Reviewed by: Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture Matthew Gambino Benjamin Reiss. Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. xi + 237 pp. Ill. $50.00, £26.00 (cloth, ISBN-10: 0-226-70963-9, ISBN-13: 978-0-226-70963-5), $20.00, £10.50 (paperbound, ISBN-10: 0-226-70964-7, ISBN-13: 978-0-226-70964-2). In this felicitous study, literary historian Benjamin Reiss seeks to recreate an era in U.S. history when the proper response to mental illness was debated alongside fundamental questions of freedom and democracy. His focus is the period extending from the 1830s through the 1870s, when the asylum movement first appeared, came of age, and began to confront the challenges of long-term custodial care. In the course of his analysis, Reiss examines both “the institutional processing of culture” (primarily the literary and dramatic productions of patients) and the “cultural processing of the institution” (the role of the asylum in the lives and fiction of selected American writers) (p. 17), drawing intelligently on the still-contentious historiographic debates about the nature of the asylum. Of particular interest is Reiss’s study of patient culture at the New York State Lunatic Asylum at Utica, where a group of educated patients in the 1850s produced a journal known as The Opal. Most contributors chose to remain anonymous, a decision that Reiss contextualizes with considerable skill. He finds both a “public transcript” and a “hidden transcript” in The Opal (p. 25), questioning sociologist Erving Goffman’s claim that such publications reflect only the official line on asylum life. Reiss also documents a hitherto unexplored dimension of institutional culture: patients’ embrace of blackface minstrelsy at Utica in intramural theatrical performances at mid-century. Here he expertly analyzes the complex semiotic resonances and reversals involved in such an enterprise. Reiss then turns to the case of the messianic poet Jones Very, whose association with the transcendentalists tested the limits of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s devotion to personal liberty. Emerson, we learn, raised no objection to Very’s confinement in 1838 at McLean Asylum outside Boston. Far from being at odds with the asylum movement, the transcendentalists expressed many of the same concerns as medical superintendents about the impact of market forces on American culture. Themes of liberty and confinement recur in Reiss’s examination of patient-activist Elizabeth Packard’s campaign to reform commitment laws during the 1860s. Although nineteenth-century fiction often depicted women as emotionally unstable, popular novels also contained frequent images of the unjustly confined woman. This created a narrow rhetorical window through which female patients could voice their protests in the public sphere. For male patients, in contrast, to acknowledge having been deemed incapable of self-government was to undercut the basis of one’s own masculine authority. Theaters of Madness works best as a collection of essays, with those chapters that stray furthest from Reiss’s stated goals being among the least compelling. When it comes to the writings by asylum superintendents on the genius of William Shakespeare, Reiss argues that these physicians used Shakespeare to establish a measure of cultural legitimacy for their still-novel professional worldview. If their intended audience was the educated public at large, however, we are left to wonder [End Page 615] why asylum physicians published this work overwhelmingly in medical journals. Reiss’s reading of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” takes us to the French Revolution and le geste de Pinel, but his excursions in the historiography are of unclear relevance for the book’s broader argument. Here Reiss also strays occasionally from the conventions of historical reasoning, as when he suggests that Poe’s story “anticipates” (p. 166) contemporary debates in disability studies. These criticisms notwithstanding, Theaters of Madness remains a valuable contribution to the scholarship on the nineteenth-century asylum. If Reiss’s literary approach occasionally leads him to favor intensive analysis over comprehensive exposition, his insights are nevertheless welcome at a time when fresh perspectives are infrequent in the field. Ultimately, Reiss’s work represents a strong argument for cross-disciplinary conversation...
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Jan 1, 2021
Marya Yu Gendova 
Open Access
