Whitney Walters
Dr. Halverson
English 102
16 May 2013
The
Hype of the Madwomen
“Men
were always quick to believe in the madness of women.”- Alison Goodman. This
quote speaks a lot about how women were viewed by society in the nineteenth
century and still today. It was commonly
thought that every woman was born mad and if she hadn’t shown her madness yet,
it was bubbling under the surface, threatening to come up and give adequate
reason to send her to an insane asylum. During the nineteenth century, female hysteria
skyrocketed and asylums saw more women patients than ever before, causing the
rise of the Victorian madwoman. This rise and their role in insane asylums were
due to many gender roles and the oppression of women during the nineteenth
century, some of which my paper will delve into by looking at detailed accounts
of these women who inhabited the asylums.
Why Women?
Some may ask what started this idea that women were mad
lunatics, running around ready to strike at any minute. Surely women couldn’t
have gone mad at the turn of the century, but rather they have been mad all
along and much thought wasn’t given to it until the nineteenth century. The
differentiation began at the end of the eighteenth century when a shift
occurred in the way madness was viewed and treated (Showalter 8). Lunatics were
formerly seen as brutes, ferocious animals that needed to be kept in chains and
strait jackets living in heavily locked cells, but there was the first
psychiatric revolution that turned lunatics to be seen merely as sick humans
that were pitied (Showalter 8). This revolution caused many reformers, wealthy philanthropists,
and magistrates looked into how insanity was treated in private madhouses,
workhouses, and prisons. They used their findings to create an alternate way to
treat insanity, and started insane asylums where patients were heavily surveillance
(Showalter 8). This turn also shifted lunatics from being male patients to
female patients. Surprisingly, in the middle of the eighteenth century, the
most common image of madness was a sculpture of two male nudes manacled
together (Showalter 8). By 1815, the rape and murder of women patients by
madhouse keepers changed this image of the madman and replaced it with a
victimized and delicate lady (Showalter 9). There seemed to be a fundamental link between
femininity and insanity, with women being represented as irrational, and men
being seen as reasonable and knowledgeable (Showalter 4). Insane
asylums entrapped women with greater ease, kept them longer, and released them
with less frequency than their male peers (Matlock 167). In fact, there are
files of a doctor named Richard Napier from the seventeenth century that shows
that women made up nearly twice as many cases of mental disorder than men
(Showalter 3) and there were 1,182 female lunatics for every 1,000 male
lunatics (Showalter 52).
Stress
of the Ideal Victorian Woman
Two
centuries later, the “Angel in the House” emerged. It was the Victorian
feminine ideology, coined by Coventry Patmore in his epic that portrayed an idealized
image of the Victorian woman: cooking, cleaning, and tending to her husband’s
every need (Yildirim 114). The Victorian ideology of women is perhaps best
represented by Queen Victoria herself, when she described marriage as a “great
happiness... in devoting oneself to another who is worthy of one's affection; still,
men are very selfish and the woman's devotion is always one of submission which
makes our poor sex so very unenviable... it cannot be otherwise as God has
willed it so" (Yildirim 117). The perfect Victorian woman’s main mission
was to serve others dutifully and selflessly and to be deemed a “lady”; women
had to follow the norms and manners inflicted upon them by the society (Yildirim
117). In the Victorian social pyramid, a woman was always considered secondary
both in the family and society and her only role was to be a servant to her
husband and children, having no desires or needs outside of this role (Yildirim
118). Acting in anyway outside of the gender norms pressed upon women was not
acceptable and could lead to a one-way ticket to an insane asylum.
There
are many causes as to why women make up the majority of mental disorder
patients, ranging from sexual oppression to stress from their family life. Most
female patients are a product of their social situations, both from their
confining roles as daughters, wives, and mothers and their mistreatment by a
male-dominated psychiatric profession (Showalter 3). Doctor Richard Napier saw that among his
patients, women of all social classes complained more of stress and unhappiness
in marriage, had more anxiety over their children, and suffered more depression
than their male counterparts (Showalter 3). This goes to show that the stress
of being a doting mother and wife was overwhelming for some women as they tried
to live up to society’s idea of a perfect family woman. The women of the
nineteenth century became so overworked trying to be the perfect housewife that
they fell ill a lot from the stress and became delirious (Showalter 55). According
to Lunbeck, seventy percent of manic-depressive patients “belong to the female
sex with its greater emotional excitability.” This suggests that the gender
difference was not just a matter of perception by society, but was encoded into
the very categories that ordered psychiatrists’ observations (Lunbeck 148).
