Recovery as imprisonment

Text 1: A Letter from Seabourne, by Cecilia Hartree

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

My dear Fanny, Here I am at Seabourne, where Dr Lister has sent me to be cured of my lungs by the simple method of forbidding me to do anything at all. I am to rise at nine, take a glass of warm milk, sit in a bath chair upon the parade from eleven until one with a rug over my knees, return for luncheon, lie down until four, and retire at half past eight. I may not walk further than the end of the terrace. I may not climb the stairs more than twice in a day. I may not, above all, become excited, which Dr Lister considers more dangerous to a young woman than the whole of the consumption.

You may imagine how I chafe. Mrs Pyne, my landlady, has received her instructions and enforces them like a gaoler; she counted my steps on the stairs yesterday and sent me back to bed for exceeding them. From my window I watch the fishermen haul up their boats, and the children shrieking at the edge of the waves, and the bathing machines trundling in and out, and I feel like a bird in a cage that has been hung in a window for the pleasure of the passers-by.

And yet, Fanny, I must confess something odd. Last week, having nothing else to do, I began to draw the sea from my bath chair, and I find I cannot stop. The sea is never twice the same colour. I have filled half a book with it, and the hours on the parade, which I dreaded, now seem too short. I am still a prisoner of the rug and the milk and Mrs Pyne. But a prisoner, it seems, may find a window.

Text 2: The Parallel Bars, by Owen Pritchard

An original contemporary memoir.

At thirty-four I had a stroke on a Tuesday afternoon while making a cup of tea. One moment I was reaching for the kettle; the next, my right hand had stopped belonging to me. I spent the following four months on a rehabilitation ward, learning to do again all the things that a toddler learns to do, and doing them, at first, rather worse than most toddlers.

People talk about being trapped in your own body, and I always thought it was a figure of speech. It is not. I would lie in bed at night giving my right foot instructions, very clearly and politely, and it would simply ignore me. I could think a whole sentence and then hear something entirely different come out of my mouth, like a radio picking up the wrong station. Visitors spoke to me slowly and loudly, as if the stroke had taken my brain along with my hand. I wanted to shout at them that I was still in here. Sometimes I tried, and it came out as ‘Tea,’ and they went and got me one.

The physiotherapists were the ones who let me out, a step at a time. Literally a step: the first day I walked the length of the parallel bars, all four metres, the whole ward clapped, and I cried like a child. I am walking now, with a stick and a limp, and I talk well enough that people have stopped bringing me tea when I do not want it. The cell door is open. But I have learned that the walls were never really the hospital. They were me.

‘Both writers present recovery from illness as a kind of imprisonment.’

How far do you agree with this statement?

In your answer you should:

• discuss what we learn about each writer’s experience of recovery
• explain how far you agree that both writers present recovery as imprisonment
• compare the ways the writers present their confinement and their recovery.

Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.