Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter
The Victorian era is an important one for analyzing its culture and literature because of the spread of British imperialism around the globe. Where neo-Victorianism differs from Victorian literature and culture is in the basic use of the word “neo,” meaning new, which invites us to focus our attentions on modified understandings about the era. A new look at the Victorian period and Victorian culture can also be understood as maintaining the historicity along with acumen about the long-term effects of its social practices, especially in the civic space—a term to explain the space where people, culture, and laws (or lack of them) come into contact.
Historically, imperial expansion led to the dissemination of culture and language, and, I would argue, attached to that were the expectations of women visible in nineteenth-century literature. Neo-Victorian fiction and theory study such contexts to explore the missing information in historical records about the marginalized. For example, and in this case, context means looking carefully at the wrongful institutionalization of women that took root in earlier centuries and continued in America in the twentieth century. Such connections show us how nineteenth-century English culture carried its influence the globe, as opposed to remaining local.
Mark Llewellyn and Ann Heilmann address the need for the careful globalization of neo-Victorian studies and a “diversity of the disciplines or geographical spaces engaged with the genre or its concepts” (27). In response to their assessment that neo-Victorian studies have remained “predominately literary-critical and Anglocentric in presentation” (27), my study seeks to explore “a more nuanced interpretation of the past as a history that can be reclaimed and can redeem the present,” similar to the work of neo-Victorianist Elizabeth Ho (27). Applying a disciplinary lens specifically to the study of the wrongful institutionalization of women using Victorian fiction and sensation fiction, paired with a biography of an American woman who was wrongly institutionalized, constitutes an engagement with the work of neo-Victorianism, and therefore history, which champions not only feminist studies, but also reexamines those scholars or writers who unconsciously invoke Victorian influence and know not what they do (35).
In this chapter, I will make this argument through an analysis of the book Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter (2015), by Kate Clifford Larson, in which we see the expectations and ultimately the wrongful institutionalization of a young American girl, Rosemary Kennedy. This chapter does not aim to incriminate any parties, but instead to understand power dynamics and to influence change where marginalized women are concerned.
An additional function of using the lens of neo-Victorianism rests in its ability to drive debate. While the ideas presented here are meant to engage with history and pose questions about how wrongful institutionalization happened, they may trigger many, even contrasting opinions; debate will continue to produce the academic theories necessary for engaging with literature and culture. Llewellyn and Heilmann state that, “Adaptive acts conceptualized as ‘neo-Victorian’ in an interdisciplinary and global format are required to drive debate about internationally diverse ‘re-memorisations’ of the age which often but not exclusively laid the foundations for today’s cultural and social thought” (28).
Looking back on Sarah Waters’ work, Fingersmith resonates with this statement, and with this chapter. Being a resident English woman, Waters’ proximity to the Victorian makes her local rather than global, yet her work takes on aspects of the treatment of women and feminist theories that are still controversial in many global places. Her novel is therefore a “diverse rememorisation of the age” (the Victorian age) that created specific cultural and social expectations of women. Through fiction, we see how women, like her characters, show movement from restrictive class and sexual boundaries to dynamic thinkers who defy the set notions for femininity.
Waters demonstrates how politics and gender intersect when Susan is institutionalized with additional severity due to the false accusation of being a lesbian aggressor. Waters’ use of metafiction and the convention of historiographic writing, similar to the work of sensation fiction authors, becomes interdisciplinary by being simultaneously literary and political. This is where scholarly and cultural debate may arise, due to conflicting points of view and the polarity between those who cling to tradition and those who embrace social change. Llewellyn and Heilmann address this conflict in their article when they conclude, “such memorialisation opens up complex issues related to the (s)elective affinities drawn between the contemporary and the historical” (30). Again, the focus is on women, yet we must often depend on literature to get complete stories of how certain social norms trap women in various forms of institutionalization.
