One of the things we discussed in our podcast, but were unable to touch on in the edited version of our file was what we thought Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Mad-House would have been rated in its time? Would this expose have been seen as PG or R rated?
Personally, I think that this piece would have been quite shocking to its readers—who I pictured to be upper-middle class women. I think that these women would have been horrified by not only obviously the physical torture, but the day to day horrors the inmates of the asylum experienced as well. For example, the lack of hygiene among women, the freezing temperatures, dearth of edible food…These are privileges the audience of this expose would have been used to. To read a piece where the perfectly sane women that Nellie focuses on are forced to endure life without these privileges would have been especially alarming. However, reading this piece now, it feels as though this piece is largely censored compared to any sort of expose we would read now—even in Nellie’s description of the actual physical abuse.
I was particularly struck by how Nellie Bly chose to act and what she thought constituted insane behavior. Her behavior in the house for women, which starts her down the path to the asylum, seemed to me to more closely resemble depression rather than any sort of alarming “insanity”. Repeatedly, Nellie Bly adopted a forlorn attitude, “‘Yes, everything is so sad,” I said, in a haphazard way, which I had intended to reflect my craziness,” (6). Nevertheless, the woman were frightened by her behavior. Only one woman, Mrs. Craine, showed the sort of sympathy that I would have expected in response to Nellie Bly’s behavior. Nellie Bly also chose to act “insane” by refusing to undress and go to bed and by commenting repeatedly on how everyone in the house “looked crazy”. It seemed to me that what alarmed the other women, and what made them decide Nellie Bly was insane, was that through these simple actions Nellie Bly refused to buy into the normal functioning of society. Nellie Bly refused to play the role of the working woman – going to bed when she was supposed to and fitting in with the other women. Furthermore, several times people commented that she seemed to be an upper class woman, but her removal from this position as she drifted aimlessly in society, seemed to add to their conviction of her insanity. I was also intrigued by the style of the article. To me, it came off as highly dramatic to the point that it almost undermined its credibility. It wasn’t that I thought Nellie Bly was exaggerating the horrible treatment in the asylum, I believed that that terrible treatment really was inflicted on patients. Instead, it was something about her tone that made me feel more like I was in a fictitious piece rather than a piece of expository journalism. Perhaps though, my real problem was that I just had such a hard time believing that everyone so quickly decided Nellie Bly was insane, especially when her behavior never even seemed that crazy to me. This, however, was one point of Nellie Bly’s article, to show how easy it is to get committed.