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My Nguyen

ENG 1102

Professor G.Sewell

30 September 2020

Ten Days in a Madhouse

Matthew Goodman’s Eighty Days is a really fantastic piece

of nonfiction—the kind that’ll make you gasp out loud, even

though you know how this race between two lady journalists in

the 1880s is going to turn out. I’d heard of Nellie Bly in

passing before (something something asylum something

something), but Eighty Days introduced me to her in her

entirety, from birth to death. Naturally, despite Goodman’s

warnings about Bly’s subpar attempts at writing novels, I was

interested in what put Nellie Bly on the map: Ten Days in a

Madhouse. While it was originally published as a series of

articles in The New York World, it was collected into a book

the same year (1887), making it eligible for my establishment.

In Ten Days in a Mad-House, New York journalist Nellie Bly

answers her editor’s challenge to come up with a stunt by

feigning mental illness in order to be committed to the

Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell Island. Rumors of

corruption and abuse have been pouring out of the island, but

no one has been able to confirm anything—until now. Posing as

Cuban immigrant Nellie Moreno (although she initially

determines to go by Nellie Brown), Bly gets herself committed

and begins documenting the harsh treatment of society’s most

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vulnerable members. This edition includes a few more of Bly’s

investigative adventures, from servant to factory worker.

Well, Goodman was right—Bly isn’t exactly someone you

read for her writing. It’s capable enough, but in the face of

modern nonfiction, not exactly gripping. What is gripping is

Bly’s pluck, determination, and bravado. She glosses over

being assigned the project, but imagine yourself, a young

woman of twenty-three, penniless, eager to support yourself on

your own pen… and this is the first assignment you get from

your boss. It takes a lot of wherewithal in order to

tackle that.

Unfortunately, that moxie feels a bit submerged. Part of

that is probably period dissonance: what’s utterly shocking to

a Victorian audience is pretty blase material for someone who

spent a Thanksgiving break in middle school binging on CSI.

But part of that is Bly constantly negotiating her position in

society. As Eighty Days shows us, plucky female journalists

hellbent on getting the story are really only tolerated as

long as they’re pretty, modest, and demure. In one of the

other investigations collected in the book, Bly goes

undercover as a factory worker to expose labor exploitation.

But she opens it by creating a dichotomy of pleasure-seekers

and working people, and talks about joining the working people

for the first time—as if she herself is not a working woman.

It’s quite shrewd, in a way, although I suspect part of it is

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internalized; still, it’s always a pleasure to peek behind the

curtain and hear Bly be vain of her hair.

The abuses Bly discovers at the asylum are awful. Bly

constantly points out that Blackwell Island (now Roosevelt

Island) is handling the most vulnerable members of society,

and we see (and hear, through second-hand accounts, as Bly

could not bring herself to be committed to “the rope gang”)

women being slapped, choked, forced to sleep in wet hair and

clothing in freezing temperatures, all in incredibly poor

sanitation (by Victorian standards, mind). Most horrifying are

the haphazard ways of curating who should and should not be

committed—one of Bly’s tests is administered by a doctor much

more interested in getting into the nurse’s skirts than making

sure a sane woman isn’t committed.

But what defines a sane woman in a misogynistic and xenophobic

society? It’s nebulous, fickle, and cruel, as Bly shows us.

She does meet women with legitimate mental illnesses, whose

stories are harrowing (especially after she returns and

several of them are mysteriously gone), but, among other women

committed due to their foreignness or sexual appetites, the

story of Margaret gripped me the most. Margaret, a German

servant, is committed because she had a fight with the other

servants. “Other people are not shut up for crazy when they

get angry,” Margaret fumes.

Well, they’re not shut up anymore, Margie, but women’s

anger is still constantly treated as irregular or unnatural—

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anything to make it not real. You just had the misfortune to

live in a time and a place where they could shut you up

physically and torture you mentally by forcing you to sit

without any stimulation, physical or intellectual, all day

long. It’s enough to drive a sane woman “insane” by your

society’s standards: just look to your right and behold Tillie

Maynard’s downward spiral.