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A review by katya_m
Ten Days in a Mad-House; or, Nellie Bly's Experience on Blackwell's Island by Nellie Bly, Nellie Bly
The insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island is a human rat-trap. It is easy to get in, but once there it is impossible to get out.
Nellie Bly é uma das grandes figuras da última metade do século XIX e primeiras décadas do século XX. Uma mulher desempoada cujos feitos incluem uma corrida à volta do mundo em 72 dias (em competição direta com Elizabeth Bisland); uma série de invenções para a indústria; uma fértil carreira jornalística (e uma carreira menos conhecida na ficção), e a publicação de vários livros - cuja base foram as múltiplas reportagens de investigação para as quais se voluntariou, entre elas reportagens sobre a chamada escravatura branca (também incluída neste volume) e o seu internamento no manicómio (Hospital Psiquiátrico para mulheres) da ilha de Blackwell.
Efetivamente mais conhecida por esta publicação, Bly parte um dia da redação do New York World numa missão de se infiltrar em Blackwell*. Para isso, basta dar entrada numa pensão (um alojamento temporário só para mulheres), onde lhe é extorquido o pouco dinheiro que tem consigo, recusando-se a permanecer no quarto e dando parcos sinais de paranóia. Presente às autoridades e posteriormente ao juiz (tudo no espaço de sensivelmente 24 horas), Bly é declarada insana e transportada com grande pompa para o rochedo onde passará os dez dias seguintes:
From the moment I entered the insane ward on the Island, I made no attempt to keep up the assumed role of insanity. I talked and acted just as I do in ordinary life. Yet strange to say, the more sanely I talked and acted the crazier I was thought to be.
Do momento da chegada em diante, o seu relato é chocante: o diagnóstico é nulo (nenhum médico assume que uma paciente seja qualquer coisa menos do que neurótica) - a própria Bly foi "examinada" por quatro médicos e todos foram peremptórios a afirmar a sua insanidade -; as condições de acolhimento são atrozes...
I could not sleep, so I lay in bed picturing to myself the horrors in case a fire should break out in the asylum. Every door is locked separately and the windows are heavily barred, so that escape is impossible. In the one building alone there are, I think Dr. Ingram told me, some three hundred women. They are locked, one to ten to a room. It is impossible to get out unless these doors are unlocked. A fire is not improbable, but one of the most likely occurrences. Should the building burn, the jailers or nurses would never think of releasing their crazy patients. (...)in case of fire, not a dozen women could escape. All would be left to roast to death.
O tratamento é desumano e abjeto, as pacientes sofrem mais tratos, fome, tortura - na verdadeira aceção da palavra - passam frio, são obrigadas ao silêncio ou à pose de estátua certas vezes por mais de dez horas seguidas, e presenteadas com banhos frios (usando a mesma tina de água, uma após a outra, até que esta fique barrenta):
We were taken into a cold, wet bathroom, and I was ordered to undress. Did I protest? Well, I never grew so earnest in my life as when I tried to beg off. They said if I did not they would use force and that it would not be very gentle. At this I noticed one of the craziest women in the ward standing by the filled bathtub with a large, discolored rag in her hands. She was chattering away to herself and chuckling in a manner which seemed to me fiendish. I knew now what was to be done with me. I shivered. They began to undress me, and one by one they pulled off my clothes. At last everything was gone
excepting one garment. “I will not remove it,” I said vehemently, but they took it off. I gave one glance at the group of patients gathered at the door watching the scene, and I jumped into the bathtub with more energy than
grace. The water was ice-cold, and I again began to protest. How useless it all was! I begged, at least, that the patients be made to go away, but was ordered to shut up. The crazy woman began to scrub me. I can find no other word that will express it but scrubbing. From a small tin pan she took some soft soap and rubbed it all over me, even all over my face and my pretty hair. I was at last past seeing or speaking, although I had begged that my hair be left untouched. Rub, rub, rub, went the old woman, chattering to herself. My teeth chattered and my limbs were goose-fleshed and blue with cold. Suddenly I got, one after the other, three buckets of water over my head—ice-cold water, too—into my eyes, my ears, my nose and my mouth. I think I experienced some of the sensations of a drowning person as they dragged me, gasping, shivering and quaking, from the tub.
