The Lunatics’ Ball

“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

A fearless, personal, and redemptive excavation of how women with mental illness have been stigmatized and abused in the name of treatment throughout history.

“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

Contents
Prologue
The Lunatics’ Ball
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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
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Epilogue
I Dreamed I Danced All Night
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Acknowledgments