Biological Factors & Sexual
Repression of Women
Another
theory of why women were more susceptible to lunacy was because of their
instability of their reproductive systems and the biological crises linked to
the female life cycle including: puberty, pregnancy, childbirth, and menopause
(Showalter 55). Their reproductive systems interfered with their sexual,
emotional, and rational control, causing them to be more susceptible to insanity
(Showalter 55). This connection between the female reproductive and nervous
systems led to the condition called “reflex insanity in women” which led to a
weakened mind because of their life cycles (Showalter 55). In fact, most female patients were admitted
to the asylums right after they went through puberty and experienced their
first menstruation. Doctors then argued that menstrual discharge in itself
predisposed women to insanity and irregular menstruation was seen as dangerous
so they treated women with purgatives, forcing medicine, hip baths, and leeches
on the thighs (Showalter 56). During the nineteenth century, females weren’t
allowed to publicly talk about anything that was going on with their bodies and
their mothers didn’t prepare them for it all, causing them to have a mental
breakdown and have great feelings of anxiety and shame. In fact, twenty-five
percent of female mental patients were left completely in the dark about their
menstrual cycle and once they experienced their first period, they became
frightened, screamed, and went into hysterical fits, causing them to be seen as
mad (Showalter 57). Up until their first
menstruation, girls were treated just like their brothers, but after, they were
forbidden to participate in physical activities, traveling, exercising, and
studying. Now a woman, the female had to give up everything and stay at home to
become the perfect housewife (Showalter 57). Diagnosis for insanity was highly
imperfect and the male psychiatrists used knowledge extracted from embarrassed
and confused female patients (Lunbeck 143). Examination was an arena, after
all, in which psychiatrist set the rules, called the plays, and determined the
outcome, so no amount of a female explaining her menstrual situation would help
her sanity in the doctor’s eyes (Lunbeck 143). This would explain why so many
young women were committed right after their first menstrual cycle because not
only were they confused about what was happening to their bodies, they were
also deeply embarrassed too.
Many
women were seen as lunatics with their sexual orientation and sexual desires,
thus leading them to get committed. Up until the nineteenth century, women
weren’t allowed to show their feelings and affection towards ones they loved
and at the turn of the century, they had relaxed their sexual etiquette and
were viewed as “hypersexual” (Lunbeck 188). Before, mothers taught their
daughters that they were to feel no passion or sexual desire because, “in the conventional
society, which men have made for women, and women have accepted, they must have
none, they must act the farce of hypocrisy.” (Showalter 64). Victorian women
were seen to have a lesser capacity for erotic pleasure than males and a lesser
capacity for sexual feeling of her own; they were merely to see themselves as a
passive vehicle of male sexuality (Reuther 145). Reuther states, “Rapid industrialization went
hand in hand with the depletion of the economic functions and sexism of women
traditionally married and centered on the home.” Industrialization drew many women into
factory jobs and women soon turned away from the idea that their roles were to
take care of her family and home (Reuther 197). With the times changing, many
women stayed single, started dating around, got jobs, and even turned to
lesbianism, something that was unheard of decades earlier. The nineteenth
century became known for the intensifying crisis of the family: the rising
divorce rate, the falling birthrate, and the lowering of moral standards
(Lunbeck 18). Industry and feminism were loosening the bonds of family,
tradition, and sexuality, setting women adrift (Lunbeck 18). This was caused by the Victorian society
attempt to pacify the contradiction between the women’s domesticity and sexual
repression (Reuther 198). Women grew tired of being trapped in the private
sector to service male compensatory needs and turned towards the same sex,
giving up being a child nurturer and a textbook perfect housewife (Reuther
198). This behavior was frowned upon and the new found independence and sexual
deviance led many women to the cells of an asylum (Lunbeck 194).