[...]
We numbered forty-five patients in Hall 6 (...) there were two coarse towels. I watched crazy patients who had the most dangerous eruptions all over their faces dry on the towels and then saw women with clean skins turn to use them. I went to the bathtub and washed my face at the running faucet and my underskirt did duty for a towel.
Before I had completed my ablutions a bench was brought into the bathroom. Miss Grupe and Miss McCarten came in with combs in their hands. We were told so sit down on the bench, and the hair of forty-five women was combed with one patient, two nurses, and six combs.
A posição dos médicos (sempre homens, claro, a faculdade de medicina não estava aberta a mulheres) é, no mínimo, negligente e pactuante com a bestialidade das enfermeiras - a violência psicológica, física e as ameaças de violência sexual são uma constante e revoltante ocupação destas mulheres que não merecem o nome:
“Urena,” said Miss Grady, “the doctors say that you are thirty-three instead of eighteen,” and the other nurses laughed. They kept up this until the simple creature began to yell and cry, saying she wanted to go home and
that everybody treated her badly. After they had gotten all the amusement out of her they wanted and she was crying, they began to scold and tell her to keep quiet. She grew more hysterical every moment until they pounced upon her and slapped her face and knocked her head in a lively fashion.
This made the poor creature cry the more, and so they choked her. Yes, actually choked her. Then they dragged her out to the closet, and I heard her terrified cries hush into smothered ones. After several hours’ absence she returned to the sitting-room, and I plainly saw the marks of their fingers on her throat for the entire day.
As facilidades de internamento de uma mulher são degradantes e sintomáticas de uma sociedade misógina...
Later in the afternoon a boy and a woman came. The woman sat down on a bench, while the boy went in and talked with Miss Scott. In a short time he came out, and, just nodding good-bye to the woman, who was his mother, and went away. She did not look insane, but as she was German I could not learn her story. Her name, however, was Mrs. Louise Schanz. She seemed quite lost, but when the nurses put her at some sewing she did her work well and quickly.
...a mesma sociedade que consente em práticas humilhantes como a exibição de pacientes para gáudio de visitantes, e que, num espaço que deveria primar pelo respeito e pela integridade dos sujeitos que acolhe, escolhe antes favorecer a castração da individualidade, da feminilidade, da sanidade:
According to one of the physicians there are 1600 insane women on Blackwell’s Island.
Mad! what can be half so horrible? My heart thrilled with pity when I looked on old, gray-haired women talking aimlessly to space. One woman had on a straightjacket, and two women had to drag her along. Crippled, blind, old, young, homely, and pretty; one senseless mass of humanity. No
fate could be worse.
Muitas destas mulheres, refere Bly, não são sequer doentes - nem é preciso que o diga, as conversas que descreve com várias das pacientes tornam isso evidente. Muitas, imigrantes, são apanhadas nas malhas da justiça por uma ou outra razão e, incapazes de comunicar, enviadas para o asilo como psicologicamente doentes; outras são mulheres pobres e desamparadas que procuram o asilo dos pobres e são, ao invés disso, encaminhadas para ali; outras são simplesmente internadas por familiares que as querem fora do caminho. Uma vez em Blackwell, o seu destino está traçado. Perdidas para o mundo, afastadas de tudo e todos, e submetidas a maus tratos, estas mulheres perdem qualquer esperança numa segunda oportunidade:
A long cable rope fastened to wide leather belts, and these belts locked around the waists of fifty-two women. At the end of the rope was a heavy iron cart, and in it two women—one nursing a sore foot, another screaming at some nurse, saying: “You beat me and I shall not forget it. You want to kill me,” and then she would sob and cry. The women “on the rope,” as the patients call it, were each busy on their individual freaks. Some were yelling all the while. One who had blue eyes saw me look at her, and she turned as far as she could, talking and smiling, with that terrible, horrifying look of absolute insanity stamped on her. The doctors might safely judge on her case. The horror of that sight to one who had never been near an insane person before, was something unspeakable.
