Review: Ten Days in a Madhouse by Nellie Bly

Original Publication Date: 1887

Genre: Investigative journalism

Topics: Asylums, abuse, mental illness, women

 

 

 

 

 Review by : Chrisbookarama

Journalist Nellie Bly, pen name of Elizabeth Cochrane, was tired of reporting for the “woman’s pages” of Dispatch. She turned to The New York World whose editor gave her an assignment, one he didn’t think she had much hope of accomplishing.

Nellie would pretend to be insane and have herself admitted to Blackwell’s Island Women’s Asylum, while there she would record all that went on inside. Her editor doubted she would get in and didn’t have a plan to get her out! Nellie was determined to get her story. From the beginning, she believed that the reports of abuse inside the hospital were exaggerated. She was about to find out how wrong she was.

First, she thought it would be easier to get to the asylum by way of a women’s temporary home, a kind of homeless shelter for working women. She felt the landlady would have experience with these cases. The first night, Nellie began acting erratically, calling the other women crazy, refusing to sleep, and claiming to have lost her luggage. After the police are called, Nellie was placed before a judge who for some reason believed she’s from Cuba. “How did you know?!” she says. She isn’t, actually, she’s from Pennsylvania, but she plays along and it’s kind of hilarious.

The judge sends her to be examined at Bellevue Hospital and she fears she will be found out. She needn't have worried. The doctors declare her a “hopeless case.” One asks her if she is a prostitute and she takes umbrage! She and a few other women, including a German woman with no English, are shipped off to Blackwell’s Island. And just like that, she’s in.

At the asylum, she meets several patients, some who have obvious problems and others who were put there and either recovered or were never sick to begin with. Many of these women were foreigners who could not speak for themselves, or women placed there by family. There was no hope of leaving for these women. No matter what their mental issues were the doctors didn’t listen to them.

The doctors were the least of their worries. Nellie complains of the cold and of the poor food. Worse still was the treatment of the nurses who were cruel, torturing and abusing the women. Taunting them and teasing them. They were even expected to clean the rooms of the patients and nurses.  Nellie was told more than once by the nurses that charity cases should be grateful for what they were given and “don’t expect kindness, you won’t get it.” This is how these sick women were treated.

Nellie gave up the pretence of insanity once she got to Blackwell’s Island and many times asked the doctors to test her. She called out the behaviour of the nurses and the alarming conditions of some of the patients but it helped little. Nellie was only released once a lawyer from the paper came to claim her.

The stories she hears from the patients are horrific. These women were poor and overwhelmed by their home lives. Some just had a bad day which was enough to send them to an asylum for a lifetime. The “treatment,” or lack of, did more harm than good.  The foreign women must have been scared out of their minds! They wouldn’t have understood what was happening.

Once her story Ten Days in a Madhouse was published, a grand jury was called and with Nellie’s assistance, the hospital investigated. Changes to the system were made.

When I think about this story, this true story, I’m struck by so many things. Nellie was in her early twenties. She was a woman in the Victorian era. She had no idea what she was getting into and no idea how she’d get out of it. She just jumped in with both feet. Talk about nerve!

Nellie’s reporting is clear headed and factual. She tells events as she experiences them. Although her writing is full of sympathy and frustration for the patients, it’s never overwrought. It never veers into the melodramatic. It’s a serious topic, but Nellie’s reporting is warm and at times even humourous.

I knew of Nellie Bly’s journalism, but this was the first time hearing her words. What an experience!

This was a Librivox recording read by Alys AtteWater. Alys has a pleasant, perky voice, just the voice for a plucky, twenty-something journalist.

Download Ten Days in a Madhouse by Nellie Bly at  Librivox  or read the text at Digital Library.

Review: EIGHT COUSINS by Louisa May Alcott

Original Publication Date: 1875

Genre: Young Adults

Topics: Growing up, Morals, Child-reading, Happiness, Health

Review:

“Eight Cousins” is about Rose Campbell, a 13-year-old who shortly after becoming an orphan is put under the guardianship of  her Uncle Alec. He’s a doctor and temporarily away at sea, so until he returns Rose goes to live in “Aunt Hill”, the home of many aunts, great-aunts and seven male cousins. When we first meet her, Rose is treated by the Aunts as the frail and delicate creature every young woman of the should be, but when Uncle Alec comes back, he begins a long process towards a happier and healthier Rose, using very unorthodox methods (he was ready to burn her corset!).


