemitism that was rampant during these periods, and the immigrant history of her family.
Greenberg was born to immigrant parents during the Great Depression in Brooklyn, New York. Her life was shaped by this history, by her place as a Jewish American, and by the resulting mental-emotional chaos that led to the writing of her most famous novel. She lived through harrowing times, her own personal tragedies, and adopted many different career paths during her life. She entered a mental health facility at age 16 and was the youngest patient ever to have been admitted. Greenberg was released for the last time in 1951. She has written 42 books, and, at age 90, published a memoir. As I Never Promised You a Rose Garden’s conclusion suggests Deborah may tutor, Greenberg also became a tutor of Hebrew and Latin. She received a wealth of recognition for her work as a writer, including the National Jewish Book Award for fiction, and helped to break down barriers of understanding between people who are considered to be of “healthy” mind and those with mental health conditions.
Historical Context: Mid-20th-Century Mental Healthcare
The first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, commonly called the DSM, was not published until 1952. The DSM, now in its fifth edition, is a comprehensive attempt to standardize diagnostic criteria for mental health disorders that is ever-changing as our understanding of mental health grows. Prior to the first DSM, psychotherapy was largely concerned with so-called “major disturbances” of the psyche. These mental health disorders ran the gamut of diagnoses today. These “major disturbances” were typically mental health disorders that impeded a person’s day-to-day functions. Often, the only treatment available was confinement to a mental health facility. Many of these “major disturbances” were gathered under the label of schizophrenia, a very particular diagnosis today that served as an umbrella term post-WWII. With little standardization, there were no definitive metrics for diagnoses. As a result, diagnoses were often at the whims of individual doctors who held institutional power over the institutionalized. Due to the power of confinement given to a legal diagnosis, mental health facilities were often used to sequester marginalized people away from society, particular people of color and LGBTQ+ people (LGBTQ+ identity was widely considered to be a mental health condition that impacted so-called “normal” functioning). As such, diagnoses and discussions of mental health pre-DSM do not reflect contemporary understandings.
Lack of oversight and standardization of mental healthcare, combined with a lack of public knowledge of mental health, led to severe stigma for people with diagnoses in the mid-20th century. This public stigma reinforced the lack of standardized oversight in mental healthcare, leaving patients open to abusive “cures” and dehumanization. In the novel, Deborah is subjected to wet sheet pack treatment, where she is wrapped in icy sheets for hours. This treatment is widely understood as inhumane and traumatizing today, due to the often-involuntary nature of the treatment. Likewise, patients at Deborah’s mental health facility are dehumanized, even by other patients, such as when Deborah calls Sylvie “the mute piece of ward furniture” (90). I Never Promised You a Rose Garden reflects a pre-DSM understanding of mental health that is often rooted in inconsistent diagnoses and inhumane treatment.
