"...there is no gate, no lock, no bolt, that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
On Mad pride via Madwomen in the Attic, Ten Days in a Mad-House & Virginia Woolf; The Snake Pit, Camille Claudel, & more.
This month we’re returning to Cita’s newest title, Ten Days in a Mad-House by Nellie Bly, via an organization that uses literature to advocate for people who, like the characters in Ten Days, face marginalization related to mental health diagnoses. July 26 marked the 34th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and July is Disability Pride Month in the US. Despite many landmark gains since Bly wrote about the asylum on Blackwell’s Island in 1887, discrimination continues to impact people living with visible and invisible disabilities. Madwomen in the Attic (MITA) seeks a radical shift, greatly expanding upon the ambitions and imagination behind reform projects of the past.
Many thanks to Jessica Lowell Mason, co-founder of MITA, for sharing her work and expertise with us.
Situating Nellie Bly’s “Mad-House”
“Could I pass a week in the insane ward at Blackwell’s Island? I said I could and I would. And I did.”
Published near the turn of a tumultuous century, Nellie Bly’s account of her experience at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island gives us an idea of how public attitudes towards women’s mental health evolved in the modern age. From the start, she lays out and rejects prevailing assumptions and calls for a major shift in thinking for readers. Her project was distinctly progressive—and it did raise significant awareness and influence reform.
Thinking about Ten Days in a Mad-House in the context of this century raises questions about the premise of Bly’s reportorial assignment. Ten Days’ narrative strength comes in large part from the author’s alignment with her fellow patients. But her position is fundamentally different on every structural level, and Bly herself acknowledges that her role in the story is fraught. Upon leaving the asylum, she feels “intensely selfish” for leaving her fellow patients, who have no employer to rescue them, behind. “But only for a moment. The bars were down and freedom was sweeter to me than ever.” She rejoins the society that created the conditions she just experienced, and then achieves fame by telling the stories of those left behind.
Engaging with Ten Days today calls for evaluating the text on its own terms, but also connecting it to current work that goes beyond what its author would have (or perhaps could have) thought possible.
Madwomen in the Attic: Feminist Mad Liberation & Lit
Madwomen in the Attic (MITA) gives people affected by a psychiatric diagnosis and/or the mental health industry the tools to tell their own stories. Based in Buffalo, MITA connects its dispersed community “attic to attic” via a range of programs including writing workshops, letter-writing initiatives, readings, and more. MITA positions itself as part of the Mad Liberation movement, which brings together people of diverse experience and beliefs to empower individuals with mental illnesses and reclaim or rewrite harmful narratives. Where Bly largely accepted the binary of “sane” and “insane,” a fundamental tenet of Mad pride is to resist such simple categorization and influence a fundamental shift in public attitudes towards mental illness and mental health treatment.
Madwomen in the Attic serves women and gender-nonconforming people and its ethos is rooted in feminist theory and disability theory. The founders of MITA, sisters Jessica Lowell Mason and Melissa Bennett, consider Virginia Woolf both an inspiration and co-founder—the “Mother of Mad Pride.” Institutionalized several times throughout adulthood and constantly navigating the anticipation of periodic breakdowns, Woolf has often been characterized as a romantic or tragic figure. But her work invalidates any simplistic reading of her mind. She explored her experiences (and the way her family and doctors responded to her illness) through her pen, with a singular style. According to Mason, “Madwomen in the Attic came to be because I looked to a figure in whose writing I take comfort in order to understand, resist, and survive the violence of my own pathologization and institutionalization.”
Though Woolf provided a model for MITA’s founding, there are many other voices inspiring its approach, and the community is careful not to reproduce patriarchal structures in its operations and communications. Through meetings, workshops and other initiatives, the organization is constantly redefining itself to encompass a wider range of perspectives and practices. “There are many mothers who have been pathologized and who have resisted—who have shaped Mad liberation, known and unknown, named and unnamed,” Mason explains, “and it's important to remember that it's a collective movement in which there are many influential figures, leaders, helpers, and contributors.”
There are many “unknown” and “unnamed” women in Ten Days in a Mad-House with whom Nellie Bly identifies despite the fact that she is only temporarily “one of them.” The factors that brought the other patients there (poverty, language barriers, domestic abuse, isolation) may vary, but they all end up in the same ward. Bly is there with them, getting violently scrubbed in an ice cold bath and gaslit by sadistic attendants. The impact of her reporting relies on that solidarity, and Bly remains engaged after her articles are published. Reflecting on her participation in the grand jury investigation of Blackwell’s, she writes “If I could not bring [the other patients] that boon of all boons, liberty, I hoped at least to influence others to make life more bearable for them.” By acting as a “sane” representative with direct experience of the abuses she is testifying to, Bly is able to puncture the authority of the institution and mental health system on and off the page.