I was already 30 pages in when I realized I’d already read “Eight Cousins”, many, many moons ago. I vividly remember two scenes in particular, but in my mind they became part of ”A Little Princess” (I confused my orphans…): the scene where Uncle Alec creates placebo pills from brown bread, and when he put together Rose’s room, full of exotic objects from his travels. Why these two in particular in a book full of other events? No idea.

The story is pure Alcott in it’s gentleness and focus on strong messages for young people, but it felt rather more outdated than “Little Women” and its sequels. In those more famous works, she seem to be writing for both adults and children, but this one comes across as more infantile. The moralizing and sentimentality in “Eight Cousins” (full of “little dears” that go to “little beds”, with ”little cups of broth”) become too much Tell and not enough Show. Here’s when the kinder of the Aunts tries to dissuade her sons from reading “popular stories”:

”A boot-black mustn’t use good grammar, and a newsboy must swear a little, or he wouldn't be natural,” explained Geordie, both boys ready to fight gallantly for their favourites. 

“But my sons are neither boot-blacks nor newsboys, and I object to hearing them use such words as ‘screamer,’ ‘bully,’ and ‘buster.’ In fact, I fail to see the advantage of writing books about such people unless it is done in a very different way. I cannot think they will help to refine the ragamuffins if they read them, and I’m sure they can do no good to the better class of boys, who through these books are introduced to police courts, counterfeiters’ dens, gambling houses, drinking saloons, and all sorts of low life.”

Still, Uncle Alec’s theories about what a young girl should eat, dress and be taught were radical for the time, and still refreshing now. He forbade corsets and tight belts, he recommended lots of fresh air and exercise, and defended that every girl should be educated on how to handle her financial affairs and (gasp) how her body works.

“Do you think that is a good sort of thing for her to be poking over? She is a nervous child, and I’m afraid it will be bad for her,” said Aunt Myra, watching Rose as she counted vertebrae, and waggled a hip-joint in its socket with an inquiring expression.

“An excellent study, for she enjoys it, and I mean to teach her how to manage her nerves so that they won’t be a curse to her, as many a woman’s become through ignorance or want of thought. To make a mystery or terror of these things is a mistake, and I mean Rose shall understand and respect her body so well that she won’t dare to trifle with it as most women do.”

 I've added “Rose in Bloom”, the sequel to “Eight Cousins”, to the wishlist. They are both available on Project Gutenberg.

Review: Ten Days in a Mad-House

Original Publication Date:  1887

Genre:  Non-Fiction, History

Topics:  Women as Victims, Mental Illness

Review:  I did a Google search for "Best Librivox recordings" and one of the first suggestions I came across was Nellie Bly's Ten Days in a Mad-House.  It's hard to read that title and not be uber-intrigued, so I downloaded the book immediately and was able to listen to it in just one afternoon.

Nellie Bly  is the pen name of one of those fantastic women who seems to have been lost in history.  She was one of the first female journalists in the US, and this book is an expose of her time working undercover, posing as a patient at the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island in New York.  She also took a very fast trip around the world in only 72 days, beating Jules Verne's fictional trip of 80 days.  She married a millionaire 40 years older than her (making him around 70 at the time of their marriage) and became president of Iron Clad, going on to invent items and getting patents in her own name.  Then she went bankrupt and returned to reporting, choosing the topics of World War I's Eastern Front and women's suffrage on which to focus.

Oh, and after writing this book, a grand jury investigation was initiated into the treatment of inmates of insane asylums.  Bly was a key witness who helped increase the budget for the ill by almost $1 million.

Pretty awesome, right?

