The Lunatics Are Running the Asylum

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” - Edgar Allan Poe 

Mysterious illnesses sweeping through parties, foreboding prophecies uttered by animals, death looming like a specter at a feast, being buried alive- few writers better captured the horror and general macabre of the gothic Victorian period than Edgar Allan Poe. Born in Boston, raised in Richmond following the death of his mother, and educated in England, Poe bounced back and forth between cities, serving in the army and briefly attending the U.S. Military Academy at West Point before settling in Richmond, where his writing career took off. Unfortunately, he struggled with addiction to both gambling and liquor, the latter of which he is famous for, as well as a brain lesion, the symptoms of which, combined with his alcoholism, gave rise to rumors he was a drug addict. He died at the age of forty, found dead in a gutter the same year he became engaged to his childhood sweetheart.

In his work, Edgar Allan Poe explored common Victorian themes such as doppelgängers, which he covered in William Wilson, and buried treasure, as seen in his short story The Gold Bug and his poem Eldorado. He also wrote about once-great aristocratic houses falling to ruin and becoming ghosts of their former selves as seen in his story The Fall of the House of Usher and his poem The Haunted Palace. In short stories such as The Imp of the Perverse and The Angel of The Odd, he focused on addiction, self-destructive streaks, and, ultimately, inner demons.

Poe’s most famous poem, The Raven, describes the narrator’s longing for his lost love, and in his short stories Eleonora, The Oval Portrait, and The Spectacles, he expands upon the theme of tragic romance. His poem Annabel Lee combines this with a maritime setting, which Poe explored in another of his poems, The City in the Sea, as well as stories such as A Descent into the Maelstrom and Manuscript Found in a Bottle. Poe went on to pair both tragic romance and the sea with death in The Oblong Box, and his fixation on the women loved by the narrator dying is further illustrated in Ligeia.

Poe tackled death from every angle. In The Murders in the Rue Morgue, considered one of the first detective stories, C. Auguste Dupin solves the crime by putting himself in the head of the killer, a process he repeats in The Mystery of Morte Roget and The Purloined Letter, serving as the basis for other fictional, world-class detectives such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. Poe wrote The Black Cat, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Cask of Amontillado all from the point of view of murderers, described a prisoner tortured at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition in The Pit and the Pendulum, and even gave death agency in The Masque of the Red Death, in which a plague wanders like a character through a party, killing the guests. In The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar and Some Words With a Mummy, he brought the dead back from the grave to discuss the circumstances of their deaths, and in The Premature Burial, he took the common Victorian fear of being buried alive and used it to craft a harrowing tale of a character trapped, in a way, between life and death.

He delved into the realm of the dead in his poems Spirits of the Dead and Dream-Land, and he further explored supernatural realms in stories such as The Island of the Fay and Silence: A Fable. In his poem The Sleeper, he described a romance that transcends death, and in his poem Lenore, he floated the idea of two lovers separated by death meeting again in another world, but it was his short story Mesmeric Revelation in which he truly tore into the metaphysical, using the practice of hypnosis as a plot device to discuss what happens to us after we die.

Hypnosis and mesmerism to treat certain mental disorders became mainstream during the Victorian era, as did psychiatry in general. With rapid urbanization and industrialization came the exacerbation of mental illness as well as the development of methods to treat these illnesses. The Victorian approach to psychiatry still haunts us today, but it’s worth noting the abuses in asylums of the time were largely kept secret. The secret got out thanks to investigative journalists such as Nelly Bly, who feigned mental illness and got herself institutionalized to experience these abuses firsthand, and the system was reformed as a result. Of course, the system is far from perfect, as is evidenced by America’s rampant homeless problem, the 30% increase in suicides between 2000 - 2018, and the 99% increase in teenagers self-harming during lockdowns.

While the Victorian culture of institutionalizing women for female hysteria was atrocious, so is the culture of validation that has emerged in modern America. Take, for instance, a common argument against putting healthy women on magazine covers: seeing skinny women will make fat women feel ashamed of their bodies, causing anorexia. The problem with this, of course, is that the root cause of anorexia is actually feeling powerless (1, 2), not merely feeling fat. If the fat shaming argument had any truth to it, anorexia would have been most common at the peak of heroin chic in the nineties, but we have more anorexia now than we did then. Validation culture’s fatal flaw is that it creates a sense of powerlessness, essentially love bombing its victims then convincing them they’re useless without validation culture. Telling people that obesity is purely genetic when all of us know it isn’t creates cognitive dissonance. We’re a society suffering from delusion, and while punishing the delusional is not the way to go, neither is affirming them.

Edgar Allan Poe touched on this imbalance when he wrote the short story The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether, which provides the basis for a very famous trope: the lunatics are running the asylum. The story provided the inspiration for the 2014 film Stonehearst Asylum, in which a young doctor arrives at a Victorian sanitarium only to discover the patients have locked the staff in the basement and taken up running the sanitarium themselves. The staff were abusive toward the patients, treating all of them like violent criminals when only a few were, but most of the patients could not fend for themselves, and in the absence of the staff, self-destructed, while the violent patients were able to seize power. I would take that as a metaphor for authoritarianism versus anarchy.

As Poe once said, “the boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”