Kingdom Of Yr

The Kingdom of Yr is an imaginary or alternative dimension inhabited by the Yri Gods, described in Joanne Greenberg's autobiographical novel I Never Promised You A Rose Garden.

Rejected by peers and to a certain extent by her family, victimised by anti-Semitism, and traumatised by painful surgery for urethral cancer in early childhood, Deborah Blau is a highly intelligent and sensitive girl who perceives reality as innately cruel. At approximately age eight, she creates or discovers Yr, an alternative dimensional world where she is respected as a queen. It has a language of its own called Yri, which may or may not be based on scraps of other languages Deborah heard from her multilingual family. It is rich in metaphor and poetic imagery, with place names like "the Plains of Tai'a" and "the Canyons of the Sorrow". In a way, the culture of Yr, with its emphasis on remembering Deborah's personal suffering, reflects the values of her Jewish heritage and its commemorative stories and festivals describing historical events.

In its purest form, Yr is an ancient kingdom of awesome beauty. Eagles soar over mountain ranges overlooking plains and valleys where wild horses graze. Deborah has several names there, but is most often referred to as "Bird-one"; she can shapeshift there and become a wild horse or a bird. Because she sometimes slips and speaks or writes Yri words on earth, there is a Censor who guards her speech and actions so that she can travel in her homeworld while maintaining a semblance of normality on earth. The gods of Yr are Anterrabae, who perpetually falls in a shower of fire; Lactamaeon, a black man on a black horse; and Idat, a rarely seen, androgynous figure known as the Dissembler.

Over time, Deborah is removed from anti-Semitic environments and moves to a large city where Jews are accepted. As she matures and earth world pressures ease up on her, such that at sixteen she actually has friends and is doing well, she finds her loyalties divided, but is unwilling to put Yr behind her. She holds onto it more firmly than ever, such that its hold on her becomes tyrannical. In her perspective, it's the gods who will not let her go. She begins to suffer much more from their cruelty than in her daily life, but she's afraid that she is too different from ordinary people, that the earth world is still not a good place for her and will ultimately destroy her if she tries to exist there without Yr to retreat to when things go wrong. In addition, it's no kiddie fantasy to her; it is a homeland, the birthplace of her soul. It is at this point that she enters a private hospital for the insane, and begins therapy with an insightful woman psychiatrist.

The doctor in the novel is based closely on Greenberg's real doctor, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and Deborah's hospital is Chestnut Lodge in Frederick, Maryland. In writing the novel, Greenberg changed names and places, of course; but she also changed the names of the Gods (Yr was Iria, and Anterrabae was originally Antilobia, for instance), and so the words of the Yri language given in the book may not be the true Irian speech. Some of Greenberg's doctors at Chestnut Lodge felt that she had made up Iria on the spot to impress Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, who wrote glowing reports focusing on Greenberg's genius and creativity. Fromm-Reichmann saw these qualities as signs of Greenberg's innate health, indicating that she had every chance of recovering from her mental illness.

In both real life and in the novel, Greenberg was diagnosed with schizophrenia; however, this word was used at the time to describe any thought disorder. In fact, undifferentiated schizophrenia was a trashcan diagnosis which could cover anything from anxiety or depression to simple homesickness. Greenberg was probably obsessive-compulsive, but whether or not she actually had schizophrenia is controversial. Still, the doctors of Chestnut Lodge believed in treating even outright psychosis through insight-oriented talk therapy, and Greenberg was by no means their only success story.

At the novel's end, understanding that acceptance by other people is not impossible, and finding that it simply takes too much energy to maintain a functional life in the earth world at the same time she dwells in her own, Deborah resigns from the Kingdom of Yr and enters the world of reality completely. Her decision has something of the flavour of a very quiet conversion experience.

References:

• I Never Promised You A Rose Garden (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0451160312/qid=1079180625/sr=8-1/ref=pd_ka_1/103-0966655-3563048?v=glance&s=books&n=507846) Amazon.com link.
• To Redeem One Person Is To Redeem The World (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684827921/qid=1079211370/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/103-0966655-3563048?v=glance&s=books&n=507846) Biography of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, with much information on Greenberg and her stay at Chestnut Lodge. Amazon.com link.
• Budding from a Garden of Reality (http://www.hotchkiss.k12.co.us/hhs/english/webfolios/2002/kfulk/litessay.htm) Student essay proposing that the Kingdom of Yr was real, if not material.
• Frieda Fromm-Reichmann Facts (http://www.webrenovators.com/psych/FriedaFrommReichmann.htm)
• A 1995 lecture by Joanne Greenberg, exemplifying her personal style. (http://www.mines.edu/fac_staff/senate/dist_lecture/greenberg_text.shtml)