Sensational

by Kim Todd

  Easy to diagnose, yet impossible to define, the only sure thing about hysteria was that the primary risk factor was being female. Sometimes, that in itself was enough. “As a general rule, all women are hysterical and . . . every woman carries with her the seeds of hysteria. Hysteria, before being an illness, is a temperament, and what constitutes a temperament in a woman is rudimentary hysteria,” claimed one physician. The nature of their bodies made sufferers unreliable.

  Other doctors acknowledged, though rarely in so many words, that the problem was sexual frustration, the struggles of a female body straitjacketed by Victorian ideals of femininity. Cures included pelvic massage, spraying upper thighs with water, and, when the technology developed, the application of vibrators to “dissolve the paroxysm.”

  But the patients receiving these treatments were the lucky ones, mainly wealthy, mainly white. Others ended up in the asylum. Like Nellie Brown.

  On the boat across the East River, in a dirty cabin, accompanied by attendants who spit tobacco juice on the floor, Bly took note of the other women consigned with her to Blackwell’s Island. Tillie Mayard, a frail twenty-five-year-old with short hair who was recovering from an illness, stood out even at Bellevue. She seemed sane enough, just sick. Mayard thought friends were sending her to a convalescent home to recover from a “nervous debility” and was devastated to find out where she was going. Bly would keep an eye on her.

  On shore, an ambulance took them along the river road, past sparse trees and a reeking building Bly determined was the kitchen. The L-shaped asylum itself, enormous and stark, was built of pale stone quarried on the island. Once again, Bly feared her performance skills might let her down. When she walked into Blackwell’s grand hall, marked by a twisting staircase, her goal in sight, she wanted to shout in triumph. Seeing her expression, Mayard commented, “I can’t see what has cheered you up so. . . . Ever since we left Bellevue you have looked happy.”

  “Well, we might as well make the best of it,” Bly replied.

  The first night, Bly eavesdropped as Mayard pled her case, asking doctors to test her for insanity, only to be ignored. Attendants slapped the newcomers, fed them bread with rancid butter, roughly bathed them in icy water in a cold room. In a more cheerful moment, Bly played “Rock-a-Bye Baby” on an out-of-tune piano, and Mayard sang along. Mayard plotted escape, telling Bly she would be obedient until she could make a plan, but the next morning confessed that, after a sleepless night, “My nerves were so unstrung before I came here, and I fear I shall not be able to stand the strain.”

  Settling into the asylum, Bly met many patients, like Mayard, who didn’t strike her as insane at all. One immigrant woman with little English was locked up by her husband, according to the nurses, “because she had a fondness for other men than himself.” Another, who described herself as “penniless” with “nowhere to go,” had asked to be sent to the poorhouse but ended up at the asylum instead. A third, a young cook, had been committed after she lost her temper when someone dirtied the floor she’d just finished cleaning.

  Immigrants, the poor, the adulterous, the angry, the sick. Like hysteria, the asylum seemed like a catch basin for women society didn’t know what to do with.

  Once inside Bly stopped acting “crazy” at all. It wasn’t necessary. Despite Mayard’s requests for evaluation, doctors paid scant attention to the patients. “How can a doctor judge a woman’s sanity by merely bidding her good morning and refusing to hear her pleas for release?” Bly asked one doctor. She concluded, “Even the sick ones know it is useless to say anything, for the answer will be that it is their imagination.”

  In fact, the place seemed designed to turn sane women crazy. When nurses whisked patients out of sight, Bly gathered evidence of violence on their return: black eyes, choke marks on throats. And she hadn’t even seen the worst, deciding that she wouldn’t try to get into the Lodge and the Retreat, which housed the most violent prisoners. Her bravery had its limits. Noting that women were locked in their rooms with individual locks, a death sentence in a fire, she suggested to the assistant superintendent they install universal locks, like those in prisons, so all doors could be opened with one switch. He just looked at her with pity, wondering about her prison stay. After days of eating rotten beef, shivering by open windows, sitting all day confined to a straight-backed bench, staring at the wall, Bly concluded that there was no recourse for the sane. “The insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island is a human rat-trap,” she would write. “It is easy to get in, but once there it is impossible to get out.”

