Whitney Walters
Dr. Halverson
English 102
16 May 2013
Annotated Bibliography
Akavia, Naamah. "Hysteria, Identification, and the Family: A Rereading of Freud's Dora Case." American Imago 62.2 (2005): 193-216. Project MUSE. Web. 14 May 2013. <http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.uwc.edu/journals/american_imago/v062/62.2akavia.html>.
This rereading of Freud’s Dora case delves into how she has become an illustration of gender conflicts in Victorian Europe. They regard Dora as a heroine whose illness was a form of revolt against societal norms, while others pity her as a victimized figure. The article details her family and how they influenced Dora’s hysterical behavior, which was only brought on by the stress of taking care of her sick father her entire life, leaving her to be deprived of sleep, obsessively worrying, and neglecting her own body with the added stress that she was condemned to the life of a housewife when she really wanted to pursue education. Freud believes that her hysterical symptoms come from a repressed sexual desire for her father and she mimics his symptoms for his attention. When her father starts an affair with his nurse, Dora threatens to expose them and her father officially turns her over to the care of Sigmund Freud.
I thought this article was wonderful and very trust-worthy because it had entries from Freud’s journal about Dora’s case and her symptoms. It looked into both sides, taking Dora’s view of how her symptoms of hysteria were merely caused by the stress of her life, not a predisposed sexual repression that Freud insinuated. The article was very credible and listed other sources from psychological scholarly journals and from some of Freud’s other works.
I plan on using Dora’s story to show how easily women can be thrown into insane asylums by the ones they thought they could trust. Dora was turned over to Freud and believed to be insane, thus spending the rest of her life in an asylum, even though her hysterical symptoms were caused by the heavy responsibilities of caring for her sick father.
2 Bly, Nellie. “Ten Days in a Mad-House.” New York, 1887. Print.
This book was a documentation of the female journalist named Nellie Bly that my paper focuses a lot. She tells of the horrors she endured while committed to a madhouse around 1887. In detail, Nellie depicts what happened to her day by day and how her stunt reporting helped the insane asylum.
This source was very credible because it was the accounts of Nellie Bly and if anyone knew what nineteenth century insane asylums were like, it would be Nellie Bly.
I plan on using this book for my primary research as a cultural analysis and to incorporate her experiences in my paper to prove how women were viewed as lunatics by society during this Victorian period.
3 Brincklé, Adriana P. "Life Among the Insane." The North American Review. 363rd ed. Vol. 144. N.p.: University of Northern Iowa, 1887. 190-99. JSTOR. Web. 1 Apr. 2013. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/25101179 .>.
In this article, Adriana Brincklé tells her story about being locked up in an insane asylum for twenty-eight years for being too extravagant and too fond of dress. She relied heavily on her family for financial issues and they soon tired of her and hard her committed in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania under the insanity defense in 1857. Her article talks about the nurses she encountered there and how many weren’t rational beings. In fact, most of the nurses were promoted to nursing after first being patients there and they were not properly trained to deal with the mentally unstable. They resorted to using violence and brutality with the patients and expected them to do their work for them like sweeping and cleaning rooms. Adriana then goes on to talk in detail about all the patients she encountered and how mistreated they were along with the laissez-faire approach the nurses took when actually caring for the patients.
Overall, I don’t think this article was very credible because it was just a journal entry from a woman who was wrongly convicted and it also doesn’t seem very reliable, but rather elementary. The information in the article is extremely biased because we aren’t hearing the nurses’ side of the story, only the wrongly convicted side. Adriana’s goal was to tell her story of how she was committed and wasn’t insane, a common theme popping up around the 19th century.
The article had a lot of useless information that will not help shape my research question. I will use some of the accounts of the nurses’ mistreatment in my paper and how it was very easy for a woman to get wrongly committed to a mental institution. This article has made me interested at looking into why the 19th century had a rise of women put in insane asylums against their own will.
4Lunbeck, Elizabeth. "Hysteria: The Revolt of the "Good Girl"" The Psychiatric Persuasion. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994. 209-28. Print.
