Conclusion: Voices in Confinement
Fiction helps us examine those ties through the authors’ use of realism, which reflects socially and culturally acceptable treatments of women during periods of time when they were most vulnerable to both the ignorance of medical practice and unethical treatments of women. While fiction is often understood as telling imaginative stories, it is also impossible to dismiss completely the authors’ own real-life experiences and reflections of what they witness in the real world. In other words, though fiction is not factual, the imagination is not completely divorced from an author’s social experience. When it comes to the wrongful treatment of women, as seen over the course of centuries when their rights remained unequal to men’s and they were called the lesser or weaker gender, fiction became an ally in showcasing the systemic and socially acceptable treatments of their gender and their bodies.
One way I wished to reinforce the truths that fiction reveals is through research I conducted at multiple institutions in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The Doris I. Walker Trailblazer Scholarship from the California State University Dominguez Hills English Department made this research possible, and I gathered information from tours of the buildings, read related literature on the premises, and engaged in conversations with employees of the institutions. This experience contributes relative and concrete details to demonstrate how the fictional representations of wrongfully institutionalized women are in fact truthful. Four institutions provide the base of these details: The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia, Pennhurst State School and Hospital in Pennsylvania, Devereux Advanced Behavioral Health Center in Philadelphia, and the Ravenhill Mansion in Philadelphia. The first two represent the primary conceptualization of mental healthcare. The second two are private institutions where Rosemary Kennedy lived and represent transformations of mental healthcare.
The two buildings that most resemble the fictional depictions in Jane Eyre, Lady Audley’s Secret, and Fingersmith are The Trans-Allegheny Asylum and Pennhurst State School and Hospital. These monolithic institutions now represent society’s old ways of thinking about mental health and seem to draw both fear and awe in light of modern technology. They also reflect the “building as cure” mentality that Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride captured when he called them “a special apparatus for lunacy” (quotes from a wall-mounted placard). Dr. Kirkbride is known for his ideas and design for hospitals for the mentally insane (Ferguson). While the structures and treatments helped people with mental health issues and who needed specialized care, even if that care was rudimentary for its time, what I repeatedly observed was the mistreatment of patients, with special attention to women. Mistreatment is a power struggle between a dominant power source and its subordinate. Each novel discussed in this project highlights a power structure between a male authority with female subordinates, and a system that runs according to his literal “design.” This structure is also noticeable between the doctors who were like “gods” in the medical facility and its micro-society.
The first building I visited was the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum (TALA). Its preservation is a testament to impressive architecture and its contribution to the small economy of Weston, West Virginia. Nestled between small rolling hills and a winding river, the Kirkbride-designed asylum’s Gothic Tudor style remains beautifully preserved as an impressive sandstone structure (the second largest after the Moscow Kremlin, which was built in 1701). While it closed as a medical facility in 1994, it is still quite active with various tours ranging from $35 for the basic tour to $150 for a private ghost hunt, and an annual Halloween Haunt attraction that features actors dressed as tortured insane patients and zombie-like medical staff. Though the building is a modern marvel and invites comparisons to Bedlam in England, even more interesting are the details about its history of patients.
The 242,000 square foot structure began its services in 1864 yet did not have a modern medical ward until 1934, indicating that patients were treated as lunatics rather medical patients for 70 years. Also, while the original design meant to accommodate 250 patients, it housed up to 2,500 patients. With such overcrowding it seems unsurprising that women were admitted to the TALA for any reason, including not producing enough breast milk for their babies—and, as we have learned, it only took two males to commit them. If a husband wanted another wife or if his wife was “unreasonable,” she could be committed and only released with the consent of the man who committed her—she would be considered sane but housed alongside the insane. These facts echo the fictional two-doctor scenes from The Woman in White and Lady Audley’s Secret. While the novels create fictional women with names and details surrounding their lives, stories about real women who were wrongfully institutionalized at TALA are silent in comparison to the pride of the structure, its economy with tourism and Halloween Haunts, its history in the Civil War, and the name of the doctor who conceptualized its purpose. The history of women confined against their wills is overwritten by entertainment; even their ghosts are “hunted” and held captive.
While TALA was designed for the mentally insane yet accepted sane female patients, another institution called Pennhurst State School and Hospital in Spring City, Pennsylvania was designed for the mentally disabled and physically deformed and accepted sane female patients as well. Founded in 1908 and originally called the Eastern Pennsylvania State Institution for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic, Pennhurst sits on 1,400 acres secluded from society in a dilapidated and neglected state. Foliage grows from within most of its eighteen buildings. This institution differs greatly from the TALA in appearance foremost, as well as conceptually. Conceptually, the buildings are divided between the first lower campus for the male colony and a later built upper campus for the female colony. Each building served a specific medical purpose, such as care for patients with cerebral palsy, tuberculosis, handicap, down syndrome, deaf, mute, and many other diagnoses.