  Through all this, Bly struggled to do the work that drew her there, pleading for the return of the pencil and notebook that had been in her purse, only to be told, “You can’t have it, so shut up.” When she asked again, a doctor told her she hadn’t brought a pencil and should strive to stop hallucinating. She stayed up late, trying to take in as much as she could, the whispers and shufflings of the asylum night. The nurses offered a narcotic to prompt sleep, and, when Bly refused it, they called the doctor who threatened to put it in her arm with a needle. Figuring once injected, the medicine would be in her blood for good, Bly drank it, but forced herself to throw up as soon as the staff left.

  For Mayard, still not fully recovered, the unsalted and spoiled food, the cold baths, the inadequate clothing, took their toll. She grew steadily worse. One day, when they sat together on a bench, Mayard started shivering violently, then collapsed in what Bly referred to as a “fit.” When the superintendent came in, Bly reported, “He caught her roughly between the eyebrows or thereabouts, and pinched until her face was crimson.” Mayard was never the same.

  After ten days, the lawyer from the World showed up, asking for the confounding Nellie Brown. Relatives were willing to take over her care, he told the asylum. Fetched from a walk with other inmates, pulled from the line and led through the grounds, Bly said an abrupt “goodbye” to those around her, and was free.

  The departure of the sad girl from Cuba left the other papers in suspense. What was her story? How did all these strange parts add up? They would soon find out. The first installment of Bly’s asylum exposé splashed across the World’s front page days later.

  Bly worked fast. Rescued on October 4, she published the first of two Blackwell’s articles on October 9, under the headline “Behind Asylum Bars.” Illustrations of Bly, practicing insane faces in a mirror, standing before the judge, being grilled by the doctor, decorated the columns. Over the course of the lengthy piece (the two parts together spanned almost thirty thousand words), she wrote about the freezing cold, the inedible food, the cruel treatment of the prisoners, and the way the facility was completely incapable of telling who was sane or not. It was desperate for reform. At the end of the first installment appeared the signature “Nellie Bly.” In the second installment, “Inside the Madhouse,” published October 16, Bly’s name moved to the subhead: “Nellie Bly’s Experience in the Blackwell’s Insane Asylum.” This was quite a coup for a new reporter.

  The tale of the pretty girl with amnesia had been compelling, but the tale of the young woman who faked her way into the asylum was explosive. Sun reporters scrambled to catch up, interviewing doctors, nurses, and others who had encountered Nellie Brown. They were writing about Bly writing about her asylum experience. Bly was so popular with readers that within a few weeks, the World highlighted her name in their promotion of upcoming issues. Her story crept into other advertisements, too. Under the headline “Can Doctors Tell Insanity?” and the subhead “Experience of the World’s Reporter, Nellie Bly, Would Indicate Not,” an ad for “Dr. Green’s Nervura Nerve Tonic” offered to “restore tone, vigor, and vitality to the brain, rebuild and restore lost nerve force and power, and renew the strength and energies of the whole system.”

  From its epicenter in New York, the asylum exposé rippled outward. The rise of syndication and news transmission by telegraph meant the story stirred readers on San Francisco streetcars and benches in Tennessee. The Salt Lake Herald declared th
e articles had set “New York wild with excitement,” and added, “It’s a tale far more interesting than a romance.” The Hazel Green Herald, out of Kentucky, reprinted an article under the headline “Smarter Than All of Them,” that crowed, “The police, the Court, the nurses and physicians at the famous Bellevue Hospital, were all successfully duped by a mere girl.” The Ohio Democrat concluded, “Miss Bly has undoubtedly performed a great work for the cause of humanity.” The Iola Register reprinted a column that took Bly’s performance as evidence for the competence of women. The whole piece was a rebuttal to the editors who told Bly women were only good for twittering about ball gowns. After recounting the stunt that “made a sensation from Maine to Georgia,” the writer concluded, “There is no reason whatever, there can be no argument whatever, against girls working on newspapers.”

