Power Play: Games, Jokes, and Performance in Nineteenth-Century American Asylum Narratives

“Power Play” illuminates an understudied vein of creative, playful, and collaborative practices animating patient life in nineteenth-century American asylums. Popular and scholarly preoccupations with dramatizing or theorizing mechanisms of abuse and social control in asylums have long obscured this vein, too often locating patient agency primarily in individual acts of violent resistance. This dissertation draws on published patient writings, including letters, poetry, pamphlets, memoirs, and periodicals, to uncover how patients enacted forms of cognitive and often communal liberty despite bodily confinement. Across their writings, patients testify to the potency of play and humor to contest medical authority while sustaining friendships and other aspects of personhood that were threatened by institutional life. Literary and ludic modes generated various forms of collective action, blurring distinctions between staff and patients and producing unlikely friendships and alliances that unsettled institutional hierarchies. “Power Play” centers patient writings from 1860 to 1890, decades when “moral treatment” (a constellation of theories and practices structuring asylum life) had its maximal reach, even as public and professional optimism in its efficacy waned. This dissertation’s three chapters examine how patients creatively manipulated loopholes in the parameters of moral treatment, toying with symbiotic relationships between literary genres and ludic modes. Drawing on writings by Lydia Denny, Margaret Starr, Sophia Olsen, and Elizabeth Packard, chapter one traces the gameplay involved in women’s clandestine epistolary exchanges, analyzing how they evaded surveillance by transforming tools and textiles of domestic labor into communicative vessels. The second chapter turns to the public circulation of an 1870s Alabama patient periodical, the Meteor, demonstrating how patients deployed humor to smuggle critiques and forge alliances through their “house organ.” In chapter three, I explore the role of improvised performances in the writings of Nellie Bly and Anna Agnew to critique practices of asylum tourism, journalistic stereotypes of insanity, and physicians’ diagnoses. Taken together, these case studies constitute a potent counternarrative of asylum life, rife with imaginative and liberatory insights for contemporary concerns with mental health.