“The Lunatics’ Ball is an explicit compendium of women seen and feared as other in a range of European and American asylums. The angels held therein varied: some saw God; most were railroaded, punished, exploited, experimented upon, or simply ‘removed.’ New visions of famous and infamous ‘madwomen’ are here, alongside women unknown but for these saving pages. We must all hasten immediately to The Lunatics’ Ball, which has the arc and thrill of an incendiary novel.”
—Jayne Anne Phillips, Pulitzer Prize−winning author of Night Watch, Small Town Girls, and Black Tickets
“Jacqueline Doyle has managed a feat of literary resuscitation in these pages. Weaving personal and family experience with cultural and historical research, Doyle frees a legion of women from the asylums, attics, and case notes into which they'd been relegated and brings them, shimmering and spinning, into the light. An exquisite collection.”
—Sonja Livingston, author of Ladies Night at the Dreamland and Ghostbread
“In this thought-provoking kaleidoscope of personal history, research, dreams, fairy tales, and fantasy, Jacqueline Doyle speaks to, for, about, and through the ‘many unseen madwomen throughout history,’ spotlighting the injustice and inhumane treatment they suffered. Women beg for release, for their perceptions, their imaginations, and their desires to be believed, but through Doyle’s balanced choreography, they also create and join a community of independent-minded, creative, and charismatic women, inspiring us all to join in the dance.”
—Jill Talbot, author of The Way We Weren’t
“There must have been more of us, hidden from sight, or slipping off the family tree like leaves in autumn, unnoticed.” Compelled by grief over the suicide of her beloved aunt and by her own bipolar diagnosis, Jacqueline Doyle set out to discover more about their shared disorder and the ways society has punished women it labels “mad.” Her genre-bending collection, The Lunatics’ Ball, grew into something larger than she expected: a collective (auto)biography combining her aunt’s story and her own with those of more than thirty “lunatic” forebears whose histories have been misrepresented or lost. Some are well known, such as Sylvia Plath, Nina Simone, and Zelda Fitzgerald—the latter who died in a locked room in a mental hospital fire. Others are lesser known, such as Lorina Bulwer, who stitched her story into enormous patchwork tapestries; Violet Gibson, incarcerated in an asylum for decades after attempting to assassinate Mussolini; and the writer Janet Frame, who narrowly escaped a lobotomy. In this fearless work that is equal parts imaginative brilliance and exacting historical inquiry, Doyle expands the boundaries of memoir and creates a new community in the face of stigma and repression.
Jacqueline Doyle is the author of the flash collection The Missing Girl. Her essays have appeared in Fourth Genre, EPOCH, The Gettysburg Review, and numerous anthologies and have earned nine “Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction” citations in Best American Essays. She is the creative nonfiction flash editor at CRAFT literary journal. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Contents
- Prologue The Lunatics’ Ball
- I. Asylums
- Cross-Stitching Mary Frances Heaton and Lorina Bulwer
- When It Started
- Cinderella at the Lunatics’ Ball Blackwell’s Asylum
- Returning to the Wreck
- Who Counts Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum
- Lunatic Impromptu Blackwell’s Asylum
- II. Hysteria Across the Atlantic
- Dermographism La Salpêtrière Mental Hospital
- Freud’s Odalisque Gives Him Side-Eye Ida Bauer, aka “Dora”
- Charcot’s Monkey La Salpêtrière Mental Hospital
- Dora Talks Back Ida Bauer, aka “Dora”
- Capturing Augustine Louise Augustine Gleizes, aka “Augustine”
- Jane la Folle Dances with Herself Jeanne Beaudon, aka Jane Avril
- Dancing on the Roof
- A Mad Ars Poetica
- III. Dear Doctor
- Huntress Lucy Ann Lobdell, aka Joseph Israel Lobdell
- The Women Behind the Wallpaper Alice James and Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- Dancing with Ghosts Emma Gregory and Elizabeth Faribault, aka Elizabeth Fe Alexis The Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians
- “The Worst Woman on Earth” Lizzie Halliday
- Counting (On) Psychiatrists
- The Fortune Teller’s Words
- IV. Dear God
- Saints and Birds
- Conjuring Ghosts Central Lunatic Asylum for the Colored Insane
- “Unnatural and Abnormal” Mary Todd Lincoln
- “A Very Dangerous Woman” Ida C. Craddock
- Shooting Mussolini Violet Gibson
- I Saw the Devil Once
- V. Dear Husband
- The Madwoman on BART
- Lizzie Dreams of Hellfire
- “Lest I Outshine Him” Elizabeth Packard
- Married to Genius Vivienne Eliot and Zelda Fitzgerald
- Dearest Leonard Virginia Woolf
- Sealed with a Kiss Sylvia Plath
- Maddy’s Paper Dolls
- VI. Baggage
- My Mother’s Suitcases
- After the Rabbit
- A Language I No Longer Speak
- Alternate Choreographies Vivienne Eliot, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Lucia Joyce
- Madeline’s Trunk Madeline C.
- VII. My Ten Days
- Dear Maddy
- Prayer and Exaltation “Mary Roberts”
- My Ten Days in the Madhouse
- American Venus Audrey Munson
- Kaleidoscope for Maddy
- The Kiss
- VIII. Midcentury Depression
- Midcentury Modern
- Cutting Edge Rosemary Kennedy, Rose Williams, and Naomi Ginsberg
- I Can’t Hear You Trudy Drucker
- “A Symphony of Anger” Eunice Waymon, aka Nina Simone
- Audrey on Her Hundredth Birthday
- “A Normal Life” Janet Frame
- IX. The Last Dance
- Dancing in Outer Space Napa State Hospital
- On Connections
- Little Colored Pills
- Epilogue I Dreamed I Danced All Night
- Acknowledgments