While Pennhurst was never named as an asylum because it did not serve insane or schizophrenic patients, some patients were dropped off and never heard from their families again. The lines became blurred regarding who could be committed. A woman could be committed to Pennhurst for promiscuity—something better understood as cultural punishment for a social transgression. These details reinforce the realism in sensation fiction that warns us how women experienced confinement for imprudent reasons: Jane Eyre, in which Bertha’s misunderstood and wild nature is confined to the attic; The Woman in White where Anne Catherick is committed for knowing a secret; Lady Audley’s Secret in which Lady Audley is denied a trial and sent 400 miles away to the maison de santé.
Though not an asylum for the insane, Pennhurst still became part of a system that allowed some women to be wrongly institutionalized, whether dropped off as unwanted or for being overly sexually active. This information was generated during a private tour I took that was agreed to months in advance with a woman named Ruth. A former Pennhurst employee, Ruth has positive reflections on her career there. She made mention of Pennhurst Day, a family picnic day for the patients to enjoy time outdoors with family members. She created a reward system for patients using Pennhurst “dollars”—a black and white hand drawn version of the US dollar bill. She also happened to have with her, serendipitously, a Special Olympics medallion that she found on the property after one of the annual Halloween haunt events (called “Pennhurst Asylum”). The Special Olympics and its connection to Eunice Kennedy Shriver and Rosemary sparked marvel and confirmation as the research continued to institutions where Rosemary lived.
When Joe and Rose Kennedy searched for boarding facilities for Rosemary, they most likely knew about the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum and Pennhurst State School and Hospital. Speculation about treatments in such places likely deterred them, and due to their affluence and reputation, they chose to house her in private facilities. The next two institutions visited for research not only housed Rosemary for short periods of time during her life before the lobotomy, they reflect a different discourse surrounding madness and have evolved in a different direction than the TALA and Pennhurst. The first one is Deveraux Advanced Behavioral Health Center and the second is Ravenhill Mansion.
The Deveraux Advanced Behavioral Health Center in Philadelphia was founded in 1912 by Helena Trafford Deveraux. It was designed to provide “specialized and individualized lesson plans for a wide range of intellectually challenged students” (Larson 60). Rosemary lived there from 1929 to 1932, ages 11 to 13. While Rosemary needed specialized help, her sisters also went to boarding schools because “keeping her girls under control was a significant priority” for Rose (67). Her actions (while keeping in mind a woman could be committed at Pennhurst for promiscuity) contribute to our understanding of early twentieth-century attitudes towards women and their sexuality. This seems to be a particularly patriarchal driven issue, especially in the subject of madness and mental health, that sexuality was the fault of women and not of men. Women could be confined to prevent them from engaging in sexual activity, and they could be confined if they were overly sexually active. It seems women had so few options where their sexuality was concerned, as well as their consent—autonomy was not evenly distributed.
At the end of Rosemary’s third year at the Deveraux educational institution her parents removed her because they wanted her to experience advancement and did not want the stigma of falling behind. It seems unfortunate that Rosemary changed schools and institutions so often during her parents’ search for something that required a miracle reversal of her asphyxiation at birth.
A visit to Deveraux did not appear to be as fruitful with public information or as inviting as the visits to the first two institutions. The office manager engaged in little conversation and scoffed at the mention of research about Rosemary; this secrecy about America’s “royal” family came as no surprise. My only help came from the literature in a 2016 Annual Report that turned out to be quite informative. Inside, a letter from the company president and CEO states, “To achieve our mission—now and in the future—we must remain connected and open to an ever-changing world” (2). This quote challenges Foucault’s study on asylums and his conclusion that, “The asylum, always oriented to anachronistic structures and symbols, would be, par excellence, inadapted and out of time” (255).
In the words of the president’s letter, the old world of madness and asylums appears to evolve out of Foucault’s range of theory about those who conceptualize care for the mentally unwell. What Deveraux’s modern approach does is show a new way of looking at patients who need care due to their mental health, one that requires a diagnosis, consent, and dignity. This method seems a logical way to prevent the wrongful institutionalization of women in either a physical building or through social stigmatization by false accusations. The bright and colorful pictures in the report show smiling faces on well-dressed people, some who have visible special needs like down syndrome, a vast difference from the perceived abuse from asylums and monolithic institutions. Also pertinent to the report is the list of donors, which is eighteen pages long. Notable companies donate to Deveraux such as Wells Fargo, the Calvin Klein Family Foundation, and Spirit Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, Inc. This list of donors signifies a societal concern about contribution to the advancement of such healthcare, while suggesting personal interests as well.
Last, there is a list of services located at the back of the report that lists boarding locations for patients with: ADD, ADHD, various psychological and emotional disorders, Autism Spectrum Disorder, learning disabilities, brain injury, and sexual and developmental disorders. While these dignified, modern, and costly means of boarding people with special needs shows the complicated process of establishing medical differentiation for each individual’s special needs, it is understatedly a vast improvement from the asylum and confinement of the “mad.” With the focus on women and their wrongful confinement, such accommodations have to do with the evolution in the medical understanding of madness, not necessarily the understanding the vulnerability of women. Women definitely benefit from a stricter process of medical diagnosis, but only the future will reveal what secrets hide in power dynamics and how women may or may not continue to be wrongly institutionalized, should the practice persist.
