Complete isolation within your padded cell walls. The screams and unintelligible ramblings of your fellow inmates. The torturous “treatments” that are more terrifying than the monsters in your own mind. What could make a better setting for horror than the madhouse? As popular as lunatic asylums still are in modern horror, this setting has its roots deep in Gothic literature—going back further than you might think. Indeed, like so many of the other recurring Gothic settings, these institutions lend themselves particularly well to Gothic tropes. Isolation and imprisonment are at the core of the asylum’s function. Any story set within its walls can use the spectacle of insanity as the engine of horror. And apart from madness itself, there are also the horrors of the cruel treatment, cramped spaces, and poor physical conditions that unfortunately characterize such institutions.
The genre of the Gothic novel emerged just when the treatment of mental illness in the West was undergoing drastic changes. Before the eighteenth century, madness was regarded mainly as a domestic problem and the mentally ill were usually kept at home or sent to small, private asylums. But with the Enlightenment came a rise in public asylums, the most famous of which was Bethlem Royal Hospital in London, also known as Bedlam. These asylums became the focus of humanitarian reform, which shifted the emphasis from merely restraining inmates to attempting to treat and rehabilitate them. Despite these more noble intentions, however, abuse and mistreatment continued to be a pervasive problem. Throughout the nineteenth century, asylums and the treatment of those deemed insane were topics of popular discourse, spurred on by all sorts of new theories in the quickly developing field of psychology. Below are some examples from Gothic literature in which asylums feature prominently as a setting:
Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin (1820)
One of the earliest examples that I’m aware of is Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, which centers on a Faustian figure named Melmoth who has sold his soul to the devil in exchange for 150 extra years of life. Now, this is a sprawling novel with many nested stories within it and thus many different settings. In a previous post, I highlighted how one such story within the story, the Tale of the Spaniard, utilizes the Gothic setting of monasteries. But an asylum is featured in the very first of these nested tales, Stanton’s tale, which begins in Chapter 3. The initial protagonist of the novel, John Melmoth, learns at his uncle’s funeral of a mysterious visitor who left behind a manuscript many years before. The manuscript tells of a man named Stanton who repeatedly encounters the damned figure of Melmoth and becomes obsessed with pursuing him. When Stanton briefly catches up with the wanderer, Melmoth warns him that they will meet again in a madhouse. Sure enough, Stanton’s erratic behavior after this encounter enables a jealous relative to have him committed to a small, remote asylum typical of earlier centuries. From his first night there, Stanton is confronted with locked doors, barred windows, brutal guards, and the maniacal screams and ramblings of his fellow inmates. Though Stanton holds onto, as Melmoth puts it, “the curse of sanity,” the horrors of the madhouse begin to chip away at his mental state. Melmoth visits and tries to take advantage of Stanton’s misery to tempt him into making a bargain. Despite the horrible future that Melmoth lays out for him as the lone sane man trapped among the mad, slowly driven to madness himself, Stanton refuses to take part in any bargain. He ultimately gets free from the asylum by some other means and dedicates the rest of his life to once again hunting Melmoth down.
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (1859)
Much in the way that convents were used in earlier works of Gothic literature, we often see the asylum used to get inconvenient women out of the way. This is certainly the case in Wilkie Collins’s most famous novel The Woman in White. The specter of the asylum is raised at the beginning of the novel when the protagonist Walter Hartright encounters a strange woman on the road at night who is revealed to be Anne Catherick, an asylum escapee. Some time later, Walter falls in love with a strikingly similar-looking woman named Laura. Though Laura returns his feelings, she is already betrothed to Sir Percival Glyde and follows through with the marriage. Glyde is in desperate need of money but Laura refuses to sign her fortune over to him, so he comes up with a devious plan: with the help of his friend Count Fosco, they drug Laura and present her to the asylum as the escaped Anne. Her insistence upon her true identity is regarded as merely a delusion of the insane. Meanwhile, Anne has died and is buried under Laura’s name, thus allowing Glyde to inherit his wife’s money. Luckily for Laura, her beloved half-sister Marian comes snooping around and discovers Laura in the asylum. Marian is able to bribe a nurse into letting Laura escape, and the two join Walter in figuring out a plan to restore Laura’s identity and legal status. The asylum itself is given little description in this story. It is a private institution with well-manicured lawns for the inmates to stroll and seems to lack the violence, uncleanliness, and other physical horrors common to other depictions. Nonetheless, Laura’s stay in the asylum—and the insistence of everyone around her that she is mistaken in her own identity—takes a great psychological toll. By the time she is rescued, Laura is dazed and confused, with weakened mental faculties and fragmented memories. Much like poor Stanton above, Laura finds that the experience of being cursed with sanity while in an asylum is enough to potentially drive one insane.
Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
Perhaps the most famous asylum inmate in Gothic literature is Renfield from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. R. M. Renfield is a patient in the asylum run by Dr. John Seward, one of Lucy’s suitors. Dr. Seward is very personally invested in the patients under his care and conducts extensive interviews with them, taking detailed notes, in order to better understand their state of mind. Seward takes special interest in Renfield and refers to him affectionately in his notes as “my friend” and even “my homicidal maniac.” Dr. Seward closely follows the burgeoning science of psychology and develops new scientific theories based on Renfield’s behavior. When we first meet Renfield in the story, he is using part of his meals to attract a swarm of flies, which he keeps as pets before feeding them to spiders, which he then feeds to some sparrows—then Renfield devours the sparrows himself! Later in the novel, Renfield briefly escapes while questing after his master, and is dragged back to the asylum and restrained with a straitjacket and chains in a padded room. Renfield breaks out of the asylum several more times, always heading toward the neighboring Carfax estate that has become Dracula’s English home. After Lucy’s death, Seward’s asylum is used as a staging area for the protagonists as they make plans to hunt down Count Dracula. At times with both Seward and Mina Harker, Renfield is able to converse politely and eloquently on the subject of his own madness and even gives valuable clues about Dracula’s whereabouts. Staying at the asylum turns out to be a poor decision, however, as Dracula uses his sway over Renfield to gain entrance and feed on Mina.
“The Thing on the Doorstep” by H. P. Lovecraft (1937)
No discussion of asylums would be complete without mention of Arkham Sanitarium, the infamous institution created by Lovecraft for his short story “The Thing on the Doorstep.” Arkham Sanitarium is located in the fictional Massachusetts town of Arkham, in which several of Lovecraft’s stories are set. This tale begins as the written confession of Daniel Upton, who seeks to explain why he shot his friend Edward Derby in his cell at Arkham Sanitarium. Upton asserts that, though his actions seem mad, this account will prove his sanity. Years earlier, after Derby married a woman named Asenath Waite, Upton began noticing strange changes in his friend’s behavior. Derby eventually confesses to Upton that the Waite family has somehow developed the ability to swap bodies. He believes that Asenath’s body is really possessed by the mind of her father, Ephraim Waite, and that Ephraim occasionally steals into Derby’s body when he wants the freedom to move about the world as a man. Terrified that Asenath/Ephraim intends to switch into his body permanently, Derby comes up with a plan to get rid of Asenath. While visiting with Upton, however, Derby begins rambling incoherently about a tugging on his brain, and unsure what else to do, Upton has his friend committed to the local asylum. After some time in the sanitarium, a sudden change in Derby’s manner convinces the staff that he has regained his sanity. When Upton visits, however, he is struck by the impression that it is Asenath’s or Ephraim’s intelligence looking out of Derby’s eyes. This suspicion is confirmed when an animated corpse arrives on Upton’s doorstep with a note explaining that Derby’s consciousness has been forced into Asenath’s decaying body while she took over his. He begs Upton to end the cycle by killing whoever it is that inhabits his body.
Lovecraft’s Arkham Sanitarium is, of course, the inspiration for the infamous Arkham Asylum that houses many of the villains in DC’s Batman franchise. Asylums also continue to be popular settings for more recent Gothic-inspired works, such as Emilie Autumn’s half-fictional/half-biographical The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls. What other examples of asylums in Gothic and horror literature can you think of? And what other classic settings would you like to see me cover? Let me know in the comments!