In the narrative, Bly comes off as an intrepid, determined and very engaging woman.  She manages to fool a lot of people into thinking she's insane to get her into the lunatic asylum, only to find once she is incarcerated that none of the medical staff is inclined to believe that she (or any of the other women) is actually quite sane and should be released.  Bly is clearly horrified by this fact, pointing out that if the doctors are there to help treat patients, then they should run tests and see if their treatments are working so that people can be released.  Bly also spotlights many women in the asylum who were not insane, but somehow ended up there because their families couldn't afford them or their husbands didn't trust them.  She told the story of a very sane German woman who did not know English; the doctors didn't know German and made no attempt to find a translator, so the poor woman was incarcerated with very little hope of ever being released, just because of a language barrier.

The conditions were horrifying- there was no heat, the baths were cold and harsh, the food was miserable, and the doctors seemed to completely ignore the women.  I couldn't help but think about all the women who were quite sane when they arrived at the hospital but probably went slowly insane because of the hopelessness of their situations.  While many of the women did suffer from mental illness, there were many that were incarcerated through the workings of their families, and it was very disturbing to see how little access to help they had.

It feels wrong to say that I enjoyed reading a book about poor women being locked up and slowly driven insane.  But Bly's writing is crisp, she is an excellent investigative reporter, and the Librivox narrator was a very engaging reader.  I am so glad to have learned more about Nellie Bly, too, who sounds like an amazing woman.  Really great historical source on mental illness and how women particularly were made to suffer at the hands of men who had no idea how to diagnose or treat illness (case in point:  Nellie never acted insane while in the asylum, but everyone insisted that she was insane.  She was only there for 10 days, so was able to withstand this onslaught, but what about the women who were told this so many times, for many years?).  This piece resulted in some big, important changes to the system in New York, and we have a lot to thank this amazingly brave woman for!

Review: Molly Make-Believe by Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

Original Publication Date: 1911

Genre: romance, epistolary

Topics: illness, letters, love, relationships







Review:

Molly Make-Believe tells the story of Carl Stanton, a young man from New England who suffers from rheumatism. Carl is engaged to be married to Cornelia; and to his complete dismay, his being unwell doesn’t prevent her from going south for the winter with her family as she has always done. To add insult to injury, the letters Cornelia writes him are distant, short, and businesslike: they completely fail to provide a sick young gentleman with the comfort and amusement he requires. How dare his fiancée neglect him so?

It is Cornelia herself who suggests that Carl sign up to receive letters from The Serial Letter Company. As the advertisement says, this company provides “Comfort and Entertainment for Invalids, Travellers, and all Lonely People in the form of “Real Letters from Imaginary Persons”. Carls begins to receive letters from someone who calls herself “Molly Make-Believe”, and very soon this imaginary person begins to take the absent Cornelia’s place in his heart. But who exactly is the real Molly? And could it be that there is any real feeling behind what is in essence a business exchange?

Molly Make-Believe tells Carl and Molly’s story though the letters they exchange, but the presence of long narrative sections means that the novel is perhaps more accurately described as semi-epistolary.

I decided to read Molly Make-Believe because it was mentioned in the same breath as Jean Webster’s delightful Daddy-Long-Legs in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. The reference, I might add, is not exactly flattering, but I figured that if I disagreed with Fitzgerald’s narrator about the latter, I might very well also disagree about the former.

As it turns out, I was completely wrong.

Jean Webster’s Daddy-Long-Legs is in many ways a traditional romance, but it’s also full of proto-feminist elements and exciting ideas about women’s education and intellectual and emotional independence. Not so with Molly Make-Believe. The deep-seated assumption underpinning this story is that it’s only right and proper for a woman to put a man’s emotional needs first – that it is indeed completely unreasonable for a wife, or wife-to-be, to dare to do otherwise.