Historically, not only could women not own property, vote, or have custody of their children if they were divorced, they were often conceived as pieces of property themselves, as Mary Wollstonecraft’s narrator in Maria points out: “Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?” (11). While Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s novel suggests that a moral-defying woman could not access the law, Waters’ suggests that the law actively worked against such women. In her own nuanced way, Waters confronts the civic space in society where laws and norms and traditions collide. Regarding that space and in relation to neo-Victorianism, Llewellyn and Heilmann state, “Civic accommodates the modes of living, engagement, political and social action required at specific moments but in this respect frequently finds itself the state of nostalgia, longing and mourning” (32).
Contemporary cultures seem to wax progressive about the fact that change is inevitable and unstoppable, yet in the twentieth century a young woman was wrongly institutionalized in a true story that reads like the fiction we have surveyed. Women are at the center of the civic space where laws affect them directly, yet if bound to elusive power sources such as longing and nostalgia for the past that invented it, the civic space cannot help them. Neo-Victorianism aims at filling in the gaps where those elusive power sources might be.
Power is pertinent to discourses about women, and not for the obvious reason that men wield power over them, but for the strange cases in which women support patriarchal power over women. Mrs. Sucksby’s and Nurse Bacon’s characters are excellent examples of women exerting this power. While the dominant patriarchy is an obvious power source, neo-Victorian theory helps explore additional ways in which women have been vulnerable to institutionalization, such as Waters’ example of women using homosexuality against women to indict them. Theory becomes one of the few and limited ways in which such issues are addressed, for they are hidden.
Foucault says theory “is a struggle against power, a struggle aimed at revealing and undermining power where it is most invisible and insidious” (208). Neo-Victorian theory and fiction, as well as works of fiction at large, seek to enhance understanding, to develop discourse about subjects with a backstory of struggle, and if the struggle is “invisible and insidious,” then all the more reason to pursue it. Foucault continues, “Everywhere that power exists, it is being exercised. No one, strictly speaking, has an official right to power; and yet it is always exerted in a particular direction, with some people on one side and some on the other. It is often difficult to say who holds power in a precise sense, but it is easy to see who lacks power” (213). In some dynamics we can clearly see who has the power and who lacks it, such as the one between the colonizer and the slave, or between the husband and the wife, the parent and the child. Yet, arguably there are more hidden power struggles, such as women who oppress women under the “mist” of patriarchal power.
Of course, this leads to the issue that Foucault addresses of needing to distinguish between what is unconscious and what is secretive: The discourse of struggle is not opposed to the unconscious, but to the secretive. It may not seem like much; but what if it turned out to be more than we expected? A whole series of misunderstandings relates to things that are “hidden,” “repressed,” and “unsaid”; and they permit the cheap “psychoanalysis” of the proper objects of struggle. It is perhaps more difficult to unearth a secret than the unconscious. (214)
In other words, while the discourse of struggle could easily embrace the unconscious as a challenge of intellect or awareness, understanding the secretive is a greater challenge, and one that could threaten power sources. As this pertains to women, how they were wrongly institutionalized had largely to do with a source of social, cultural and/or political power and more often than not, some kind of secret in place to reinforce the dominant power. We can see how this dynamic operates in Jane Eyre, when Jane does not question Bertha Mason’s insanity and confinement in the attic; and the nurses in Fingersmith, whose abuse goes unnoticed by the doctors. These fictions help us realize how in more ways than one, women’s fictional and historical voices have been glossed in the same manner that real-life legal practices allowed for their wrongful confinement.
Some of these literary masterpieces (and now their new counterparts) have captivated readers for over a century and have enhanced higher learning for half as long, but why? They engage theories of confinement as Foucault discusses—both the power of one person to confine another, as well as the authority of reason over unreason. They show the vulnerability of already vulnerable women. They demonstrate culturally acceptable actions at their points in history. But there is more here than mere fascination with them, and neo-Victorianism helps twenty-first-century readers understand what that “more” might be. The example of a twentieth-century young woman, from a well-known family, demonstrates that fear operates in a greater capacity than fascination in stories about marginalized women.
There are three important points in the biography about Rosemary Kennedy that help us more fully understand what happened: the facts about her birth, her sexuality, and the operation her father ordered that required medical care and supervision for the rest of her life. Larson’s text begins poignantly with the history of Rosemary’s homebirth on September 13, 1918, in the Boston suburb of Brookline. When Rose Kennedy’s doctor was unavailable to arrive in time to deliver her baby, the nurse demanded she resist the contractions and they held Rosemary in the birth canal for an abnormally long period of time—Rose obeyed as she had learned through her strict Irish Catholic upbringing.