Being
a single woman who was perfectly content without domesticity in her life proved
to be impermissible. A thirty-nine year old French musician named Hersilie Rouy
was sent to an asylum on behalf of the requests from her half-brother (Matlock
167). Hersilie was single and had very little income, but suspicions of
lesbianism swirled around her and it was enough to have the authorities called.
Matlock states, “Hersilie was labeled manipulative, dangerous, and sexually
provocative by the doctors who examined her and she would find few
resources-legal or otherwise-at her disposal.” For the next fourteen years, Hersilie Rouy
would attempt to write her way out of incarceration, keeping a journal which
she hoped would convince officials that she had never been estranged of mind,
but only the brunt of a terrible scheme by her family (Matlock 167). Hersilie’s
writing evoked the doctors and her self-defense brought intolerable punishment
down upon her: "It is usually against individuals who have their senses
and know how to defend themselves or complain that they use these terrible
means to break them” (Matlock 171). In an attempt to keep Hersilie quiet and
stop her plans of proving her sanity, the doctors and nurses tried everything
including: beatings; straightjackets; a shaved head; solitary confinement;
imprisonment with dangerous patients, deprivation of: food, water, heat,
clothing, light, or medical treatment, and most importantly, no writing
(Matlock 171). Thankfully, Hersilie disobeyed the rules and wrote her story
down on any surface she could use, with any ink she could obtain. Hersilie's
writing gained her attention, hearings, and eventually protection under the law
and she was set free (Matlock 168). Her story shows that a woman living a life
different from the perfect housewife can easily be committed to an insane
asylum, even if they are perfectly sane and they have to spend the rest of
their life trying to prove it.
Insane Asylums: The Perfect Dumping
Ground
The
last reason a woman was thrown into an insane asylum was by her family and
friends if they claimed the woman was insane. The woman couldn’t testify
against it because that would prove that she was in denial and clearly insane.
In a lot of cases, women were sent away by their husbands after they got sick
of them and moved on to other love interests or when they thought their wives
had become too expensive to take care of (Matlock 167).
Sigmund
Freud discusses the case of Dora, who has been reformed by feminists as an
illustration of gender conflicts in Victorian Europe (Akavia 193). Many think
that Dora romanticized hysteria and regard her as a heroine whose illness is a
form of revolt against societal norms while others pity her as a victimized
figure (Akavia 193). Dora’s case is heavily influenced by her father who was
sick all of his life and seeked treatment from Sigmund Freud for neurological
complications of syphilis (Akavia 197). Her father made Dora his confidante and
trusted her with his most intimate secrets, something that will later backfire
for Dora and ruin her life (Akavia 203). During the nineteenth century, it was
common for daughters to nurse their sick fathers back to health, but according
to Freud, “this led to the young woman’s own illness and anyone whose mind is taken up by the hundred
and one tasks of sick-nursing . . . is creating material for a ‘retention
hysteria’.” Akavia states that, “In addition to being deprived of sleep, obsessively
worrying, and neglecting her own body, the nurse is compelled to preserve a demeanor
of indifference when faced by a large number of disturbing impressions. She is
therefore likely to repress them, sowing the seeds for her own hysteria.” The
stress of taking care of her father and knowing that all her life consisted of
was being a good housewife, deprived of anything intellectual, caused Dora to
exhibit symptoms of hysteria. When her father’s health worsened, he hired a new
nurse with whom he started an affair with.
Dora found out and threatened to tattle in exchange for more
independence, but her father turned her over to Freud for psychotherapeutic
treatment (Showalter 159). From Freud’s analysis and journal entries of Dora’s
case, he blames her hysteria on the jealousy she felt from her father’s affair
because she had repressed sexual desires for her father, rather than the stress
of nursing (Akavia 207). Freud had her committed to an asylum because he
thought she was obviously hysterical and had possible homosexual or incestual
desires and when Dora denied the allegations, it only gave Freud further proof
that she was insane, thus Dora spent the rest of her life as a neurotic patient
(Showalter, 160). As many can see, the rise of the Victorian madwoman can be
due to the fact that insane asylums were seen as an easy place to dump somebody
that you no longer cared for or in Dora’s case, for knowing too much, no
questions asked.
