Abstract
Drawing on case records of 19th-century asylums in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Diana Peschier examines how women described themselves and how those treating them described their mental health. Her goals are “to give a voice to the disenfranchised women who were put into the various asylums where they were frequently ignored and neglected and to establish that being female was a strong contributing factor to being diagnosed” (p. xiii). In order to illustrate the differences between the language used by and about female and male inmates and the treatments they received, the author compared case records for women and men. In short, she succeeds with her ambitious goals of (1) giving a voice to the women and (2) demonstrating that being female was a major factor in the diagnosis of mental illness.
By examining medical texts of Victorian medical practitioners (including John Conolly, John Haslam, William Willis Mosely, and George Savage), Peschier discusses connections between physical and mental illness (e.g., women’s reproductive system causing mania or melancholia). The Victorian ideal for women was to marry well and bear many children, but the realities for women of the time included poor medical care for pregnant women, infertile women, and children. Many women died in childbirth, and many children never lived to adulthood. Many of the women described in the case records would today be diagnosed with postpartum depression.
Peschier’s particular focus is religious mania and religious excitement. In order to place the asylum records within a broader historical and social context, she examines the literature of the evangelical Sunday school movement, particularly the works of Carus Wilson, who greatly influenced Victorian authors such as Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens. Evangelical literature focused on judgement, punishment, and the afterlife. Because evangelicalism appealed to human emotions (especially fear and guilt), and women were viewed as being more emotional than men, Peschier concludes that women were particularly susceptible to influence by evangelical ministers and literature. In addition, women carried the “sin of Eve” who, in the Book of Genesis, lured Adam into eating the fruit, which God had forbidden.
Another way that Peschier puts the asylum records into context is to compare them with popular notions about “madwomen” found in literature of the time, including works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Wilkie Collins. Themes of loneliness, abandonment, and heredity are found in depictions of Victorian madwomen who were “frequently wronged by society in general and men in particular” (p. xiv).
The book is ambitious and, toward the beginning of it, it was not clear how the various goals and sections of the book would come together. Overall, the book is well organized, which helped the various ideas and themes fall into place. While the book achieves its aims, and its theses are clearly supported, further work could be done in examining 19th-century medical texts and literature. For example, the book just scratches the surface of the depiction of women in Victorian literature.
The book is recommended to researchers who want to learn more about using texts as primary source material and what this humanist approach can bring to the social sciences. In fact, the book’s methodology of examining primary text materials—19th-century asylum case notes, medical texts, and literature—is one of its major contributions to the field of social work. The book also highlights the interdisciplinary nature of social work practices, scholarship, and education. It will also be of interest to those whose research focuses on 19th-century British literature, but they will want to go deeper into the themes of abandonment, loneliness, and religion found in literature of the time.
By examining Victorian literature, this book prompts readers to consider differences and similarities between the real (as documented in case records) and the imagined (as documented in literature). Anyone working in the field of social work, especially readers of Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work, will benefit from the reminder to give voice to the disenfranchised, especially women and “to compare and contrast the value judgements of the Victorian era with some of those that still prevail in mental health services” (p. xiv).