Larson explains, “It was well understood that preventing the movement of the baby through the birth canal could cause a lack of oxygen, exposing the baby to possible brain damage and physical disability” (3). While the nurse was medically trained to deliver babies, it was of the greater concern to abide by the doctor, who made a large sum of $125 for prenatal care and delivery, and she held Rosemary in the birth canal for two hours causing severe asphyxiation. Once Rosemary was born, she appeared to be a normal and healthy baby. The facts about her birth demonstrate the concept that neo-Victorian theory fleshes out in Waters’ novel, and the statement made in Fingersmith that “The doctors were like kings to them [the nurses]” (435). Though doctors have specialized knowledge, they have too much power if women/nurses deny their better judgment in fear of the doctor’s authority—I do not want to confuse asylum doctors with obstetric doctors, but to focus on the male role of the doctor as an extension of patriarchal power that is influential over women. This doctor constitutes the first significant influence in the process of Rosemary’s life within institutionalization.
Over the course of the following twenty-three years, Rose and Joe Kennedy placed Rosemary in myriad institutions. At that time, mental health awareness was still largely undefined and labels such as “idiot,” “imbecile” and “moron” were normal terms for people who functioned abnormally (55). Institutions designated for such people became “warehouses for the insane” and no matter who ran them, many were “houses of horror” (55). When Rose and Joe realized Rosemary could not follow the public-school curriculum, they sent her to five different boarding schools, starting with Devereux school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Elmhurst the Convent of the Sacred Heart school in Providence, Rhode Island; Newton’s private school in Brookline, Massachusetts; Miss Hourigan’s Residence School in Manhattan, New York; and Sacred Heart Convent Academy in Manhattanville, New York.
Rosemary struggled to supersede a fourth-grade level of intellect and these educational institutions lacked the right resources to help her. As she matured physically her education remained the same, yet it was clear she loved to dress up and go to social events. Larson keeps our attention on the relative mobility of women in the twenties when she says, “The movement for universal suffrage was at a fever pitch; in August 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment would give women the right to vote…There were sharp distinctions between attitudes of the nineteenth and the twentieth century toward smoking, drinking, sex, and independence, particularly for privileged white women” (25). While these attitudes applied to a certain population of women, as Larson notes, they would not necessarily apply to Rosemary in the strict Catholic home of the business mogul and politician Joe Kennedy: “To Joe being ‘different’ meant being excluded from clubs, parties, and business deals. He had spent his life battling the discrimination that kept him from the inner sanctums dominated by the Protestant moneyed elite” (41-2).
Larson’s biography makes visible multiple layers of patriarchal power at work in Joe—he is a businessman, a politician, a Catholic, and the father of the house. These layers all carry their own authority and no family member in the house could threaten the empire he built for himself. Using Foucault’s explanation of power distribution, we can see Larson helps clarify the large and influential powers of politics and social circles that operated in the Kennedy home and others like it. Another aspect of Foucault’s study visible here, as we have seen, is how the discourse of struggle has historically been opposed to that of secrecy. Joe and Rose faced a legitimate struggle with their daughter Rosemary, yet their greater fears of social stigmas and rejection forced them to keep the truth about her shrouded in secrecy. They faced additional challenges with the “proper objects” of struggle, Rosemary’s role in the public eye, rather than allowing the world to accept who she was. Rosemary is a marginalized figure who suffered from the power of the patriarchy.
