On a recent trip to my favourite secondhand book shop, I found a 1928 edition of Rupert Brooke's poetry. As was common at the time, the name of the owner is written inside. The address, however, was more of a surprise: Royal Bethlem Hospital, aka Bedlam, the notorious psychiatric hospital housed in what is now the Imperial War Museum in south London.
Bedlam, especially from 1900-1950, has long been an interest of mine, so seeing this handwritten whisper from there stopped me in my tracks. Alongside her name, the owner had written a line from Brooke's poem Seaside: "I stray alone, here on the edge of silence, half afraid, waiting a sign." I was moved that she had chosen these particular lines from inside Bethlem, and it got me thinking about the link between the fictional portrayals and the reality of Bedlam.
One of the best portrayals of the female experience of Bethlem is Beyond the Glass, by Antonia White. Published in 1954, it's the last in a quartet of novels about Clara Batchelor, who, following a series of distressing events that her repressed Catholic upbringing has failed to equip her to deal with, has a mental breakdown. As Clara's sanity becomes more fragile, there are images of glass and mirrors, of distorted and fragmented reflections, but also a lack of recognition of oneself. Clara thinks of herself as Alice, gone through the looking glass into a world where everything is upside down.
Clara's time in Bethlem is based on White's own time there between 1922-23. What is conveyed is not cure or treatment, but control. Locked in a cell for months on end, her only human contact with "the torturers who entered: the young man and the two nurses with the basin and the funnel", and through the haze of drugs, Clara finally realises she is in a hospital. She asks a nurse what kind. "A hospital for girls who ask too many questions," she is told. The hospital's aim is not understanding, but the breaking of one's will to achieve compliance.
It doesn't have to be Bethlem for it to be Bedlam, though. In The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman describes a woman suffering from what we would now be likely to understand as post-natal depression or psychosis. In a remote country house, her husband, a doctor, creates her asylum, which, as with Beyond the Glass, is all about control. Her baby is removed from her and the woman is kept in a former nursery. Surrounded as she is by paraphernalia of both the nursery and the asylum – "the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls" – her confinement is both regressive and punitive. The "treatment" in this story was based on the American physician Silas Weir Mitchell's "rest cure", which he believed was the best way to deal with "female hysteria". Patients were allowed no stimulation, and in severe cases were not even allowed to leave their beds to use the toilet. In the final stages, the need to repress one's feelings was drummed into the patient, to prevent the return of the condition. Often, of course, this so-called treatment actually compounded any problem or illness that already existed – or even, as in the case of the woman in The Yellow Wallpaper, who begins to hallucinate that there is a woman trapped behind the "florid arabesque" wallpaper, created madness where little or none previously existed.
In her 2006 novel The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, Maggie O'Farrell tackles the Bedlam model of the asylum. In a fictional framework, O'Farrell movingly describes what was the reality more often than we like to think: a young woman in the 1930s committed as a "lunatic" because she wouldn't toe the conventional line. Her book accurately mirrors real reasons for certification, found in asylum archives: "Unwashed dishes, and unswept floors, of never wanting marital relations or wanting them too much or not enough or not in the right way... Daughters who just don't listen". In the fictional Esme, we see a life hidden away and dismissed as worthless.
This indefinite confinement allowed those on the outside to conveniently forget about the "mad" people they had known, perhaps for fear of discovering similar "madness" in themselves. They could airbrush their former friends or relatives out of society and family history, while telling themselves that because they personally were free, they were sane. Though told within fictional structures, these stories show us some of the true experience of the Victorian and Edwardian asylum and the harrowing reality of being branded a "lunatic".