Os dez dias de Nellie Bly decorrem penosamente - observadora e participante, o seu papel é duplamente cruel. Uma vez libertada (sob o pressuposto de ser acolhida e tomada à responsabilidade de um conhecido, na realidade o advogado do jornal New York World), Nellie publica a sua história. Após a publicação da reportagem (1887), um júri acompanha Bly até Rockwell para averiguar o seu relato. Todavia, alertado para a visita, o pessoal do asilo compõe o espaço e trata de afastar possíveis testemunhas, negando todas as acusações que lhe são feitas. Bly consegue, ainda assim, que uma verba muito considerável seja libertada a favor da melhoria das condições nos asilos mentais - com a ajuda da sua investigação, estes passaram a contar ainda com uma equipa de tradutores (para ajudar na integração de imigrantes).
Ten days in a mad-house é um relato brutal das condições de acolhimento das mulheres nos asilos ** e em sociedades que se estruturam para e por homens cujo objetivo único reside na supremacia pela força. Toda e qualquer forma de violência para com as mulheres é aqui explicitamente pretendida e sancionada pelos mesmos poderes que se afirmam pela justiça e pela proteção dos seus cidadãos, o que torna a sua leitura (como o foi a sua publicação) uma poderosa ferramenta de luta por direitos que estão longe de se tornar inalienáveis
(...)here was a woman taken without her own consent from the free world to an asylum and there given no chance to prove her sanity. Confined most probably for life behind asylum bars, without even being told in her language the why and wherefore.
Compare this with a criminal, who is given every chance to prove his innocence. Who would not rather be a murderer and take the chance for life than be declared insane, without hope of escape?
*Blackwell é hoje conhecida como Roosevelt Island e, à data, acolhia várias instituições, entre elas o asilo/manicómio, uma penitenciária, hospitais de doenças infecciosas e asilos de pobres.
**Bly descreve as condições de Blackwell em finais de século XIX, mas que isso não sirva de isenção já que, mesmo em 1941, uma sua conterrânea - e que conterrânea!- Rosemary Kennedy ainda seria sujeita a uma lobotomia a simples pedido do pai. Escusado será dizer que o resultado desta brincadeira levou ao seu afastamento público e apagamento deliberado da história da família
Nellie Bly é uma das grandes figuras da última metade do século XIX e primeiras décadas do século XX. Uma mulher desempoada cujos feitos incluem uma corrida à volta do mundo em 72 dias (em competição direta com Elizabeth Bisland); uma série de invenções para a indústria; uma fértil carreira jornalística (e uma carreira menos conhecida na ficção), e a publicação de vários livros - cuja base foram as múltiplas reportagens de investigação para as quais se voluntariou, entre elas reportagens sobre a chamada escravatura branca (também incluída neste volume) e o seu internamento no manicómio (Hospital Psiquiátrico para mulheres) da ilha de Blackwell.
Efetivamente mais conhecida por esta publicação, Bly parte um dia da redação do New York World numa missão de se infiltrar em Blackwell*. Para isso, basta dar entrada numa pensão (um alojamento temporário só para mulheres), onde lhe é extorquido o pouco dinheiro que tem consigo, recusando-se a permanecer no quarto e dando parcos sinais de paranóia. Presente às autoridades e posteriormente ao juiz (tudo no espaço de sensivelmente 24 horas), Bly é declarada insana e transportada com grande pompa para o rochedo onde passará os dez dias seguintes:
From the moment I entered the insane ward on the Island, I made no attempt to keep up the assumed role of insanity. I talked and acted just as I do in ordinary life. Yet strange to say, the more sanely I talked and acted the crazier I was thought to be.
Do momento da chegada em diante, o seu relato é chocante: o diagnóstico é nulo (nenhum médico assume que uma paciente seja qualquer coisa menos do que neurótica) - a própria Bly foi "examinada" por quatro médicos e todos foram peremptórios a afirmar a sua insanidade -; as condições de acolhimento são atrozes...