Since women were seen as unstable lunatics, it’s no
wonder they were treated poorly in the insane asylums. Very rarely did female
patients get the help they actually needed and most of the time the women were
swallowed up by the asylum and were never to be seen again, in fact, hundreds
of women disappeared without a trace each year into the labyrinth of the
psychiatric order (Matlock 167). Families that committed their female family
members thought they were receiving the best care possible, but in reality
little was known about how patients in insane asylums were treated and the
patients would be beaten if they told anyone how they were really taken care
of. Unfortunately, attendants had to resort to using force to administer
treatment that often led to patients getting struck, kicked, punched, hair
pulled, or not treated in a morally human way (Lunbeck 171).
Nellie
Bly: Girl Stunt Reporter in 19th Century
Female
journalist Nellie Bly can attest to the abuse received in insane asylums during
the nineteenth century. Nellie’s story is fascinating and exposed a lot of the
problems that insane asylums have, especially internal ones that dealt with the
staff and how they did their jobs. Nellie, a stunt girl reporter looking for
her next big break, faked hysteria and lunacy and fooled police officers,
judges, and doctors who examined her and declared she was a crazy hysteric.
Nellie was committed to Blackwell Island insane asylum for ten days where she
saw some of the worst horrors of her life. By performing hysteria and being
diagnosed by experts as "most definitely" a hysteric, Bly countered
an expert discourse that often disempowered women (Lutes 221). She entered
territory controlled by the predominantly male medical field, in which female
sexuality was exposed, unmasked, and interpreted by men and by turning the
tables and unmasking the male experts themselves, Bly positioned herself as an authoritative
interpreter of one of the most threatening pockets of the city: the asylum
(Lutes 221). Elizabeth Lunbeck emphasizes hysteria's unstable position within
the production of expert knowledge: "To no other psychiatric category was
the distinction between truth and reality on the one hand lies and simulation
on the other so critical but so impossible to determine. No other category-and
no other group of patients so stirred psychiatrists' anxiety and so unsettled
their professional equanimity." The doctors who called Bly
"hysterical" not only set themselves up for an embarrassing incident,
but they also shaped Bly's emerging stunt-girl persona by giving her a label
that was already vulnerable to manipulation (Lutes 232). After her experience
at the asylum, Nellie Bly emerged as one of the nineteenth century’s most
prominent and daring female journalist and took on many more stunt girl reports
(Lutes 233).
Into the Mad-House
 |
The
women Nellie described around her looked like this, full of despair.
|
On Nellie’s first day there, she
met a German woman who spoke very little English and because of that she was
put in the asylum (Bly 26). The nurses
taunted and teased the poor woman because they knew that she didn’t know enough
English to respond to them or tell on them (Bly 27). Nellie also met her first
real companion there that she could confide in, a woman named Miss Tillie
Mayard. Nellie asked her if she was insane and the woman’s response was,
"No, but as we have been sent here, we will have to be quiet until we find
some means of escape. They will be few, though, since all the doctors, refuse
to listen to me or give me a chance to
Prove my sanity."
(Bly 25). Sane women sent to asylums were condemned to them, never given a
chance to explain why they were sent there, whether it is by a jealous family
member or their sexual orientation. The next
morning, the women were woken up early to get their monthly bath that was one
of the worst events Nellie endured there (Bly 32). The water they used was ice
cold and the nurses scrubbed so hard that patients’ hair would come out and
their skin would bleed. The entire time
the nurses ignored the complaints of pain and told the patients, "There
isn't much fear of hurting you. Shut up or you'll get it worse." (Bly 32).
With forty-five patients, they only had
two towels and never once got new bath water, something Nellie found disgusting
because some of the women had lice and other flesh diseases. Nellie states, “I watched
crazy patients who had the most dangerous eruptions all over their faces dry on
the towels and then saw women with clean skins turn to use them. I went to the
bathtub and washed my face at the running faucet and my underskirt did duty for
a towel.” When Nellie tried to mention to the nurses that two towels wasn’t enough,
especially with some of the women’s skin conditions, the nurses responded by
saying, "Well, I don't care about that, you are in a public institution
now, and you can't expect to get anything. This is charity, and you should be
thankful for what you get.” (Bly 34). Nellie argued that the city pays to keep
the place up and patients’ families pay for their keep, the nurses said,
"Well, you don't need to expect any kindness here, for you won't get it.”