The chapter from this book that I read looked into why hysterical women made up one quarter of patients in insane asylums and how they had become hysterical. During the 19th century, women who were committed to asylums for hysteria suffered from depression, crying spells, severe inexplicable pains, vertigo, fainting spells, paraplegias, twitching, tremors, and convulsions. Psychiatrists created three groups that these hysterical women belonged to. The first group was women who had be raped or subjected to incest, the second group were women who experienced what men considered “normal” heterosexuality, and the third group was women who experienced terrors of womanhood like childbirth and menstruation. The fact that so many females were considered hysteric was blamed on the sexual ignorance and lack of education given to women about their bodies, something that was also brought up by Elaine Showalter’s book.
This source seems very credible because it had statements from doctors and psychiatrists during the 19th century who dealt with and treated hysteric women. It had a lot of facts and figures and many of the same ideas that Elaine Showalter had explored. The goal of this chapter in the book was to explore why women became insane and hysteric and why acting hysterically has long meant to act as a woman.
I plan on using this information along with Elaine Showalter’s information to explore why the 19th century had such an increase of committed women. I will also use facts and stories from this chapter about hysteria to talk about Nellie Bly, the journalist who faked hysteria to get committed. It seems that lack of education about sex and menstruation was a big cause as to why women became insane and I want to look further into that idea and why education could not be given.
5 Lutes, Jean Marie. "Into The Madhouse With Nellie Bly: Girl Stunt Reporting In Late Nineteenth-Century America." American Quarterly 54.2 (2002): 217. Academic Search Complete. Web. 25 Mar. 2013.
Jean Marie Lutes looked into the life and success of female journalist Nellie Bly who started her career as a stunt girl journalist during 1887. One of her projects was to feign insanity and get committed to the insane asylum Blackwell’s Island, where the conditions were known to be poor and provided cheap care for impoverished mentally ill immigrants (Lutes, 217). After her story of her time at the insane asylum was published, Nellie became known as an expert in girl stunt reporting, which gave women journalists a way to profit from the attention so frequently focused on their bodies (Lutes, 219). Lutes’ article talks about the mistreatment of asylum inmates and Nellie’s success in deceiving police officers, judges, doctors, and nurses. Nellie’s act of hysteria was shocking to everyone because hysteria was only thought to be in “savage” women of color (Lutes, 229) and in women who were sexually promiscuous. In fact, hysteria was applied to any woman who was unable to express herself except through body language, making the doctors think that Nellie was not only hysteric but also a nymphomaniac and during this time, the orderlies and doctors blamed the women in the insane asylum for male acts of sexual aggression (Lutes, 233). The article ends with all of Nellie’s achievements in the journalism field by going undercover in some of the most unsafe conditions and how Nellie became the pioneer woman of stunt reporting.
The article had a few journal entries of Nellie’s that really helped me understand her desire and passion to make herself known in the journalism field, thus the only reason why she checked into a mental institution. It seems like a useful source when looking into girl stunt reporting and the treatment of women in mental institutions. When reading the article, I did notice that the author seemed almost mad at the way women journalists were laughed at by men because of the fact that they were girls so the article may be a little biased towards women.
I think this article will be a good source to use for my research paper because it had many of Nellie’s accounts that make it more relatable to not only me, but also my readers. I will use this article to explain the thought process behind why Nellie did what she did and exactly how she pulled this stunt off. The article also brought up the idea that women who were in mental institutions were viewed as sexually promiscuous and taken advantage of because of this and I plan to use this to describe how terrible living conditions were at insane asylums for women who were diagnosed with hysteria, like Nellie Bly.
6Matlock, Jann. "Doubling out of the Crazy House: Gender, Autobiography, and the Insane Asylum System in Nineteenth-Century France." Representations. Vol. 34. N.p.: University of California, 1991. 166-95. JSTOR. Web. 1 Apr. 2013.
