Resistant Women: Imagining Voices Inside a Nineteenth-Century Asylum, an essay by Stephanie Carpenter, author of Moral Treatment

Thanks to author Stephanie Carpenter for contributing a post about crafting characters within the setting for her debut novel.  Her essay makes for a good start to both Women's History Month as well as Small Press Month this March (and look for more small press-focused posts in the coming weeks). Moral Treatment was published by Central Michigan University Press on February 25.

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Resistant Women: Imagining Voices Inside a Nineteenth-Century Asylum

By Stephanie Carpenter

My novel Moral Treatment was inspired by the former Northern Michigan Asylum, a psychiatric hospital that operated from 1885-1988 in my hometown of Traverse City. When I was a kid, the hospital’s huge, Victorian buildings were vacant and untended. What little I knew about the place came from relatives who’d worked there—and from my own impressions, formed while roaming the grounds and peeking through dusty windows. I think it was inevitable that I would someday write fiction about this setting.

I didn’t know what stories would suggest themselves when I began researching the hospital’s history, but I quickly became fascinated by the ideologies associated with its crumbling architecture. The moral treatment of the nineteenth century aimed to provide humane care to people experiencing mental illnesses. Its chief therapeutic tools were wholesome food, sanitary surroundings, access to medical care, and exposure to positive influences. Few drugs were in use in this era, and the punitive tools employed by previous generations of doctors were abandoned. But this compassionate approach yielded few "cures," and across the U.S., hospitals like the Northern Michigan Asylum expanded steadily. I wondered about the experiences of doctors and patients inside those walls.

Moral Treatment imagines life in a fictional hospital in 1889, five years after its founding. The novel alternates between the perspectives of the hospital’s medical superintendent—referred to throughout as “the doctor,” to emphasize that his identity is inseparable from his work—and seventeen-year-old Amy Underwood, a newly-admitted patient diagnosed with “pubescent insanity.” Amy’s reckless behaviors led her parents to commit her, and I wanted to depict her experience as both deeply distressing and, in some ways, liberating: at the hospital, she’s exempt from societal expectations for young women. But how could she grow in a space where she’s constantly monitored and diagnosed? Drawing from research, I developed the women characters around Amy as points of resistance to repressive forces both inside and outside the hospital.

One of the most outspoken of these characters is Mrs. Lovelace, a deeply-devout patient known as “the Walking Skeleton of Charlevoix,” who I based on the “fasting girls” of this period. The wife of a minister, Mrs. Lovelace is disgusted by her husband’s superficial piety. She presents herself as an exemplar of true Christianity, sustained on faith alone; her emaciation and fervent preaching challenged her husband, leading to her institutionalization. The doctors see Mrs. Lovelace as a case of religious delusion and anorexia nervosa; she sees them as charlatans, leading witless sheep. Mrs. Lovelace’s righteous defiance impresses Amy deeply.

Another vocal challenger of the hospital’s authority is Bertha Chapman of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Visiting Amy’s ward, Miss Chapman is troubled to learn that not all patients—Amy included—have letter-writing “privileges.” The policy is presented as protective, but Miss Chapman recognizes it as repressive, arguing that the women all deserve voices. Mocked and maligned, temperance reformers fought to raise awareness of the impacts of rampant alcohol abuse, focusing on the suffering of women and children. The WCTU also took progressive stands on a variety of other issues, and it made sense to me that Miss Chapman would advocate for institutionalized women. Amy recognizes Miss Chapman—an unmarried woman, uncowed by the doctors, working for social reforms—as an iconoclast and ally.

author Stephanie Carpenter
(credit: Adam Johnson, brockit inc.)

Amy’s closest friend, Letitia Olsen, is a young, chronic patient who embodies women’s vulnerability and persistence. She’s been abused at other hospitals; her scars, including from a hysterectomy, illustrate gendered biases about mental health. A ward of the state, she’s now attracted the attention of the hospital’s most “modern” doctor, who sees her as a good subject for an experimental surgery. But charismatic Letitia thwarts the doctors’ attempts to quell her, constantly calling their motives into question and seeding doubts among the other women. Letitia always authors her own story, but Amy worries that her friend’s story-telling sometimes veers into self-delusion; Letitia’s unprotected situation pushes Amy to plan for both of their futures.

Finally, I crafted the doctor’s wife, Diana, as a bridge between her husband’s clinical perspective and the patients’ lived experiences. Diana met her husband as his patient at a health resort; though her “nervous complaints” make her seem like a Victorian stereotype, her arc challenges ideas about women’s frailty and docility. Having lived on-site at asylums throughout her marriage, Diana makes meaningful roles for herself: socializing with the patients, planning entertainments, and documenting the hospital through photography. Though her husband still sees her as his patient, Diana is increasingly concerned about his health; at fifty-one to his sixty-five years old, she recognizes that his commitment to the hospital is unsustainable. Her perceptiveness extends to the patients. By sharing her interest in photography, Diana expands Amy’s narrow view of the world.

Moral Treatment doesn’t attempt to tell the stories of actual people who lived, loved, and suffered at the Northern Michigan Asylum or hospitals like it. Those stories aren’t mine to tell. Instead, I hope that my fictional characters, rooted in historical research, help to animate the institutions that still linger around us—and I hope my novel illustrates that power may be complex, but it is never absolute.

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Stephanie Carpenter’s debut novel, Moral Treatment, is the inaugural winner of the Summit Series Prize from Central Michigan University Press. Her collection of stories, Missing Persons, won the 2017 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction. A native of northern Michigan, Stephanie holds degrees from Williams College, Syracuse University, and the University of Missouri. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Michigan Tech University. Learn more at stephanie-carpenter.com.

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