Introduction

As one of the most iconic public fi gures associated with mental illness, Sylvia Plath’s story is well known in some ways. But I want to begin with her because of the ways it is not. Plath made her experience with electroconvulsive therapy a central motif in both her fi ction and her poetry. In The Bell Jar, Plath’s protagonist Esther Greenwood-often read as Plath’s alter ego-describes the treatment like this:

Then something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world. Whee-eeee-ee, it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light, and with each fl ash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap would fl y out of me like a split plant.