The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

by Emilie Autumn

And, thus, this is now the way I live my life: out in the open, in the middle of everything, because the middle of the street is actually the safest place to walk.

Bring it on. Bring on the cure. Bring on the fucking happy. I’m committed.

I am shamelessly appealing to the guard’s workload, assuming that he wouldn’t want to be in here restraining yet another lunatic if he didn’t have to, but, upon examining his physique, I determine that restraining lunatics is probably what he was bred for.

And what’s more criminal? Taking all of your sleeping pills at once, or sending a suicidal girl to a place like this?

Seeing that none of my charms could ever hope to penetrate this soulless shell of a woman no doubt hardened by years of attending to violent or, worse, annoying patients, I surrender.

I imagine that this is what Ophelia looked like—sane but crazy, crazy but sane.

Snatching the crayon from her hand before she can change her mind, I tell her it’s perfect. And it is. Because I’m writing all of this down in the margins of my book about the plague, and everyone knows . . . EVERYONE KNOWS . . . that you can’t erase crayon.

It’s creepy, and it implies that the only thing I’m really here for is a bed, that the bed is the treatment, that I am here to lie down and stay down like a lobotomized fucking invalid, and I’m not liking this one bit.

“I can’t quite process this,” I say, unable to give up until I either get my way or receive an answer that I can understand. “I didn’t hurt anyone but myself, which, as far as I’m concerned, is my right to do, but, see, now that I’ve said that, you’ll probably add more days onto my sentence, right?"

Every hour (I’m counting seconds to count minutes to count . . . ), a new doctor will enter my room and ask me if I’m still feeling like “hurting myself.” I can’t take this question seriously anymore.

“What?” he asked, looking almost offended. “Oh, nothing, just your name, in a place like this . . . it’s right out of a movie . . . I’m sorry, I’ve just realized that I’m in the insane asylum and everything that isn’t funny at all suddenly is. Like at weddings and funerals, you know?”

Upon my next supervised trip to the bathroom, I study myself in the tiny, cracked mirror in the hope of spotting some feature—something in my physical appearance—that could be remotely alluring, so that I can wipe it out. I find nothing.

“I do have a private practice, and I could possibly find some time for you, outside of this hospital. Let me help you, Emilie. Let me fix you.”

It looks like a prison, it smells like a prison, and it all makes sense: Attempted suicide is attempted murder. I committed a crime. And I am here to be punished.

I have crawled through the very depths of hell on my fucking knees, enduring horrors which I don’t even dare write upon this page; I have suffered through so much that it had become unbearable, and, finally, as a simple act of mercy, I attempted to take my own life, a choice I sincerely regret the failure of. Now, I endure the judgment and the stigma that follows, and will continue to follow me for the rest of my days upon this earth.

We inmates creep from every corner of the building, some of us looking as though we are walking to our deaths, others looking too far-gone to know the difference.

“How dare you sit down without asking! Get away, get away, GET AWAY!!!” Bingo. Here sits a woman who has obviously been sexually traumatized,

Just as I think I’ve escaped unnoticed, the cafeteria lady mispronounces my name and slams a bright orange tray down upon the metal shelf. On said tray is a soggy paper plate piled with microwaved spaghetti to be eaten with—get this—a plastic spoon. Have you ever tried eating spaghetti with a plastic spoon? If you weren’t crazy before, you will be after that.

The staff secures the doors from the outside during the night. I suppose that, snug in their bulletproof sanctuary, they don’t want to be bothered, so they leave us locked up to fend for ourselves. They can then take an extended coffee and cigarette break, knowing that we’re not going anywhere. I wonder if they can hear us scream? I hope they can. I hope they can. I hope they care.

Why am I still here? My seventy-two hours were up days ago. I’ve been told that I am to wait for something, though what that means exactly I do not know. Treatment, I suppose, someone to come and “counsel” me, to teach me some life techniques I can use to try and be happier. Perhaps the staff is waiting for me to look non-suicidal. Perhaps they are waiting for me to gain weight. Perhaps they are actually waiting for me to start acting crazy, because surely I couldn’t recover until I could admit that I was nuts in the first place, which, incidentally, I do—I just don’t act it out as the staff expects me to.