I could not sleep, so I lay in bed picturing to myself the horrors in case a fire should break out in the asylum. Every door is locked separately and the windows are heavily barred, so that escape is impossible. In the one building alone there are, I think Dr. Ingram told me, some three hundred women. They are locked, one to ten to a room. It is impossible to get out unless these doors are unlocked. A fire is not improbable, but one of the most likely occurrences. Should the building burn, the jailers or nurses would never think of releasing their crazy patients. (...)in case of fire, not a dozen women could escape. All would be left to roast to death.
O tratamento é desumano e abjeto, as pacientes sofrem mais tratos, fome, tortura - na verdadeira aceção da palavra - passam frio, são obrigadas ao silêncio ou à pose de estátua certas vezes por mais de dez horas seguidas, e presenteadas com banhos frios (usando a mesma tina de água, uma após a outra, até que esta fique barrenta):
We were taken into a cold, wet bathroom, and I was ordered to undress. Did I protest? Well, I never grew so earnest in my life as when I tried to beg off. They said if I did not they would use force and that it would not be very gentle. At this I noticed one of the craziest women in the ward standing by the filled bathtub with a large, discolored rag in her hands. She was chattering away to herself and chuckling in a manner which seemed to me fiendish. I knew now what was to be done with me. I shivered. They began to undress me, and one by one they pulled off my clothes. At last everything was gone
excepting one garment. “I will not remove it,” I said vehemently, but they took it off. I gave one glance at the group of patients gathered at the door watching the scene, and I jumped into the bathtub with more energy than
grace. The water was ice-cold, and I again began to protest. How useless it all was! I begged, at least, that the patients be made to go away, but was ordered to shut up. The crazy woman began to scrub me. I can find no other word that will express it but scrubbing. From a small tin pan she took some soft soap and rubbed it all over me, even all over my face and my pretty hair. I was at last past seeing or speaking, although I had begged that my hair be left untouched. Rub, rub, rub, went the old woman, chattering to herself. My teeth chattered and my limbs were goose-fleshed and blue with cold. Suddenly I got, one after the other, three buckets of water over my head—ice-cold water, too—into my eyes, my ears, my nose and my mouth. I think I experienced some of the sensations of a drowning person as they dragged me, gasping, shivering and quaking, from the tub.
[...]
We numbered forty-five patients in Hall 6 (...) there were two coarse towels. I watched crazy patients who had the most dangerous eruptions all over their faces dry on the towels and then saw women with clean skins turn to use them. I went to the bathtub and washed my face at the running faucet and my underskirt did duty for a towel.
Before I had completed my ablutions a bench was brought into the bathroom. Miss Grupe and Miss McCarten came in with combs in their hands. We were told so sit down on the bench, and the hair of forty-five women was combed with one patient, two nurses, and six combs.
A posição dos médicos (sempre homens, claro, a faculdade de medicina não estava aberta a mulheres) é, no mínimo, negligente e pactuante com a bestialidade das enfermeiras - a violência psicológica, física e as ameaças de violência sexual são uma constante e revoltante ocupação destas mulheres que não merecem o nome:
“Urena,” said Miss Grady, “the doctors say that you are thirty-three instead of eighteen,” and the other nurses laughed. They kept up this until the simple creature began to yell and cry, saying she wanted to go home and
that everybody treated her badly. After they had gotten all the amusement out of her they wanted and she was crying, they began to scold and tell her to keep quiet. She grew more hysterical every moment until they pounced upon her and slapped her face and knocked her head in a lively fashion.
This made the poor creature cry the more, and so they choked her. Yes, actually choked her. Then they dragged her out to the closet, and I heard her terrified cries hush into smothered ones. After several hours’ absence she returned to the sitting-room, and I plainly saw the marks of their fingers on her throat for the entire day.
As facilidades de internamento de uma mulher são degradantes e sintomáticas de uma sociedade misógina...
Later in the afternoon a boy and a woman came. The woman sat down on a bench, while the boy went in and talked with Miss Scott. In a short time he came out, and, just nodding good-bye to the woman, who was his mother, and went away. She did not look insane, but as she was German I could not learn her story. Her name, however, was Mrs. Louise Schanz. She seemed quite lost, but when the nurses put her at some sewing she did her work well and quickly.