This is well exemplified by Carl’s reaction to the photo the fictional Molly sends him at his requests. You see, she had the audacity to pick a photo of something other than a beautiful woman. Here is our noble hero’s response:

Scowlingly he picked up the picture and stared and stared at it. Certainly it was grim. But even from its grimness emanated the same faint, mysterious odor of cinnamon roses that lurked in the accompanying letter. “There’s some dreadful mistake somewhere,” he insisted. Then suddenly he began to laugh, and reaching out once more for pen and paper, inscribed his second letter and his first complaint to the Serial-Letter Co.
‘To the Serial-Letter Co.,’ he wrote sternly, with many ferocious tremors of dignity and rheumatism.
‘Kindly allow me to call attention to the fact that in my recent order of the 18th inst., the specifications distinctly stated ‘love-letters’, and not any correspondence whatsoever,—no matter how exhilarating from either a ‘Gray-Plush Squirrel’ or a ‘Banda Sea Pirate’ as evidenced by enclosed photograph which I am hereby returning. Please refund money at once or forward me without delay a consistent photograph of a ‘special edition de luxe’ girl.

The response he receives from the company is perhaps even more revealing:

‘Oh, please, Sir,’ said the enclosed letter, ‘Oh, please, Sir, we cannot refund your subscription money because—we have spent it. But if you will only be patient, we feel quite certain that you will be altogether satisfied in the long run with the material offered you. As for the photograph recently forwarded to you, kindly accept our apologies for a very clumsy mistake made here in the office. Do any of these other types suit you better? Kindly mark selection and return all pictures at your earliest convenience.’

The assumption is that this kind of behaviour is a man’s prerogative, and this premise is never, ever questioned. I should add that even after being sent a “satisfactory” set of pictures to choose from, our Carl is still afraid that his Molly may be old, disfigured, or, horror of horrors, black.



Yes, seriously.
MILD SPOILERS

A possible feminist reading of Molly Make-Believe is that it features a young woman who achieves financial independence by attaching value to the kind of care work – in this case, companionship, amusement and emotional support – that women are generally expected to do for free. Unfortunately, this reading is undermined by speech Molly herself gives towards the end:

‘I guess—I guess it takes a man to really run a business with any sort of financial success, ‘cause you see a man never puts anything except his head into his business. And of course if you only put your head into it, then you go right along giving always just a little wee bit less than ‘value received’—and so you can’t help, sir, making a profit. Why people would think you were plain, stark crazy if you gave them even one more pair of poor rubber boots than they’d paid for. But a woman! Well, you see my little business was a sort of a scheme to sell sympathy—perfectly good sympathy, you know—but to sell it to people who really needed it, instead of giving it away to people who didn’t care anything about it at all. And you have to run that sort of business almost entirely with your heart—and you wouldn’t feel decent at all, unless you delivered to everybody just a little tiny bit more sympathy than he paid for. Otherwise, you see you wouldn’t be delivering perfectly good sympathy. So that’s why—you understand now—that’s why I had to send you my very own woolly blanket-wrapper, and my very own silver porringer, and my very own sling-shot that I fight city cats with,—because, you see, I had to use every single cent of your money right away to pay for the things that I’d already bought for other people.

Yes, the ladies are far too emotional to ever successfully run a business. Furthermore, charging money for the kind of care work they are naturally suited for feels so wrong to them that they’ll always do more than they’re expected to, and the result will inevitably be financial ruin. It’s a sad fact of life.

To end with something positive, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Carl’s fiancée Cornelia was treated with far more kindness than I expected in their final confrontation. The two part ways amicably, having realised that they’re not temperamentally suited to each other, and there’s far less condemning Cornelia for not being as devoted as a woman should be than I feared.

END SPOILERS

It goes without saying that Molly Make-Believe is a product of its time. Of course, the early twentieth-century world in which it takes place was not a place where the gender essentialism, racism or conservatism that underpin this novel were never questioned, as evidenced by novels like Daddy-Long-Legsor the work of early feminists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and of other activists; but nonetheless these ideas were socially dominant to an even greater extent than they are now.

It’s of course completely possible to enjoy the novel for the love story without aligning oneself with the very traditional ideas about gender roles or the problematic power dynamics it reveals. Readers’ mileage for how much is too much will naturally vary. It’s also possible to find Molly Make-Believe an interesting read exactly because its pre-feminism is so revealing. That was what happened in my case: I may not have loved it, but I’m glad to have picked it up all the same.

You can find Molly Make-Believe at Project Gutenberg.



Another illustration from the novel by Walter Little.
They read it too: Redeeming Qualities