One particular Kennedy family moment that is relative to this study of Victorian fiction, sensation fiction, neo-Victorian fiction, and biography, is the presentation of Rosemary and her younger sister Kathleen at the British Court. Joe Kennedy had been appointed as ambassador to the Court of Saint James’s in Britain in 1938 (98). The presentation would demand a visible perfection of the secrecy about Rosemary: The British aristocracy had long shunned their own mentally disabled and mentally ill family members, hiding them away in sanitariums, mental hospitals, country farms and cottages, and—a favorite of British novelists—attic rooms. To present Rosemary, an intellectually disabled adult, to the monarchy at Buckingham Palace during the debutante season was more than a bold act; a debutante with intellectual disabilities would have stirred long-held prejudices about passing along ‘defective’ traits to the next generation. (106)
To unpack this point, first let us return to this study’s original issue of wrongful institutionalization. Larson makes the connection between British aristocracy and the long-time practice of hiding their mentally disabled. By acknowledging a literary connection here to Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre from 1847, and further using the lens of neo-Victorianism, we can imagine that not all of those who were hidden by the British aristocracy were institutionalized rightfully. The neo-Victorian lens also validates that hiding people who needed help was not beneficial to their health and created what Foucault calls a cheap “psychoanalysis” of the proper objects of struggle (214). With people’s identities, or even simply their bodies, hidden from the public eye, society then shifts the proper objects of struggle to “greater concerns” such as economic crisis or political divisions.
The “bold act” of presenting Rosemary to the British Court was dependent upon her maintaining the façade of normalcy, one without a learning disability or the unfortunate tragedy at her birth. In this way, Rosemary was additionally wrongly confined into social façade, a mode of perfection to maintain appearances for her family and for the Court. She was presented for the posterity of the family, and more specifically for Joe’s reputation as the American ambassador. She was not presented at the British Court as a candidate for marriage due to her hidden identity as a mentally challenged young woman. The issue of long-held prejudices about a “defective” genealogy is quite interesting, considering her “defects” were inflicted. Again, this study does not incriminate but instead seeks understanding.
Turning again to Foucault and his study of genealogy, he states, “Genealogical analysis shows that the concept of liberty is an ‘invention of the ruling classes’ and not fundamental to man’s nature or at the root of his attachment to being and truth. What is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissention of other things. It is disparity” (142). In other words, a superficial study of genealogy seeks to find liberty in identifying the perfect lineage and history of a bloodline, but this is a construction. Foucault would argue that genealogy tends to lead to the dissention of things and a disparity that would otherwise remain secretive. The resulting prejudices against defective genealogical traits are another means to hiding truths and creating secrets about people who are not designed for the public eye.
Hiding Rosemary’s intellectual deficiencies was the lesser struggle, when compared to the issue of sexuality that ultimately determined her father’s decision and her fate. As she matured into a beautiful and fun-loving young woman who loved to smoke and socialize, she began to sneak out at night, and though the biography does not explicitly say what she did, it is implied that she met up with men. As a result, she experienced repression rather than the sharp distinction in attitudes towards women in contrast to the previous century, as Larson points out. Rosemary’s actions in her early twenties caused the greatest disruption for her parents because they shared and feared the common attitudes towards the sexuality of intellectually deficient and mentally ill women: Twenty years after women had finally gained the right to vote, society’s lingering nineteenth-century ideas played heavily on social, religious, and scientific attempts to control women’s more public and expressive sexuality. This had devastating consequences for the country’s most vulnerable and weakest women, mentally ill and disabled women who faced victimization through forced sterilization and institutionalization at alarming rates. (142)
The treatments mentioned here signify the conflict for women in the early twentieth- century that is related to the attitudes from the nineteenth. While some women experienced a greater variety of freedoms and “liberties,” others were alarmingly mistreated, but by whom? In Rosemary’s case, the biography shows her parents’ genuine struggle raising her in the public eye and among eight other children. Though a majority of power in the home was Joe’s, Rose follows closely as the exemplary social planner and family manager. Here was a real-life example of power connected to the patriarchal father with support from the mother. Rosemary’s potential for public shame for promiscuity posed the greatest threat to everything her parents worked for. After years of placing her in institutions and the shame with asylums, new medical advancements caught his attention and Joe took matters into his own hands.
A new medical procedure known as a leucotomy, more popularly known as a prefrontal lobotomy, became Joe’s plan for Rosemary in 1941, as he increasingly feared for the family’s reputation and her safety. A short description of this procedure is described by Larson: “The surgery involved cutting the white fibrous connective tissue linking the frontal lobes to the rest of the brain, relieving the violent rages and psychological and physical pain some severely mentally ill patients suffered,” yet a doctor had informed Rosemary’s sister Kathleen that, “after the surgery patients ‘don’t worry so much, but they’re gone as a person, just gone’” (160-61).
