The Woman Who Didn’t Want to Get Well

The Princess Esmeralda loves everyone. She is sweet and trusting, and perhaps the most beautiful woman on Earth—or at least the only part of Earth that matters, which is Manhattan’s 72nd Street, west of Central Park. There, she is a beneficent ruler. She blesses her domain by dancing down the block in elaborate outfits, sitting alluringly in the windows of bars and luncheonettes, and occasionally taking the men she meets there up to her apartment, with only the barest memories of the resulting encounters. She is purity and light.

She is also only sometimes real.

Esmeralda is the manic manifestation of Ellen, the protagonist of Elaine Kraf’s The Princess of 72nd Street, which was originally published in 1979 and has recently been reissued. A bright and wry-humored painter, Ellen no longer wishes to be whisked away to Bellevue Hospital when she experiences mania, or what she calls “the radiance.” So instead, having noticed that Esmeralda is markedly more sensible when directing herself toward reflection rather than action—the latter tends to lead to half-naked dancing in Riverside Park—Ellen instructs herself to avoid trouble by spending her latest episode glued to the typewriter, writing out her life stories.

The problem: All of those stories suggest one thing, which is that Esmeralda is in many ways the version of herself that Ellen prefers. She is free and joyful, and able to love without questioning. She imagines herself as all kinds of delightful plants and creatures. “For the past five minutes I have been a water lily,” she notes. “Sometimes I become a flower or a moth.” And she is untroubled by the things that make the world complicated, such as money.

Esmeralda has her faults; she preaches a rigid and bizarre moral code that she appears to have little personal interest in following. (A highlight: “Married men should be required by law to wear a special cap which cannot be removed without removing the scalp and a tattoo across the groin saying MARRIED.”) But given the option to be either a modern woman navigating the demands of a sexist world and unattainable artistic dreams or the living embodiment of otherworldly light and truth on Earth, why would she ever opt for the former?

So Ellen sets out to maintain the part of herself she most treasures despite knowing that it can put her in harm’s way—and despite the extraordinary persistence of her lovers, neighbors, and the New York City health system in attempting to treat it into submission.

[Read: Can you cure mental illness? Two centuries of trying says no.]

Kraf’s portrait of mania is not romantic: Esmeralda is repeatedly arrested, has a number of sexual encounters that are at best dubiously consensual and at worst explicitly violent, and makes decisions that, in more lucid moments, repel Ellen. But it is frank about the truth that health and happiness are not always intertwined—and, in fact, are sometimes in direct conflict with each other.

Take Ellen’s affair with Rombert, whom Esmeralda calls “the Alien”—a past lover she selected in an utterly ordinary state of mind. An accomplished but vicious doctor (he ignores Ellen when she faints in front of him at dinner), he has a nice house outside the city, a thriving rose garden, and a passion for fine dining. On paper, Rombert looks like a good choice. A relationship with him would bring both financial security and the kind of physical well-being that suburb-dwellers sometimes insist can be found only in green places. And yet: He is demeaning and aggressive, taking obvious pleasure when he finds Ellen in a mania and persuading the police to escort her away in a straitjacket.

Compare him with Auriel, an itinerant street magician with a passion for wigs and a regrettable habit of not telling any of his lovers about the many, many others. He is fickle, poor, sexually creative in a not entirely agreeable way, and obsessed with the teachings of a questionable character called Guru Maharaj-goo. A partner less suited to providing a stable, well-regulated life could hardly exist. But Esmeralda loves him, her “Prince Auriel with the white doves and exquisite fingers.”

Is it possible to find, in another person, the joy that Auriel provides alongside the potential stability that Rombert offers? The question is not really about men, who throughout the novel come to symbolize aspects of Ellen’s own torn identity and desires. It is about Ellen.

There is a fiction, prevalent today, that with enough concentration and effort, anyone—particularly any woman—can improve herself into an idealized state of being. With the right wardrobe, exercise routine, skin-care regimen, therapy practice, diet, and sense of personal style, she can live an optimized life. The obstacles she might face—illness, disability, personal trauma, family strife—must never threaten the performance of a perfect self.

