So begins Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar (1963). Its rather flippant opening – “they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York” – that equates the seriousness of Cold War politics and national security with petty girlhood tribulations is, in fact, a triumph of literary compression. The Rosenbergs’ electrocution, it will turn out, has everything to do with the novel's narrator and main character Esther Greenwood's own fate, hospitalized in a number of psychiatric institutions to undergo a series of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) treatments.

From ECT to electrical execution, electricity exudes ambivalent powers: visible and imperceptible, life giving and lethal, healing and punitive. In his cultural history of electricity in America, David Nye claimed that “despite its ubiquity, electricity seemed to defy definition, and remained a mystery to the citizenry that saw it every day in the street.” Electricity is also thoroughly modern: “After the Russian Revolution Lenin proclaimed that only when the Soviet Union had been completely electrified could full socialism be attained.” In the free world, Darius Rejali has shown how, as an instrument of stealthy bodily control, electricity is characteristically democratic: it suits open societies in which public scrutiny provides legitimacy to power under the auspices of human rights discourse.