Memoirs of Madness

In the mid-nineteenth century, reformers worked to transform the public's image of psychiatric institutions from the rattling chains of Bedlam to sunny gardens and sprawling hospitals. Many patients and ex-patients in the United States claimed that, to uphold this new image, administrators upkept one sparkling ward for visitors to see and kept poor, intellectually disabled, or behaviorally nonnormative patients hidden and neglected in abysmal back wards. Patient-writers challenged the image of the Potemkin asylum in memoirs that doubled as exposés with a twofold purpose: (1) to show readers the hidden parts of asylum life (including the interiority of people experiencing madness) and (2) to advocate for reform or abolition. This essay looks to one lesser-known patient-memoirist, Isaac Hunt, to ask, How do these writers acknowledge readers' desires for a sensational spectacle without replicating the objectifying dynamics of the Bedlam tour? What roles do disability, madness, stigma, and suspicion play in this encounter? Finally, how does one narrate an experience of madness? While memoirs like Hunt's have historically been framed as "psychotic" or "impaired," this essay argues that patient-memoirists often used literary experimentation to capture the ways that they experienced fluctuations in their sense of time, place, and self while in the asylum.