Ten Day's In A Madhouse Summary

“I have watched patients stand and gaze longingly toward the city they in all likelihood will never enter again. It means liberty and life; it seems so near, and yet heaven is not further from hell,” quoted by Nellie Bly in her work Ten Day’s in a Madhouse. Bly’s work was a reflecting piece towards the treatment of the mentally ill in mental hospitals, which was a place to help their illness not make it worse. This work can be analyzed from a reader’s point of view of Marxism and New Historicism theories. The structure of American society towards women was as if it were against them from the beginning. Women had almost no rights and were merely a decoration for their husbands can wave around or a walking incubator for the next generation of misogynists. These problems were reflected in Bly’s work in Ten Day’s in a Madhouse. During the time Bly was reporting in Blackwell’s Asylum, women’s suffrage was going on but it was not as strong or had that much recognition. …show more content…
She unveiled the horrors of public mental institutions and the unfair treatment to the middle and poor classes. Revealing that women do not have a voice or a choice if they are committed to an insane asylum whether they are truly insane is not important to the doctors of the mental institution. If a women’s husband, father, or any male figure were to grow annoyed or could not control their female he could simply have her committed. One patient’s reason to being committed into the asylum was, “They said her name is Sarah Fishbaum, and that her husband put her in the asylum because she had a fondness for other men than him” (108). Sarah was as sane as any other person in the world but just because she was crazy about men other than her husband she was sent to the asylum. Through the dreadful ten days Bly pulled through and wrote a significant book on the troubling treatment in the Blackwell