  And if praise and fame weren’t enough, her articles had real-world effects. Bly testified before a grand jury, an experience she found gratifying: “I answered the summons with pleasure, because I longed to help those of God’s most unfortunate children whom I had left prisoners behind me. If I could not bring them that boon of all boons, liberty, I hoped at least to influence others to make life more bearable for them.” She also went along on an inspection of asylum facilities. To Bly’s disgust, inspectors found better food, barrels of salt in the kitchen, polite nurses, and few of the patients she’d deemed mistakenly imprisoned. The institution had clearly prepared for their arrival. And Tillie Mayard? “I shuddered when I looked at her,” Bly wrote. She seemed to have become genuinely insane.

  Even so, the grand jury recommended the asylum hire at least three female doctors, install prison-style locks that could open with one motion, and receive increased funds. The Board of Estimate and Apportionment gave the facility an additional $50,000.

  Though it was the kind of creative reporting he loved, Pulitzer wasn’t enjoying the splash. He was strangely silent for reasons that soon became clear. One morning, a month after Bly’s first asylum piece, he went to the World’s offices to pore over the editorial page, to see that each phrase met his high standards for vividness and clarity. He’d been stressed for some time, weathering constant criticism of the World’s exposures. Insomnia plagued him. When he held up the sheets, as he told a friend later, “I was astonished to find that I could hardly see the writing, let alone read it.” A doctor ordered him to stay in a dark room for six weeks, and he did, but afterward, the prognosis was no better. The diagnosis was a ruptured blood vessel, then a detached retina. More rest was ordered. He was going blind.

  Bly’s wasn’t the first undercover story, but it was inventive in all kinds of ways. In 1859, just before the Civil War, Mortimer Thomson of the abolitionist New-York Tribune posed as a buyer at an auction of more than four hundred enslaved men and women in Savannah, Georgia. Other abolitionist reporters went “blackbirding,” signing on as crew on slave ships to write about what they saw.

  In a famous stunt for London’s new Pall Mall Gazette in 1866, writer James Greenwood slipped on an ill-fitting coat that closed with the help of a piece of twine and spent the night in the “casual” (or temporary resident) ward of Lambeth Workhouse. He described grim conditions, taking a bath in dirty water the color of “weak mutton broth,” sleeping on a straw mattress stained with blood. But it was less an exposé of the institution than of the people who ended up there. They were ugly, dirty, lazy, and used shocking language, according to Greenwood. And his conclusion that “I have avoided the detail of horrors infinitely more revolting than anything that appears in these papers,” implied the men were selling sex rather than just sharing bedding.

  The Pall Mall Gazette continued undercover exposés with W. T. Stead’s four-part 1885 series, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” For this report on children being tricked into prostitution, drugged and kidnapped or sold outright by their parents, Stead used traditional techniques—interviewing a police officer, the owner of a brothel, and a former prostitute. But he also pretended to be a customer, requesting very young virgins, verified to have never had sex by a doctor, which the brothel owners repeatedly supplied. The age of consent at the time was thirteen, allowing many of these abuses, and his series helped get it raised to sixteen.

  In the Pall Mall Gazette stories, as significant as they were, the women described were still powerless. At the time of Bly’s stunt, women who made the news were generally murder victims or those fallen from virtue. Front-page stories from weeks just before and after Bly’s asylum articles included “He Dug Her Grave, Shooting, Stabbing and Burying an Old Woman”; “Mrs. Robinson’s Fatal Leap: A Louisville Woman’s Suicide”; “She Ran Away from Home, Story of Niagara Girl Found Wandering in Boston Streets”; and “A Bride Choked with Gas.” And the reporters who wrote about the enigmatic waif in the courtroom tried to fit her into one of those boxes. Was she a pathetic innocent? Or had she been seduced and abandoned?

