Gladys Monroe’s institutionalization in a psychiatric hospital

Gladys Mortensen’s institutionalization spans years of psychiatric treatment and shapes the fragile terms on which she and Norma Jeane Baker can meet. The novel records voices that Gladys knows are not real, an official diagnosis of chronic paranoid schizophrenia, repeated electroshock treatment, and long-term medication. Yet it also shows her as a person living within institutions: sometimes frightened and disoriented, sometimes compliant with others’ expectations, and at times able to receive her daughter’s affection without returning it in kind.

Symptoms and diagnosis

Before her hospitalization, Gladys worked in a negatives laboratory, where the virulent chemicals made her eyes water. When summoned to take an urgent telephone call, she was so frightened that someone had to support her to the phone. The coiled rubber cord seemed alive to her, and film-like voices sounded in her ears. Since the birth of her last daughter, she had become practiced at filtering intrusive voices she knew were unreal, though exhaustion sometimes made them harder to control. She feared the call concerned Norma Jeane; instead, she learned that her own mother, Della Monroe, had suffered an incident.

The institutional record supplied a stark explanation for Gladys’s condition: chronic paranoid schizophrenia, with probable neurological damage attributed to alcohol and medication abuse. The diagnosis had practical consequences beyond the hospital. When Norma Jeane was living under social-services care, prospective adoptive parents could be given this information about her hospitalized mother. Three couples nevertheless asked to adopt Norma Jeane, even as she grew from nine to eleven and Gladys remained neither deceased nor unknown, but confined in Norwalk.

Treatment and institutional routine

By the time Norma Jeane contacted a doctor at Norwalk State Hospital, Gladys had been hospitalized for ten years. The doctor described her as close to the highest level of recovery possible in her case. Several courses of electroshock had substantially reduced her crises, and an intensive medication regimen was being used to prevent depressive and manic episodes. Hospital records indicated that for years she had not tried to harm herself or anyone else.

This clinical stability did not erase the distance between mother and daughter. Norma Jeane had not seen Gladys for a decade, and the doctor’s question about whether a visit might cause problems for her or her mother left the risks open rather than reassuring her. On meeting, Norma Jeane recognized Gladys at once in a thin, worn green gown. She wept and embraced her; Gladys neither returned the embrace nor pulled away. Norma Jeane later remembered them both crying, though in fact she alone had wept. The encounter gave her an experience of emotion she could not summon in her earliest acting lessons, making the hospital visit part of her developing understanding of performance as well as family.

Escape and return

At another point, Gladys left the Lakewood clinic and was found asleep in a pew at a Catholic church on Bellflower Boulevard, less than five kilometers from the clinic. Confused and disoriented, she did not resist when Lakewood police returned her. When Norma Jeane arrived and saw her, she began to cry and held her in an embrace that seemed unable to end. Gladys smelled of wet fabric and urine, details that make the reunion bodily and immediate rather than a simple recovery of the lost mother. The clinic director apologized profusely to Norma Jeane.

The piano at Lakewood Home

Later, at age sixty-two, Gladys had not tried to escape for years and was no longer considered a danger to herself, other patients, or staff. She had become a model patient. When Norma Jeane arranged for the White Spinet Donated to Her Mother's Home to be delivered to the visiting room at Lakewood Home as a gift from Gladys, her mother seemed confused by the gesture’s significance. She declined repeated invitations to sit and play, but tentatively touched the keys and sounded a few chords, with the same respectful caution her daughter was accustomed to using at the piano.

Norma Jeane presented the instrument to the assembled staff and patients as something precious that she had tried to keep perfectly tuned. The moment had not been rehearsed, yet it went surprisingly well: staff and patients welcomed the gift, and Gladys allowed herself to be embraced and kissed when her daughter said goodbye. She did not return either gesture, but she smiled. Norma Jeane promised to call and to stay longer next time, then left quickly, putting on sunglasses so the others would not see her eyes. The piano thus becomes both a practical gift to the institution and a trace of the care Norma Jeane tries to preserve between them. Gladys’s treatment has made her safer and more settled, but the novel leaves their intimacy uneven: her daughter keeps reaching toward her, while Gladys’s responses remain slight and difficult to read.