What She Left Behind: A Haunting and Heartbreaking Story of 1920s Historical Fiction

“Heat rose in shimmery vapors from the sunbaked earth and cicadas buzzed in the long grass near the woods, a droning, live thermometer that grew higher pitched and more insistent with every rising degree.”

This description of New York uses a metaphor that compares cicadas to a thermometer. The increasing sound of the cicadas is an auditory representation of the heat increasing, which creates an oppressive atmosphere in keeping with the novel’s interest in literal and figurative imprisonment.

“These suitcases are just as important as an archeological dig or a set of old paintings. These people never had the chance to tell their stories outside of the confines of a mental hospital.”

Peg is excited about the Willard suitcase project because it gives a voice to the formerly voiceless, which Peg here defends as a legitimate object of research. As a museum curator, she is characterized by her interest in history, and Peg and Izzy bond over learning about history and caring about people who were oppressed.

“Clara’s waist measured seventeen inches, and still her mother scoffed, reminding her repeatedly that hers was sixteen, forgetting that Clara was two inches taller.”

Clara’s mother, Ruth, upholds patriarchal ideas about female bodies—that women should wear corsets to give themselves unnaturally tiny waists—helping establish the theme of Institutional Control of Women’s Bodies. Corsets had fallen out of fashion by the 1920s, illustrating how Ruth is outdated in her appearance and thinking. Her attitude also foreshadows that she will submit to whatever Henry decides for Izzy.

“My father isn’t used to me standing up for myself. He thinks women should be seen and not heard. This is his way of silencing me, of trying to prove he can control me.”

In this quote, Clara tries to reason with Dr. Thorn at the Long Island Home. Like Ruth, Henry and the psychiatric hospital are still operating under 19th-century ideas and Defining Female Autonomy as Mental Illness. Clara is healthy; she just refuses to marry the man her father wants and pursues her own relationship with a working-class man.

“Izzy couldn’t imagine one person having that kind of power over everyone else. It made her sick.”

The novel juxtaposes Izzy’s main antagonist, Shannon, with Clara’s main antagonist, Roach. Both are power hungry and willing to harm others to maintain a hierarchy where they are at the top. However, Shannon behaves in this fashion because she hasn’t processed the trauma of her mother and father’s abuse. In other words, Shannon fears other people having power over her because she has seen that power abused. Izzy’s visceral reaction to Shannon’s bullying highlights her own differing response to trauma: solidarity with other survivors.

“She knew it was crazy, but she pictured microscopic particles wafting up from the baby bonnets and silverware, floating through the air and entering her lungs and bloodstream, starting a psychotic chain reaction that when the tainted molecules reached her brain, would seal her to her mother’s fate.”

Izzy fears being “infected” with mental illness in part because she fears losing her autonomy by being placed in a psychiatric hospital or a prison. Her misperceptions and biases about mental illness reflect her repression of her father’s abuse; this erasure both exculpates him and leads Izzy to believe that her mother must have had a mental illness, demonstrating how psychiatric labels can uphold patriarchal abuse.

“Even now, after everything that happened, Izzy couldn’t imagine either of her parents intentionally harming her.”

This is a direct example of Izzy’s repression of her father’s abuse. When Ethan tells her about Shannon’s abuse, she doesn’t connect to it. Izzy is in deep denial about her father and only grows as a character when she reads the truth in her mother’s letters.

“Clara’s journal read like that of a young woman with a firm grasp on reality. Izzy knew that, back then, doctors didn’t fully understand depression or women acting out, but she could barely comprehend Clara’s father sending her away because she was in love with a man he considered lower class.”

This is an example of Izzy’s naivety. Her own repression of her father’s abuse makes it hard for her to imagine that other fathers might be willing and able to harm their daughters. Her implied belief that pathologizing women’s anger was only a problem “back then” underscores this point.

“How many were victims of circumstance, women left penniless by husbands who abandoned them or died, women who lost children and need help coping with unbearable grief, women banished by parents who disapproved of their children, or had lost their parents at a young age and had grown up in an orphanage? How many were sane when they got here, but after months of abuse or overtreatment with ice baths and sedatives, would never be rational again?”

After Clara realizes that her father is lying about her experiencing delusions, she wonders how many other people have been committed for reasons other than mental health—not only resistance to gender norms, but also factors like poverty. The irony is that imprisonment in places like Willard is traumatic enough to cause people to develop mental illnesses. This then becomes further reason to keep them there, making hospitalization a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“She squinted, trying to see the people sitting in the open area behind the cabin, wondering what they thought when they looked across the water toward Willard. Did they know what this place was? Did they think of the patients as real people, or did they look at them as nonhumans who never stood a chance at a normal existence anyway?”

This develops the dual symbolism of Seneca Lake. Some people visit the lake for leisure, while others are imprisoned in Willard on the lakeshore. The lake represents freedom for people who aren’t patients. For Willard staff, the lake is a way of getting patients onto the property.

“What would have happened if the patients had been asked what had happened to them instead of what was wrong with them?”

