The spectacular madwoman: Nineteenth-century women writers who exposed the ideological bias of psychiatric objectivity and the immorality of moral asylum management

This dissertation examines the socially inscribed gender ideologies and visual paradigms of femininity which coalesced in nineteenth-century psychiatry and legitimated psychiatric treatments that coerced women to assimilate patriarchally envisioned images and codes of femininity.; An examination of nineteenth-century psychiatric literature, medical illustration, and the quasi-scientific works by the eighteenth-century physiognomist Caspar Lavater, highlights the emergence of a physiognomy of female insanity that physicians believed enabled them to universally and objectively detect women's inherent moral and sexual deviance. Artwork, photography, and asylum tour articles published in popular periodicals crystallized and helped to disseminate a madwoman stigmata that visually and metaphorically marked women as objects to be feared and confined. The extent to which this madwoman stigma pervaded social consciousness and affected the lives of women both in the asylum and in society is evident in women's literature.; Despite the relative financial and political autonomy achieved by female physicians and professional women writers, for instance, their autobiographical sketches, fictional works, and social critiques suggest that these career-minded women recognized their vulnerability to the madwoman stigma. As evidenced in the works by Elizabeth Blackwell and Fanny Fern, women writers often described their physical appearances to assure their readers of their femininity and thus counter public accusations that they and their work undermined the moral and physical health of the nation. Women's post-asylum autobiographies reveal that women certainly had reason to fear such accusations and to visually demonstrate their femininity; many of the women autobiographers discussed in this dissertation were certified insane and committed to the asylum on the basis of physicians' testimonies that their unkempt coiffures or unconventional manner of dress constituted empirical evidence of their insanity. Moreover, as patients, these women learned that getting out of the asylum and being pronounced "sane" were privileges granted by asylum physicians to female patients whose performances at lunatic's balls, fairs, and other public asylum exhibitions mirrored the modest gestures and appearances expected of women. Through writing, however, women of the asylum deconstructed the visual paradigms and meta-discourses of psychiatry that stigmatized and silenced them.