So, finaly made it here. I loved reading Alice's story. It was very tragic and it makes me glad she can't remember it.
marielle wrote:Openhome wrote:My only critique is that Alice should have been in the asylum longer than that to sustain the damage needed to forget her past.
I totally agree, because in Twilight they discussed it after Bella wakes up in the hospital, there is a line that clearly state a long time that Alice stayed there.
"because she was always in the dark." it was the line I think Bella said after Edward pointed out that Alice was in the dark about her past....
Well, she must have been in the asylum for at least a couple of months right? Her head was shaved some time after entering the asylum (not directly when she was admitted) and her hair had already grown back some before she was changed. Plus I agree with
smitten_by_twilight, that what they were doing, was absolutely horrendous. It actually surprises me that memory loss was the only thing that happend to her. I study farmaceutical sciences and we actually had a class about neuropathology recently. We also talked about electroshock therapy and how they first experimented with it to treat schizophrenia. It was terrible, it still makes me sick just thinking about it. I feel so sad that someone as good and pure and happy as Alice had to go through that. Especially knowing there was nothing wrong with her, people were just scared of her gift.
A little background for those interested: Apparently they found that people with epilepsy never had schizophrenia, so they thought epileptic seizures could cure schizophrenia patients. They didn't have a clue what they were doing, but they took some vagrant of the streets with signs of schizophrenia and this is what happend:
"They thought, 'Well, we'll try 55 volts, two-tenths of a second. That's not going to do anything terrible to him.' So they did that. [...] This fellow — remember, he wasn't even put to sleep — after this major grand mal convulsion, sat right up, looked at these three fellows and said, 'What the f*** are you a******s trying to do?' Well, they were happy as could be, because he hadn't said a rational word in the weeks of observation."
They experimented with higher voltages and for longer periods of time too. The patients didn't recieve any type of anesthetics or muscle relaxants so they were completely consious during the proces. The produced seizures were so strong that the muscles could contract to the point of breaking the bones that they were attached to. Patients could recieve 10 to 20 shocks within days.
(Only thing is that the first electroshock in humans was done in 1937, well after Alice was changed. Before that they induced seizures with drugs. But in the name of fiction, I will forget that little detail.)
If you are really interested in it
here is a video of a surgeon (Sherwin Nuland) who talks about the history of it and his own experiences. He actually recieved electroshock therapy himself. I saw this video during my neuropathology class and it's a very inspiring story.
Jeakat wrote:I actually took great comfort in Alice's story in the bio because it was clear that her mother still loved her very much. I didn't expect that in her story at all. If anything, as I said before, I expected both her to be uncaring, so I found it really very sweet.
Of course, I also took great delight in the fate of her father!
Absolutely. I wonder how the mother would have felt about her husband putting his daughter in an asylum.
What happend to her father? Did I miss that part?
corona wrote:He watched her wake and scramble away to look for blood...
It is so eerie thinking that James was right there at the end of Alice's transformation. And then the thought of Alice waking as a newborn and "scrambling away" to look for blood...
Totally agree here. I hate to think what would have happend if James stayed and Alice became a part of his coven. Would she have had the visions of Jasper and the Cullens if she was stuck with James?
smitten_by_twilight wrote:That vampire groundkeeper must have been really attached to her, or really bored with life, or what, to sacrifice himself like that.
I wonder what he saw in her. Maybe he knew that she wasn't really "sick". Or maybe he liked her cheerful character in this misserable place.