  If Bly’s entry into journalism showed anything, it was that representation of women in newspapers altered women’s lives. She got her start protesting Quiet Observer’s thoughts about her sex’s natural abilities. Two years later, Bly wrote about a new kind of woman, one who took action, did good, was brave. And this heroine was battling institutions. Judges, police officers, medical experts—all had been wrong. The Bellevue doctors were convinced that Bly was hysterical, but her whole experience undermined their authority to make this diagnosis. After she passed a second round of tests, she wrote, “I began to have a smaller regard for the ability of doctors than I ever had before, and a greater one for myself. I felt sure now that no doctor could tell whether people were insane or not, so long as the case was not violent.”

  Part of the asylum story’s appeal was this kind of audacity, but another lure was its style.

  W. T. Stead embellished his sentences with ornate clauses and classical references. At the start of the “Maiden Tribute,” he wrote, “In ancient times, if we may believe the myths of Hellas, Athens, after a disastrous campaign, was compelled by her conqueror to send once every nine years a tribute to Crete of seven youths and seven maidens. The doomed fourteen, who were selected by lot amid the lamentations of the citizens, returned no more.” Then he quoted Ovid in Latin.

  Here is Bly, in the first paragraph of her Blackwell’s exposé: “Could I pass a week in the insane ward at Blackwell’s Island? I said I could and I would. And I did.’”

  Bly shook free of the ruffles and hoop skirts of Victorian prose and made her sentences accessible to the less educated and to recent immigrants who might struggle with English—the specific readers Pulitzer coveted. While she advocated for serious reform, her writing was always a pleasure to read. She was funny. Up all night at the Temporary Home for Women, she spent hours watching the mice that landed on her quilt and crawled over her pillow and the cockroaches that struck her as unusually large and fast. “I believe I made some valuable studies in natural history,” she wrote. Bly included ample dialogue. She was also unabashedly vain, and the humor is partially at her own expense. After her hair dried in knots following an asylum bath, a nurse combed it out, braided it, and tied it with a red rag. “My curly bangs refused to stay back,” Bly wrote, “so that at least was left of my former glory.” Though Bly’s prose had its flaws, something in it invited the reader to come along for the ride.

  For Bly, the stunt drove the story. The delight in fooling the powerful, the slipping disguise, the fact of her being a rather poor actress—it all added to the drama. In fact, that was most of the drama, as she often breezed by genuine hazards. When she was at Bellevue, a doctor came into her room as she got ready to sleep. He sat on the edge of the bed, put his arm around her, asked about Cuba, and said, “Don’t you remember me? I remember you.” In the article in the World, Bly mentioned that this doctor was particularly handsome and commented, “It was a terrible thing to play insane before this young man, and only a girl can sympathize with me in my position.” But in the version she published as a book, a few mon
ths later, she acknowledged that his caress could be read the wrong way. “Some people have since censured this action,” she wrote, “but I feel sure, even if it was a little indiscreet, that the young doctor only meant kindness to me.” A sexual encounter, even against her will, would have bumped her out of the “good woman” class. Chastity meant credibility. Throughout her story, Bly downplayed real risks—disease, assault, drugging—and highlighted less significant ones—that her hair was a mess, that she might burst out laughing and blow her cover.

  This strong first-person point of view immersed readers in the narrator’s experience. Bly’s tone was confiding—a whisper to a trusted friend rather than the assertions of a disembodied observer—and the body she inhabited was specifically young and female. The reader was right next to her, shivering, thrown into the icy bath, smelling spoiled meat, responding to a handsome doctor, hiding behind a veil. This vivid narrator, full of life, moral but not preachy, was clearly enjoying herself. And if this little scrap of a person—this “mere girl” as the Hazel Green Herald put it—could take on the whole system of institutions with wit and compassion and negligible acting ability, what couldn’t be done? A stunt reporter had real power.