Looking critically at the situation surrounding Rosemary, and allowing for the consideration of women in general, we can see that the unfortunate social stigma placed on women for being sexually active and not following the social and cultural rules for femininity, in this case the affluent and political culture, placed them in the vulnerable position to not only be institutionalized in asylums (as I learned firsthand during a recent tour of Pennhurst Asylum in Pennsylvania), but a medically vulnerable position as well. It was acceptable for a woman to be “just gone” rather than to be promiscuous. This control of sexuality gives a larger scope on the attitudes towards women that are similar to those found in Victorian, sensation fiction and neo-Victorian literature in consideration of Bertha Mason, Laura Fairlie, and Anne Catherick, Lady Audley, Susan Trinder, and Maud Lilly.
Larson explains, “Under the laws of the day, a woman like Rosemary could be forcibly hospitalized and treated without her consent. The legal requirement giving patients power and control over their own medical decisions would be decades more in the making. Women were most frequently institutionalized by the order of husbands and fathers, whose will and opinion superseded the women’s” (164-5). Notice how closely this quote resembles the unreliable prognosis of the two-doctor test found in sensation fiction and neo-Victorian fiction novels. Fiction is, then, truly a tool for challenging the way we look at history, for uncovering the secrets in power struggles, and a means for advocacy for women.
Rosemary’s life story was tragic but not hopeless. After her leucotomy surgery, Joe placed her in a private facility where it was common for the wealthy to hide their disabled family members (178). She required full-time care because “the operation destroyed a crucial part of Rosemary’s brain and erased years of emotional, physical, and intellectual development, leaving her completely incapable of taking care of herself” (170). She lived there for seven years before being transferred to Saint Coletta in Jefferson, Wisconsin. Her family and siblings were left in the dark about what happened to her and were told she “had moved to the Midwest and had become a teacher” (176). Her life continued to be surrounded by secrecy and as an invalid, she posed more of a threat to the family for exposing what Joe did to her than if she had been promiscuous.
However, once the family discovered the truth, her siblings found an overarching means to show their support towards her by also extending it to others. Her sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, realized that special needs people like Rosemary needed to be outdoors and participating in activities. She conducted such activities and sports on the grounds of her home in Maryland in 1961, called Camp Shriver, as well as other social services through the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation.
In 1968, Eunice collaborated with Anne Burke, who conceptualized the idea, and the Special Olympics were founded at Soldier Field Stadium in Chicago, Illinois. Her brother, President Kennedy, signed two important pieces of legislation. The first was the Maternal and Child Health and Mental Retardation Planning Amendments of 1963, which became an impetus for states to responsibly recognize people with special needs by creating programs. The second was the Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act, which provided funds for research centers, many of which were connected to university hospital networks (204).
Lastly, her brother Senator Ted Kennedy created legislation that addressed the treatment of special needs people, including anti-discrimination, such as the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (1975), the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Child Care Act (1990). The actions of Rosemary’s sister and brothers are relevant to thinking critically about society in ways that create enterprises which subvert the dominant culture. By publicly supporting people with mental disabilities that for centuries were known as “madness,” and by incorporating such people into the fabric of society rather than hiding them in asylums, hospitals, and other forms of institutionalization, these people are less marginalized and reflect a change in the attitudes and social norms of the dominant culture. While positive actions cannot compensate for the unfortunate actions against Rosemary, they reflect the much-needed change in the civic space where marginalized women have historically been vulnerable.
Including this biography with Victorian, sensation, and neo-Victorian fiction supports the idea that women have been wrongly institutionalized for a very long time. The influence of fiction on real life, and vice versa, reveals the need for new academic ways of looking at fiction, such as the concept of neo-Victorianism. Without this “new” way of looking at the Victorian period, Rosemary’s life would seem like an isolated incident. It is safe to say that that many untold stories and unheard voices suffered from wrongful institutionalization and did not result in any form of legislation or change. Looking at fiction and a biography that span the course of over a century, it becomes evident how slowly social changes have taken place.