The second institution I visited and where Rosemary temporarily lived is the Ravenhill Mansion. The mansion was donated to the Archdiocese of Philadelphia in 1910, who gave it to an order of nuns who founded the Ravenhill Academy of the Assumption in 1919 (Larson 148). In 1940, when Rosemary was 22 years old, she spent two months at Ravenhill, until it was quickly decided that the staff could not accommodate her needs. On the property adjacent to Ravenhill was Roseneath Farms Sanitarium, a private psychiatric facility that housed 50 patients at a time, and it was a consideration of her parents to next place Rosemary there, but instead she went to Saint Gertrude’s School of Arts and Crafts in D.C. (150-51).
Today Ravenhill Mansion is beautifully preserved and is part of the campus of Philadelphia University (now Thomas Jefferson University). The University also acquired Roseneath Farms Sanitarium and its property, a transformation that further reveals a change in cultural mindsets about how to better appropriate land and institutions for the betterment of society. The novel that best connects with this thought is Fingersmith in the scene when Susan says the gentleman’s home turned private asylum looked mad—the outside appeared orderly yet the inside was in disarray—without a transformation the home took on a form of madness. Contextually, transformation is an outer manifestation and an inner change. When opportunities subsist in which power struggles lead to the wrongful institutionalization of women, transformation disconnects the memory of doing so and women are less at risk of physical confinement. Therefore, spaces that promote higher learning and concern for the proper treatment of people benefits women.
My research on these buildings connects their “complex negotiation of national and local ideologies” (Newman 123-24) with the wrongful institutionalization of women found in fiction and non-fiction. When looking at sensation fiction and its highlighting of wrongful confinements of women, we can see how “madness” and its treatments, including confinement in buildings, happened alongside the transformation of female agency in society and culture, almost at the same pace. It is evident that madness was used as a tool to control women’s bodies and behaviors through fear of confinement. Tracking this progress depends on neo-Victorian theory and the novels that highlight a long history of the wrongful institutionalization of women during a time when madness was most misunderstood and women more vulnerable to a system that would easily receive them.
Very important to uncovering this system is the power struggle that has subjugated vulnerable women for centuries. Segments of society continue to conduct the norms of dominant culture, which is where women will be most vulnerable, as seen in Rosemary Kennedy’s life. The power dynamic between the doctor and nurse created an example of how this power struggle works and the result was, sadly, Rosemary’s asphyxiation. A second example of this kind of power is her father’s desperate attempt to reclaim a “normal” family that led to another unfortunate medical decision. The lobotomy stands as the most unfortunate of all power struggles—Rosemary’s life as she knew it was taken from her without consent.
Returning once more to Foucault, we can perceive this power system because he identifies one of the problems that began at the onset of treating madness—its dependence upon the model of the Quaker family with the father always at the head. His study includes two “important” men, William Tuke and Phillipe Pinel, who designed and operated asylums in late eighteenth-century England and France, respectively: Life in the asylum as Tuke and Pinel constituted it permitted the birth of that delicate structure which would become the essential nucleus of madness—a structure that formed a kind of microcosm in which were symbolized the massive structures of bourgeois society and its values: Family-child relations, centered on the theme of paternal authority. (274)
In this model, the madman and the madwoman are always at the mercy of the authoritative father, or the doctor who retains the dominant power of reason. The evolution of mental healthcare and the removal of ideas built around that authority structure are what contribute to the de-institutionalization of women. Yet there is still the persistence of this phenomena in society that creates institutionalization around women through cultural and social norms, as suggested in Waters’ novel Fingersmith. Waters confronts the norms built upon patriarchal values that place confining expectations and limitations on women’s sexuality. Her work within the critical theory of neo-Victorianism employs thought processes and political dynamism that have evolved from fundamental imperialistic terms and it reinforces new ways of thinking culturally, academically and legislatively. This same approach should be applied to the subject of women who died in unjustified confinement, whether through new fiction that gives them a voice, as Wide Sargasso Sea gives Bertha a voice, or through legislation that gives them a voice and acknowledges them in the civic space.
Asylums that confined them are either gone, transformed, or lack the resources to list their names and those who committed them, but their voices need to be heard for the sake of their families and for women currently held in confinement in unidentified spaces. As Llewellyn states, to “illustrate conflict and difference” should undermine “the stability of a presumed hegemonic historical narrative” (165). Illustrating the wrongful confinement of women is a call to hear their voices and set them free from the hegemonic historical narrative. Society needs transformation from the old structure of the dominant and controlling father who patronizes women and daughters because of the power it gives men to confine women. Society fears change and holds onto old ways of thinking—but inside of that tight grip women are unheard.