...a mesma sociedade que consente em práticas humilhantes como a exibição de pacientes para gáudio de visitantes, e que, num espaço que deveria primar pelo respeito e pela integridade dos sujeitos que acolhe, escolhe antes favorecer a castração da individualidade, da feminilidade, da sanidade:
According to one of the physicians there are 1600 insane women on Blackwell’s Island.
Mad! what can be half so horrible? My heart thrilled with pity when I looked on old, gray-haired women talking aimlessly to space. One woman had on a straightjacket, and two women had to drag her along. Crippled, blind, old, young, homely, and pretty; one senseless mass of humanity. No
fate could be worse.
Muitas destas mulheres, refere Bly, não são sequer doentes - nem é preciso que o diga, as conversas que descreve com várias das pacientes tornam isso evidente. Muitas, imigrantes, são apanhadas nas malhas da justiça por uma ou outra razão e, incapazes de comunicar, enviadas para o asilo como psicologicamente doentes; outras são mulheres pobres e desamparadas que procuram o asilo dos pobres e são, ao invés disso, encaminhadas para ali; outras são simplesmente internadas por familiares que as querem fora do caminho. Uma vez em Blackwell, o seu destino está traçado. Perdidas para o mundo, afastadas de tudo e todos, e submetidas a maus tratos, estas mulheres perdem qualquer esperança numa segunda oportunidade:
A long cable rope fastened to wide leather belts, and these belts locked around the waists of fifty-two women. At the end of the rope was a heavy iron cart, and in it two women—one nursing a sore foot, another screaming at some nurse, saying: “You beat me and I shall not forget it. You want to kill me,” and then she would sob and cry. The women “on the rope,” as the patients call it, were each busy on their individual freaks. Some were yelling all the while. One who had blue eyes saw me look at her, and she turned as far as she could, talking and smiling, with that terrible, horrifying look of absolute insanity stamped on her. The doctors might safely judge on her case. The horror of that sight to one who had never been near an insane person before, was something unspeakable.
Os dez dias de Nellie Bly decorrem penosamente - observadora e participante, o seu papel é duplamente cruel. Uma vez libertada (sob o pressuposto de ser acolhida e tomada à responsabilidade de um conhecido, na realidade o advogado do jornal New York World), Nellie publica a sua história. Após a publicação da reportagem (1887), um júri acompanha Bly até Rockwell para averiguar o seu relato. Todavia, alertado para a visita, o pessoal do asilo compõe o espaço e trata de afastar possíveis testemunhas, negando todas as acusações que lhe são feitas. Bly consegue, ainda assim, que uma verba muito considerável seja libertada a favor da melhoria das condições nos asilos mentais - com a ajuda da sua investigação, estes passaram a contar ainda com uma equipa de tradutores (para ajudar na integração de imigrantes).
Ten days in a mad-house é um relato brutal das condições de acolhimento das mulheres nos asilos ** e em sociedades que se estruturam para e por homens cujo objetivo único reside na supremacia pela força. Toda e qualquer forma de violência para com as mulheres é aqui explicitamente pretendida e sancionada pelos mesmos poderes que se afirmam pela justiça e pela proteção dos seus cidadãos, o que torna a sua leitura (como o foi a sua publicação) uma poderosa ferramenta de luta por direitos que estão longe de se tornar inalienáveis
(...)here was a woman taken without her own consent from the free world to an asylum and there given no chance to prove her sanity. Confined most probably for life behind asylum bars, without even being told in her language the why and wherefore.
Compare this with a criminal, who is given every chance to prove his innocence. Who would not rather be a murderer and take the chance for life than be declared insane, without hope of escape?
*Blackwell é hoje conhecida como Roosevelt Island e, à data, acolhia várias instituições, entre elas o asilo/manicómio, uma penitenciária, hospitais de doenças infecciosas e asilos de pobres.
**Bly descreve as condições de Blackwell em finais de século XIX, mas que isso não sirva de isenção já que, mesmo em 1941, uma sua conterrânea - e que conterrânea!- Rosemary Kennedy ainda seria sujeita a uma lobotomia a simples pedido do pai. Escusado será dizer que o resultado desta brincadeira levou ao seu afastamento público e apagamento deliberado da história da família