As Mason puts it:
“People affected by institutionalization are disproportionately socially marginalized or multiply marginalized, and then institutionalization itself is marginalizing and stigmatizing. Bly's experience shows us the reaches and limits of legitimacy as an activist tactic for Mad liberation, in some way. She was heard because she was viewed as sane in the public eye. Had the ‘insanity’ label been seen as valid and credible outside of the institution, her humanitarian and feminist project would not have had the kind of reach it had.”
For MITA, effective activism involves creating a community in which people are constantly learning from each other. One project that exemplifies this is “Memoirs to (Re)Imagine Mental Healthcare," a writing workshop run in partnership with the Herstory Writers Network. Each week, participants investigate new possibilities for care, drawing on their own experiences and disability theory. The goal is not just to tell stories from the margins of society, but to reshape that society so that people are not pushed to those margins. And that is an aim and an approach that Nellie Bly—who after Ten Days embedded herself in sweatshops, tenements, and a prison—would likely get behind.
“I know what it is to experience both: being part of society and being removed from it, or on the outside of it. Bly experienced both, too. Her work is intimately tied to my own experience. Both of us spent ‘ten days in a mad-house,’ but, more importantly, her work is connected with MITA's mission to tell the horrors of oppression, especially within institutions, and to compel the public to care about it enough to change its mentality and its systems.”
–Jessica Lowell Mason, Co-Founder, Madwomen in the Attic
Further Reading & Exploration
Recommendations from MITA founder Jessica Lowell Mason:
Sins Invalid: a disability justice based performance project that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities
Project Lets: peer support for liberated healing
Sista Creatives Rising: a project and concept founded by Black, invisibly disabled mother-daughter duo Claire Jones and Amaranthia Sepia with a mission to help creative, marginalized women and marginalized genders gain accessibility and visibility in the arts to facilitate personal healing
Madness Network News: a communication network for the interchange of energy and support of psychiatric survivors, mad, disabled, and neurodivergent people
Mad in America: a nonprofit serving as a catalyst for rethinking psychiatric care through a mix of mix of journalism, education and societal discussion
“Many MITA featured writers are doing radical work, related to liberation, so reading our monthly features and learning about our featured writers is a wonderful way of learning about contemporary trailblazers, where Mad feminist justice is concerned.”
Related content from Cita Press & contributors :
Cita’s edition of Ten Days in a Mad-House — free in web, pdf, & EPUB
“For ten days I had been one of them…”: Cita Press Bulletin May 2024
“Crisis Care”: Mikita Brottman (foreword author) on her experiences, for Full Bleed
Cita Canon Spotlight
This month’s entries include two artists whose work and experiences reflect what we lose when we allow for exclusion and neglect.
Mary Jane Ward (1905-1981) was the author of eight books, including three novels based on her experiences in psychiatric institutions. In her writing and in her work as an advocate, Ward emphasized how the institutional abuse she encountered was fed by poverty, racism, and sexism. The Snake Pit (1946) was enormously successful upon publication, sparking lots of conversation about mental health treatment in the United States (and, ultimately, inspiring reform across twenty-six states). The book also had huge literary influence, directly inspiring Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. A 1948 film adaptation starring Olivia de Havilland was nominated for several Oscars (winning one) and received the International Prize at the Venice Film Festival. Despite its impact, The Snake Pit fell out of print for several decades until a recent reprint by the Library of America. [“Why it’s time to reassess Mary Jane Ward’s The Snake Pit” via Library of America]
The legacy of Camille Claudel (1864-1943) is one of early and unusual triumph, neglect, and, now, recovery. The French sculptor started working for Auguste Rodin at age 19 and quickly became his collaborator, model, and lover. After their romantic relationship ended and Claudel’s own work drew more and more attention, Rodin began to see her as a rival. Though lauded by contemporary critics (with one labeling her "A revolt against nature: a woman genius"), the bold nature of her work and the gender politics of the time made it difficult to secure funding without the support of her powerful former mentor. Her family facilitated her confinement to a mental hospital in 1913 and ignored doctors’ repeated invitations to have her discharged over the next thirty years. Though long painted as a tragic, doomed figure lost in the shadow of Rodin, in recent years the art she created has gotten much more visible and celebrated for its vitality and singular vision. [“Camille Claudel,” French Women & Feminists in History: A Resource Guide via Library of Congress]
“Literature is open to everybody…Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt, that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” –Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 1929