This article tells the story of a woman from Paris named Hersilie Rouy who was taken from her apartment and committed to a private mental hospital at the request of her half-brother in 1854. While there for fourteen years, she managed to get scraps of paper and pencils, although sometimes she would have to write in her own blood, and wrote down her experiences there and how she planned to show these writings to prove that she was sane. Her writings mention how asylums entrapped women with greater ease, kept them longer, and released them less frequently than men counterparts and how the women were only allowed to write letters every two weeks which were reviewed by doctors so they didn’t speak badly of the asylum. She lastly mentions the treatments that she endured there, like torture, beatings, straightjackets, shaved heads, solitary confinement, imprisonment with dangerous patients, deprivation of food, water, heat, clothing, light, and medical treatment.
This article is a credible source because it is an eye-witness account of the treatment received in French asylums during the middle of the 19th century. Jann Matlock accurately covered the experiences Hersilie went through being a middle class woman who was thought to be insane and her goal was to show us the struggles Hersilie went through to prove her sanity.
I plan on using this to talk about how women were viewed in the asylums in the 19th century and some of the harsh treatment they received. When I started this project, I knew that I wanted to work with actual diary and journal accounts of women in asylums and this is a perfect article for that. Some questions this article brings up is why do the asylums swallow women and not men, making it seem like the women committed fell off the face of the Earth. Also, why did asylums restrict the women from writing and outside communication?
7 Ruether, Rosemary Radford. New Woman, New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation. New York: Seabury, 1975. Print.
This book looked into different reasons as to why there was the liberation of women and how women were viewed by men in the times of Adam and Eve. The book also delves into why women were viewed as witches and mentions a lot about the witch trials they endured just because they were women. It also looked into how race and social class affected the liberation of women and their sexual repression. The book mentioned Victorian women a little bit and how, thanks to the Freudian Revolution, they threw away the common belief that they were only allowed to practice domesticity and went out and got jobs.
The book is a credible source because it has in-text citations and works cited with scholarly journals and academic books that I also looked into. I trust this book very much because the author explored many ways as to why women gained a new found freedom after being repressed since the beginning of the Bible ages.
This book wasn’t very useful, I spent more time skimming through a lot of information that was interesting, but didn’t apply to my research question or research paper. The parts that did relate to my paper and the 19th century is useful, but I feel like it provided me with very little information and I’m left wanting more to use in my research paper. I plan on using the information I did get to explain why women were liberated and thus, put into insane asylums for practicing this new found freedom.
8 Showalter, Elaine. "The Rise of the Victorian Madwoman." The Female Malady. New York: Pantheon, 1985. 51-73. Print.
Elaine Showalter’s book titled The Female Malady looks into the rise of the Victorian Madwoman during the mid-nineteenth century and what caused an increase of women in insane asylums. Interestingly enough, in the beginning of the 19th century, men were more commonly committed to asylums and women were usually caretakers for the patients. This soon changed when the Lunatics Act was passed and women weren’t allowed access to medical education. This caused insane asylums to have an unusual amount of female patients and doctors believed this was because females experienced insanity linked to their life and menstrual cycle. They found many of their female patients were admitted shortly after the lady got her menstrual cycle or started menopause or right after she gave birth. This was just a beginning to why women were committed though, many doctors also believed that women became insane because there was a suffocation of family life and boredom destroys women’s capacity to dream, work, or act. The rest of the chapter has excerpts from books by Florence Nightingale and Charlotte Bronte about why the Victorian women developed insanity and took over the insane asylums.
I found this chapter of her book to be tremendously helpful and informative and very credible because it had excerpts from other books that looked at the link between women and insanity. The source wasn’t biased because it looked at both a man’s perspective as to why women are more susceptible to insanity and a woman’s. The goal of this chapter was to look at why there was an increase in female patients during the mid-nineteenth century.
Elaine Showalter’s book will help me look at why the Victorian era had so many women committed to asylums and how society viewed these “insane” women. My research question deals with reporter Nellie Bly who faked hysteria to get into an asylum and this was around the exact same time of the rise of women in asylums. I want to look into this and see how they are linked and why. This source had a lot of excerpts from books that I plan on looking up and using for research as well. Lastly, this chapter has me thinking about straying away from women journalists and mental institutions and look into why women were mostly committed during the 19th century.
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