Greetings from an unaccountably snowy Virginia. I have been here for almost twelve years and this is more snow than I have seen for all of that time put together. Apropos of nothing except I thought it was a charming story, my student Emily was walking around campus last week when the Dean of the college, Dr. Jonathan Green, was sledding with some students. Dean Green talked Emily into taking a sledding detour from whatever she was doing. On her way down, Emily was looking ahead of her, thinking, “It’s a tree! It’s a tree!” when she heard Whoosh! Then she was thinking, “It’s the dean! It’s the dean!”
This week I was the guest lecturer in our intro Gender Studies class. I talked about women and the history of psychoanalysis, something that fascinates me because, well, what’s not to like about alternate theories of consciousness, and secondly, hallucinations, multiple personalities, and disjointed speech were the purview of religions for thousands of years. What makes a person exhibiting the exact same phenomena a prophet, possessed, or insane is a perennially thin line. The medicalization of alternative states and the attempt to take them back as religious property is a continual tug-of-war. Scientology comes to mind as the most prominent current case of a religion wanting complete control over mental states but it is by no means alone in this quest.
Madness has always been perilously close to rebellion, and in this respect women in particular have often suffered for original thinking. In the nineteenth century, where I do most of my work, women who wanted to get divorced or have the right to vote could get institutionalized: this behavior literally looked crazy to the men in power. (Not always, not all, but you see where I am going here.) Women were thought to be “naturally” domestic creatures and any breach of that, including getting educated, was seen as so radical that it must be mad.
A door from a 19th c. insane asylum in Oxford, England. Look carefully--it's beyond creepy.
Poor people as well as ethnic and religious minorities were also in danger of being outside the pale of sanity, as middle-class morality dictated the parameters of what was acceptable thinking. Religions begun by women were soundly upbraided as causing insanity—anyone who could think that Mother Ann Lee of the Shakers was the return of the messiah was clearly not mentally apt. Spiritualists, the folks who brought us the séance and thought that one could talk to the dead, were ripe for charges of madness. The medium, most often a young woman, was understood as a human telegraph who could ferry messages between heaven and earth. She would speak in the voices of many spirits, relieving grief and allowing the living to consult the famous dead on contemporary matters. As a religious expression, this behavior made women spiritual authorities. They could speak in trance states to thousands, pontificate on politics and philosophy, and be economically independent while doing it. From a psychological perspective, multiple people inhabited one woman’s brain. She was clearly unhinged.
Especially in a century where women had no legal rights to control their own destiny in such matters, they were often in grave danger for stepping out of accepted boundaries in their thoughts or deeds. I am by no means claiming that insanity is strictly a social protest or that women do not suffer from real mental anguish. But when a behavior requires an interpretation, the biases of the interpreter will always come into play. And for many, the consequences were sheer madness.
