Precarious Memory: Eudora Welty and the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum

In 1940 Eudora Welty took a carefully composed photograph of the Mississippi State Insane Hospital in Jackson (see fig. 1). Peeking through a small opening in the verdant landscape of Central Mississippi and dwarfed by oaks and long leaf pines, the building seems out of place, a relic of another time, but in the years after its opening in 1855, the facility housed over 35,000 people. Welty's photograph, titled Abandoned "Lunatic Asylum," was taken just five years after the hospital closed in 1935 but was not published until 1980 as part of a limited edition portfolio. What prompted Welty to take the photograph in 1940 and publish it forty years later? What stories does the abandoned asylum conceal, and what messages does Welty's photograph offer viewers today? Following Judith Butler's assertion that photographs are powerful conveyers of the precariousness of life and Pierre Nora's conception of les lieux de mémoire, or the notion that "the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been torn—but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites," this article considers the trauma embedded in Welty's Abandoned "Lunatic Asylum" and explores the tenuous relationship between embodiment and representation (Butler, Precarious 110; Nora 7).

Photography, far from a conveyer of transparent truths, is a sophisticated mode of representation that relies on a variety of rhetorical strategies to construct meaning. Not only do photographers manipulate the formal elements of line, shape, space, value, and texture within the frame to create harmony, contrast, balance, and rhythm, but perspective, subject matter, and audience also all contribute to a photograph's denotative and connotative messages. Photography is ubiquitous in the creation of cultural memory, but its formal, compositional, and technical elements comingle in sometimes surprising ways that create tension and invite multivalent readings. This is the case with Abandoned "Lunatic Asylum," which, through its subject matter and formal and compositional elements, initiates a complex dialogue on mental illness and institutionalization.

As psychiatric medicine was professionalized in the mid-nineteenth century, states began building hospitals for the long-term custodial care of those deemed unfit for normal roles in society. Those with perceived mental illnesses and cognitive impairments are underrepresented in visual culture, and within the field of disability studies receive less theoretical, social, and cultural attention than do those with physical disabilities (Fraser 29). When those with cognitive disabilities become the subject of photography, their representation typically follows the medical model of disability, which exploits its subjects as scientific and dehumanized specimens of the pathologizing gaze—as patients to be cured rather than as human beings with their own values and identities. Moreover, as noted by Christopher M. Bell, disability studies often focuses on whiteness to the neglect of investigations of Blackness, a situation exacerbated when African-American Studies "posits the African American body politic in ableist (read non-disabled)

Fig 1.

Eudora Welty, Abandoned "Lunatic Asylum," Jackson, 1940. © Eudora Welty, LLC.

fashion" (3). These circumstances have combined to create a scenario in which the Mississippi State Insane Hospital and Welty's representation of it in Abandoned "Lunatic Asylum" have not received the attention they deserve. As I will show, Abandoned "Lunatic Asylum" confronts the exploitative implications of both photography and asylums and offers viewers a multivalent look at the intersection of disability and race in the American South.

According to the Mississippi Department of Archives of History's inventory, Welty took five photographs of the Mississippi State Insane Hospital, which are listed as "Untitled: State Insane Hospital" in the Eudora Welty Collection. The photograph pictured here was given its contemporary title when Welty selected it for inclusion in a signed and numbered limited edition portfolio of twenty eleven-by-fourteen-inch gelatin silver prints issued by Palaemon Press Limited in 1980. The portfolio includes some of Welty's most well-known photographs such as A Woman of the Thirties (1935), Ruins of Windsor (1942), and Home by Dark (1936), but Abandoned "Lunatic Asylum" (1940...