Ellen confronts similar pressures to embody external ideas of perfection. Her ex-husband, indifferent toward her artistic pursuits, wants her to behave like an adoring artist’s wife—even though they’re divorced. A particularly dreadful ex-boyfriend coerces her into seeing his crank psychiatrist, who informs her that “George and I have decided you need some tranquilization to calm you down” before prescribing an untraceable drug that sends her to the emergency room. Though Ellen’s mental-health conditions are real and perilous, it’s difficult to blame her for suspecting that the cure might be worse than the disease.  

Much has changed since Kraf first published The Princess of 72nd Street. Ellen’s neighborhood has gentrified; the worn-down diners and scuzzy bars that she frequented as Esmeralda have been replaced by sleek new restaurants and nail spas; rents have gone through the roof. And psychopharmacology has pervaded the lives of even the highest-functioning city-dwellers.

But Ellen’s sense that there must be a way for her to live the life she wants, without ceding to the ideas that others—specifically, men—have about what that should look like, reflects a kind of personal determination that feels ageless. Remembering one surreal week during which seemingly every person she ever had any kind of emotionally complicated relationship with randomly congregated in her apartment, she wonders “why had it all happened here—all those changes with myself becoming more and more invisible until I barely existed?” Almost half a century after it was first published, The Princess of 72nd Street sounds like a contemporary cry for freedom from the expectations of others.

In 1979, a woman like Ellen would have entered adulthood amid second-wave-feminist messages encouraging her to throw off the patriarchy and find independence. She might have read Cosmopolitan at the height of Helen Gurley Brown’s reign, when the magazine became known for championing sexual liberty. She would have witnessed the extraordinary success of Phyllis Schlafly’s pushback against the Equal Rights Amendment and the “women’s libbers” who supported it. Even for someone not dealing with the added pressures and dangers of a serious mental-health condition, the many different ideas about how to be a woman may have been confounding.

[Read: How did healing ourselves get so exhausting?]

Books seeking to illustrate dynamics like these can come off as tedious: Not another novel about a woman fracturing under complicated stressors! What keeps The Princess of 72nd Street fresh is Ellen’s disinterest, when manic, in being anything but herself. The radiance presents a way out of the trouble she has balancing her own desires with those of the men who are always trying to change her—to make her more adventurous, more docile, more adoring, even blonder and taller. By the time she sits down at her typewriter, alone, she is simply no longer bothered by their opinions.

Perhaps the most provocative thing about Kraf’s novel is Ellen’s refusal to see her mental health as a problem, or as a subject for whispered conversations. She merely wants to live it out, without having the police called on her and without needing to suffer injections of “large amounts of Thorazine, Stelazine, and more recent derivatives into the buttocks or ass or bottom or gluteus maximus.”

She faces serious threats when she is Esmeralda. She does not feel pain, which means that at one point, when she is sexually assaulted, she barely notices how badly hurt she is. She cannot take care of herself; when the radiance ends, she becomes aware that her apartment is full of rotting food and has been invaded by cockroaches, while her sheets are “stained with thick brownish blood.”

Kraf is wrestling with a tricky reality here: The truth is that, despite the violence that accompanies her manias, Ellen-as-Esmeralda also feels free, even happy, when completely oblivious to social norms and strictures. She is so open to the world, suspended in “the sensation that is the opposite of anxiety or loneliness or shaking,” which “cannot be explained except as a reversal of the thinking and thinking with the head aching and the body moving heavily and not knowing how far.” Her manias provide her with a bone-deep understanding of a key, if risky, message: True independence must be reached on one’s own terms. No apparently picture-perfect marriage, or medication, or idealized lifestyle can bring it to her.

“In my opinion radiance is my own and my business,” Ellen says near the beginning of the book, “and too precious to part with in this world.” Of course, insisting on independence also means fighting the treatments that could help her stay safe. But in the end, who could criticize her for wanting the freedom to choose that troubled bargain for herself?