471E4--Week 6 Questions/Comments--Thursday

In chapter 6 on gender, I am glad that Reiss gives the perspective on how asylums threatened masculinity as well as femininity. I think this point was a good contrast to the accounts we read last week on women in the asylums. While this is a valid point sometimes I think gender does not matter in the case of the patients. Many of the patients of both sexes had to go through the same demoralizing things and I doubt that they were thinking about what this would do to their gendered identity. I am sure it was equally challenging for both sexes. However women were an easier target because of the perceptions that society had on women at the time.–Courtney Collier Even though I find Reiss very hard to follow, in the beginning of chapter five he states, “In eighteenth-century France, the label of insanity was one of the tools at the disposal of the monarchy and the politically connected to remove obstacles to their authority.” I feel that even though this is in France it makes a good tie into the U.S. mental institutions with the first-hand accounts of women and other patients who were just put in the asylum so that society or family did not have to deal with them. –Courtney Collier Does Reiss just enjoy using literary allusions. For Tuesday's reading, he had a broad discussion of the use of Shakespeare. In the second half of the book, he uses Emerson and Poe. What did these two men have to do with dealing with insanity? Was Emerson's use of transcendentalism wrong? Did Poe's bizarre personality and macabre nature lead people to think he was insane? ~ Emily Barry Reiss goes in to confusing detail about the Transcendentalist movement and how it dovetails with the nascent asylum system. However, he discusses how Emerson had considerable ties to the McLean institution so I wonder if this bias caused him to use his influence to exempt asylums from criticism. After all, although he was against (I gather) the materialism and decadence of Capitalism he supported a private-institution that fed on capitalism to maintain an elite, decadent standard of living. –Scott Campbell Emerson writes about the “wicked dollar” given by misguided philanthropists seeking expiation instead of “spiritual affinity” with the “invalids and insane.” (pgs, 132-133) But Reiss leaves out if Emerson ever had similar contact with other less-well off asylums, like Dix. Emerson is critical of the community support they receive, I feel like he’s out of touch with the poor who have no wealthy benefactor besides society, and even if some undeserving poor abuse the system it’s still better that the deserving poor get needed attention too. –Scott Campbell Reiss’s takes a significant turn for the worse in the final chapters of his book. He goes from cultural treatment inside the asylum to how the asylum motivated significant literary figures of the nineteenth century on the outside. His conclusions come to dead ends and make weak ties through the history of the mentally insane. How does Reiss fit into this history if he even fits in at all? The subjects he brings up most certainly are interesting and no one has done it before, however his deliverance is extremely poor. Are the shortcomings of Reiss from his background as a literary scholar? –Jack Hylan I couldn't agree more. The chapter on Emerson was more about the pitfalls of Transcendentalism than mental institutions. The case study of Jones Very (I vaguely remember learning about this guy in high school--very different interpretation!) is hardly representative of patients in general or even patients at McLean. --SL I've got to agree with Stef and Jack...I found the latter half of the book even worse than the first. I feel like he tried to fit as many common figures as possible into his book in order to "support" his argument, but each source lacked a sufficient amount of sources and most of the time it seems like it's simply Reiss either jumping to his own conclusion (because there aren't enough sources) or, as Jack said, coming to a dead-end. I wonder if he would've spent more time focusing on one or two examples if his argument would have been portrayed better. --Carly W.  When I first began reading this book I thought that I would really enjoy it because I like the way Reiss set up the different chapters and how he focused on one topic to show more about asylum life. But the more I read the chapters the more confused I became and failed to really understand what Reiss was talking about. Chapter five, in which Reiss uses Poe as a way to examine “madness” left me very confused and wondering how race fits into the section. - Morgan H. Reiss definitely requires a close examination to read. It's not an easy book to skim. He also makes some odd claims. At one point he says that Emerson SHOULD HAVE been opposed to mental institutions, although he wasn't. He has essentially no evidence to back up his claim and I thought it was out of place. -Joanna Jourdan I thought it was interesting, although maybe not that relevant, that some Unitarians attributed the outcome of the Salem Witch Trials to mental illness. Reiss seems eager to place the Unitarians and Transcendentalists ahead of their time through their perceptions of mental illness, and I think it is interesting that, although religious, they were willing to reject the influence of the devil in that case and perhaps in mental illness altogether.- Joanna Jourdan I too struggled with the arguement that Emerson was for aslyum and, yet, against the industrialization and institutionalization of society. I just don't think Reiss made a strong enough arguement. I felt that I was left questions Emerson sanity, it seemed to me the asylums were good so long as they were working in his favor (aka with aiding in the recovery his family and friend's collapses). I do agree with Reiss assessment that the distinction between private and state aslyums is crucial to understand Emerson's motives. -kasey moore I was fascinated by the comparison between witch-hunting and admittance into an aslyum. I think Reiss does a good job of introducing the idea that religious chaos, increased interesting in peaceful and holistic existence, and the rise of specialization (capitalism/industrialization) played a huge role in the creation of asylums. However, I felt the arguement he made was weakened by all information about Emerson and Very. Do you think they truly represented this religious boosterism of asylums or was Reiss stretching their story to make a point?- kasey moore

The use of Poe to represent class domination within the asylum made sense to me. I actually thought Poe was commenting on the power of the elite to not only define insanity, but define the treatment and cure of insanity. Reiss and I agreed on that aspect, but then Reiss jumped into what seemed to be an unsubstantiated tangent on race. It was clear from the introduction that Reiss was going to find a literary example of race and it seem like he forced it out of Poe. I don’t think the animalistic rebellion was a point of revitalizing the image of slavery or that it “argued that reintegrating the insane (or the blacks) into the civilized human family is folly” rather that it argued the unnecessary social construction of asylums  (153). I just didn’t follow Reiss argument here. –Kasey Moore On page 170, Reiss suggests that authors of asylum narratives read each other’s works. Did this change what the author’s wrote? I was thinking that one could read a narrative that sold well and repeat or take ideas and add them to their own narrative or maybe exaggerate something that would not have been included in what they would have written. - Katie Tryon

Like everyone else, I'm sure; I have to say that this is the most arduous texts we've ever read. I wonder if Reiss' constant use of literary allusions was an attempt to underscore the poetic nature of these institutions however tragic that might be? Also, his use of sources, or lack thereof, is highly questionable. Does anyone think this is a qualified resource? ~ Alex Young

I'm just going to admit this right now---I am completely lost by what Reiss was trying to convey. Like Katie said earlier, I did not understand if Reiss believed in Emerson's (in)sanity, or if he just wanted to show Emerson's role in the asylum movement. What exactly did he seek to prove by including the Unitarianism vs. Transcendentalism case? In either case, the story of Very and Emerson seemed tangential. Reiss also subtitled chapter 5 as "Edgar Allen Poe and the Origins of the Asylum", but like the previous chapter, I found no clear argument or relation to the topic. Was there no better way to structure his book? Perhaps I was not reading closely enough, but Reiss's lack of evidence and his constant literary allusions caused the book to lose, in my opinion, legitimacy in its argument (whatever it is, I'm not entirely sure about the thesis of this particular book). Reiss wrote about conceptions of insanity, but what happened to analyzing the asylums? --Chelsea Chin