A Feigned Madness
The legendary journalist Nellie Bly pretended to be insane so she could expose the horrific world of Blackwell’s Asylum, a place filled with incompetence, cruelty and malice. In successfully completing the assignment, she opened the door for other women journalists to write about more than teas and petticoats. This fictionalized account by Tonya Mitchell alternates between 1887 New York, where Bly convinces the editor of the New York World to give her the assignment, and 1885 Pittsburgh, where she begins her journalism career writing about women’s issues and meets the handsome George McCain.
Alternating between the two storylines keeps the reader from becoming mired in the bleak circumstances of Bly’s assignment. Elizabeth Cochrane (Bly’s real name) has already seen her share of injustice after being fleeced of her small inheritance and witnessing her mother terrorized by a drunken husband. Her pseudonym was chosen by her male colleagues because women writers were required to use a pen name to protect their “reputations.”
In order to get committed to the asylum, Bly finds lodging at a Temporary Home for Women, behaves strangely, and pretends to have no memory. After a cursory examination at Bellevue, she is committed to the notorious Blackwell’s Asylum, a gothic structure on an island in the middle of the East River. Upon arrival she looks up at the windows and sees “faces so ravaged they looked almost skeletal.” She tries to remain objective and not get her emotions involved in the story but as she gets to know the women, she realizes some aren’t mad at all: “it seemed that our circumstances, not a diagnosis of madness, were what brought us here.”
A Feigned Madness is a gorgeously written, powerful story of a courageous and remarkable woman.
