Response to Csilla Dallos's Review of Karl Marx, Anthropologist

✍ Scribed by Thomas C. Patterson

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 96 KB
• Volume: 46
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-5061
• DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.20435

✦ Synopsis

Benjamin Reiss's Theaters of Madness is a fascinating attempt to enliven and deepen the literature on cultural definitions of madness and their implications for democratic institutions. A literary scholar with historical sensibilities, Reiss offers readings of a wide variety of "texts" to add irony and nuance to our understanding of what he views as a central problem for nineteenth-century Americans: the involuntary restraint of those deemed mentally incapable of responsibly exercising personal liberty. He demonstrates from the outset that the issue resonated beyond legal and medical circles to the broader cultural horizon. Politicians, reformers, and creative artists grappled with the challenge of insanity to republican institutions and focused on the asylum as the embodiment of their hopes and fears. Reiss presents brief insightful commentary on major scholarly views of the asylum movement and attempts to penetrate the consciousness of incarcerated citizens even as he assesses the meaning of asylum reform in its own time and for the present.

Theaters of Madness gives us neither a comprehensive historical reconsideration nor a thoroughgoing revision of Erving Goffman or Michel Foucault. Rather, Reiss uses a kaleidoscopic approach that mines forgotten details of asylum history and offers new readings of classic texts. He brings together six essay-length chapters engaging "cultural life in the nineteenth-century asylum and asylum life in nineteenth-century culture" in the cause of "recording the dialectical tension between the institutional processing of culture and the cultural processing of the institution" (p. 17).

These "snapshots," as Reiss calls his individual explorations, remind one of the occasional motion picture that seeks the soul of a city or the essence of an emotion by collecting short subjects around its theme, but instead of Paris or Love the focus is the asylum. Three pieces look at aspects of life inside the walls and three take the view from without. Woven into all six chapters are considerations of race, creativity, gender, power, and the paradoxical responses of republican society as it sought a means to control personal behavior it deemed a threat to personal liberty. Reiss makes no claim for "thoroughness or even representativeness" and describes some of his cases as "transparently exceptional, strange, or offbeat." Instead, he notes, he followed his nose in seeking subjects that illustrated "individuals caught up in a system that would erase their particularity in order to return them-paradoxically-to a society that valued individual liberties above all" (p. 17).

The most original chapters are those devoted to the inmates themselves. Reiss tracks the career of A. S. M., who became a patient at the New York State Lunatic Asylum at Utica in 1843, less than a year after its founding. Eight years later he became editor of the Opal, a patient-run and -written literary magazine of the sort most scholars have deemed simply tightly controlled "house organs" that reflected little of the patients' true feelings about incarceration. Assuming that central truth, Reiss argues that subtexts abound in such writings, and spins out an extremely wide-ranging and interesting argument that places the Opal within antebellum literary culture as well as within the internal structure of the institution. The author sees in the talented but odd A. S. M.-he writes on asylum walls and eats his own feces-a creative mind who actually feels safer at the asylum than in society and, as Reiss notes, wants "to stay put."