Izzy’s reflection represents a shift in mental health care that focuses on how experience, rather than innate physiological factors, shapes mental illness. With its focus on survivors of abuse, the novel implies that much of mental illness is a result of nurture rather than nature, making the tendency to pathologize women’s behavior doubly unfair.

“To Clara’s surprise, and for reasons she didn’t understand, Dr. Roach had grown more attentive than ever.”

This develops Clara’s characterization. Even after forced sterilization, Clara doesn’t suspect that Roach is going to steal her baby, her naivety reflecting the fact that she grew up with immense privilege. This passage foreshadows Roach’s actions, giving the reader an opportunity to predict what is going to happen before Clara does.

“Izzy remembered reading somewhere that the word ‘lunatic’ originated from the idea that the rays of the moon could adversely affect people’s minds. Hopefully, that wouldn’t be the case tonight.”

This is another example of Izzy’s fear of developing a mental illness. She references the etymology of lunatic being “lunaticus,” which is Latin for “moonstruck.” The ominous mood of this passage foreshadows Izzy’s imprisonment later in the chapter.

“The dream was so vivid Clara could almost smell Beatrice’s perfume and feel her soft cheek. It had to mean something. And she’d never find out if she spent the rest of her life locked away in the Rookie Pest House.”

Clara’s motivation is to reunite with her daughter. Her dreaming of her adult daughter foreshadows how Izzy and Peg bring them together at the end of the novel. The sensory experiences of smell and touch in this dream contrast with the traumatic imagery in the nightmares that both Clara and Izzy experience; the details of this dream offer hope.

“Behind the fancy curtains and comfortable furnishings, the windows were still covered with bars, the doors were still locked, the orderlies still watched with vigilant eyes.”

This passage develops the theme of institutional control of women’s bodies. The repetition of the word “still” highlights how the freedom that the recreation room seems to offer is an illusion. Women can be drugged, isolated, or abused at any moment in Willard.

“Either her mother’s letters would paint a picture of the woman she used to be, full of love and adoration, or reveal once and for all that she really was a lunatic.”

This passage develops the symbolism of letters. Izzy fears opening the letters and learning that her mother is not the person she knew. The letters come to symbolize Joyce’s sacrifice for Izzy, but when they are unopened, their representation of Joyce is a mystery. They instead represent Izzy’s fear of mental illness and, relatedly, her repression of her father’s abuse, which her avoidance of the letters enables.

“I won’t let my past define my future, she thought. I was a different person back then. And I’m not going to spend the rest of my life paying for my father’s sins.”

This first-person passage breaks with Wiseman’s usual close third person. Switching to the first person here highlights the importance of the content: Izzy is resilient and determined that her trauma will not control her. This develops the theme of Intergenerational Trauma and Resilience.

“She remembered a book by Stephen King called The Dead Zone, where a man injured in a car accident spent five years in a coma. She pictured the main character waking up and grabbing someone’s hand, unable to let go until he’d made a prediction about the person’s future. After reading the novel, Izzy hadn’t been able to sleep for weeks. Being in a coma seemed like the worst possible things that could happen to anyone.”

This allusion to a 1979 book reinforces Izzy’s fear of losing autonomy; being in a coma entails a complete loss of control over one’s body. This makes Joyce’s and Clara’s comas symbolically significant, connecting them to the broader loss of control they experience as a result of their resistance to male abuse.

“Gertrude Lawrence began singing ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’ and Clara’s throat constricted, remembering the first time she and Bruno danced at the Cotton Club. Now, they were dancing to the same song while locked up inside an insane asylum.”

This is an allusion to a classic song that was in the Gershwin musical Oh, Kay! Lawrence was the star of this musical, and her recording became popular in the late 1920s. Wiseman references the song twice in the novel and has Clara reflect on the repetition, the small moment of continuity highlighting how dramatically her life has changed.

“I am finally, truly alone.”

This is another example of Wiseman switching to the first person. Here, Izzy’s internal monologue reveals her trauma and grief. Izzy is struggling with her mother’s death at this moment and doesn’t recognize that there are other people who love her.

“Maybe she wasn’t alone after all.”

This quote complements the previous one. Wiseman’s close third person reflects reality: Ethan, Alex, Peg, and Harry are all there for Izzy, but Izzy has to get out of her head to recognize this. Her character evolves over the course of the novel into someone who works on combating negative self-talk.

“Then she was floating, her pain gone.”

This is an example of a cliffhanger chapter ending. The passage suggests that Clara dies in the flood at Willard. However, the next chapter reveals that Clara is still alive. Cliffhangers like this increase dramatic tension and suspense.

“Doesn’t everyone want to know where they came from?”

Susan says this when Peg asks her if she wants to know more about her birth mother. The question is ironic, as both Izzy and Susan approach learning about their mothers with significant trepidation, fearing genetic susceptibility to mental illness. Ultimately, however, the novel vindicates this idea, suggesting that the past—even when it is traumatic—can be a source of strength.