(Bly 34). Obviously the city didn’t have enough money to properly maintain the
asylum because the living conditions were very poor. Nellie found it surprising the fact that the
nurses did not once clean the ward, but it was the patients, who do it all
themselves, even to cleaning the nurses' bedrooms and caring for their clothing
(Bly 35).
Her
entire time there, Nellie did not once see the doctors take interest in their
patients. Nellie pronounces, "There
are sixteen doctors on this island, and excepting two, I have never seen them
pay any attention to the patients. How can a doctor judge a woman's sanity by
merely bidding her good morning and refusing to hear her pleas for release?
Even the sick ones know it is useless to say anything, for the answer will be
that it is their imagination." Nellie states, “When the doctors came, the
patients made no movement to tell him of their sufferings and when I asked some
of them to tell how they were suffering from the cold and insufficiency of
clothing, they replied that the nurse would beat them if they told.” Sadly, the
nurses took pleasure in beating, choking, and locking patients in closets for
days, making their job with the patients a game of cat and mouse (Bly 39).
Nellie talked to many women there who weren’t actually insane, but committed
because of their families or friends. The saner they acted, the more insane the
doctors thought and there was no way they could prove their innocence because
no one took the time to listen. As Nellie states, “The insane asylum on
Blackwell's Island is a human rat-trap. It is easy to get in, but once there it
is impossible to get out”.
 |
| Courageous reporter Nellie Bly |
The
last part of her novel describes Nellie’s joyous feeling of being released and
guilt that she felt for leaving women behind in the hands of horrible
caretakers (Bly 49). After she left, Nellie appeared in front of a grand jury
to talk about what really happened at Blackwell Island and soon the jury
questioned the nurses and doctors there, who of course said Nellie was lying
about the mistreatment (Bly 50). The jury decided to plan a visit to the Island
and once they got there, saw it was clean and seemed like a “happy” place. This
frustrated Nellie to no end because she knew they were putting on an act,
trying to cover up for the things that actually occurred there (Bly 50). .
Nellie got some of the patients to talk to the authorities and from this they
determined that Bly wasn’t lying and that there needed to be some drastic
changes at Blackwell Island (Bly 51). Nellie Bly knew she wanted to help those
poor souls in the insane asylum and she wrote a book of her account called Ten Days in a Mad-House (Bly 51). Nellie
states, “I have one consolation for my work, on the strength of my story, the
committee of appropriation provides $1,000,000, more than was ever before
given, for the benefit of the insane.”
Nellie Bly’s account of the
treatment patients received in one insane asylum during the nineteenth century
is common for all insane asylums during this time period. Many asylums didn’t
have funds to hire certified and compassionate nurses along with providing good
living conditions. The women that Nellie met in the asylum were all sent there
for reasons stated above, like signs
What
does this all mean?
The rise of the
Victorian madwoman can be contributed to many reasons, but one can mostly see
that regardless of mental illness or not, society views the female sex as mad
and unstable. Many women were sent to asylums because they weren’t the perfect
housewives the nineteenth century society called for and most times they
cracked under the pressure of trying to live up to such high standards. The young
Victorian female had to live almost a life of secrecy, never being able to
discuss female puberty or their sexual desires for fear that they would be
labeled insane. This female oppression only worsened when sane women weren’t
give the right to testify their sanity, especially when their family members
signed her rights away for a multitude of reasons. Nellie Bly’s account shows
that women had no power in not only a male dominated society, but also a male
dominated medical field, thus women’s voices and rights were taken away due to
the lack of power. Our female ancestors faced a horrible oppression just for
being a woman and sadly we still see that today. Women will forever be seen as
mad lunatics running around due to the past history that men and insane asylums
have given them. A common example of this can be seen when men state that women
are acting crazy around their menstrual time of the month and this links the
image of women and madness together today in the 21st century. Although
women have been given more rights and are hardly ever sent to mental
institutions for reasons found in the 19th century, there is still
the stereotype of domesticity that surrounds the female sex and they seem as if
they will never go away in a society that is still mildly male dominated. We
will never know what moment in time linked women to madness, but we will
forever have to live with the close minded stereotypes that our female
ancestors had to face.
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