I do not believe that, in itself alone, attempting suicide proves anything at all about your mental state, save that, upon weighing the merits of living and dying, you found that one outweighed the other.

But as marked as the effect of my music upon this varied audience, the effect upon my self was thrice as exquisite, for to share the fruit of my fingers was to share a bit of my small soul and eased a pain I carried with me always—the pain of a heart born into this world ready stocked with more love than I imagined I would ever be allowed to give.

‘I believe that suicide is most often committed in self-defense, Doctor.’

The S.S.S. is a small and secret consortium consisting of the inmates of intellect, and existing solely for the purpose of keeping each other alive, for we all know that once we lose our wits we will begin to die.

Each inmate poured a handful of dirt into the miniature grave, and the weeds were laid on top. Within only a few days of the funeral, a patch of dandelions had grown up over the spot, and, every Sunday since, we pick them and make our futile wishes as we blow the downy fluff into the air and watch it float on, past the fence and far away to where we will never go.

(isn’t it funny, the way we immediately leap to this conclusion each time we witness something unusual . . . I could be dreaming, we think, I must be dreaming, and yet we are never dreaming, and we never learn).

Some are born mad, some achieve madness, and some have madness thrust upon ‘em.

‘Why, the disease of Ophelia is the disease of the melancholy, mad, and female, and we, my dear Stockill, own a great deal of stock in it!’

“I’m just really depressed, and I can’t function anymore. I can’t do anything, and I can’t make this depression go away.” “Did anything happen to trigger your depression?” “No, nothing. I just . . . got sad. I can’t go back home because I’ll just lie in bed all day and cry. Nothing has helped, and the doctors don’t know what else to do. I want to get the treatment—people say I don’t want to get better, but I really do. I wasn’t always like this, you know. I actually used to be a really happy person. I don’t want to be this way, but I’m still really scared. I’ve read all these books about ETC, but they haven’t made me feel any better. Oh god, I am so scared . . .”

Chloe and I didn’t sleep that night. We talked about everything from what kind of music I made to the Hollywood goth clubs that she used to frequent when she had been happy. I told her that I always ended up dancing on a table, and she told me that she always ended up taking off her shirt. At four o’clock, the nurses came. Chloe got out of bed, and so did I. She was shaking. I held her tightly and told her that I loved her. She told me she loved me too. Then, Chloe switched off; she put her head down, went limp, and let the nurses fold her into the wheelchair they had brought to take her away. Once Chloe was gone, I tore the corner of the previous day’s Asylum letter into the shape of a heart. Upon the heart, I wrote Chloe a note. I told her that, soon, when she got out of here, she was to go directly to the club we had talked about. There, I wrote, she would find me dancing on a table, and she’d better be prepared to take her shirt off. I never saw Chloe again.

In flagrant contrast, Dr. Lymer delights in watching our blood flow—he makes no secret of it. In the demeanor of the visiting doctors, there is always a relish with which they perform their operations that is monstrous, yes, but there is something right in that: A mad man does a mad thing and he madly enjoys it.

I have never seen him show a speck of sorrow, nor of joy. I cannot read him, and this is what frightens me.

It is now three weeks since we were honoured by the presence of one Dr. Ramage, whose defining characteristics include a crossed eye, a weak chin, and a religious fanaticism bordering on mania.

degringolade

I should add that I have been warned of Dr. Ramage’s intention to return next month, and that, should he find me still melancholy (as though I could exist in any other state), he will be forced to conclude that the cause of my insanity was not in fact my uterus (too late), but is instead a demon that, due to my inherent female weakness, has taken up residence in my bloodstream. In that scenario, the cure could only be arrived at by thrice daily bleedings and a religious ceremony performed for the purpose of exorcising the devil.

whilst women may indeed have evolved from monkeys, men have not evolved at all.

My name is simply W14A. Veronica is W14B, and the Captain, who has been housed in our cell since returning from Quarantine, is W14C. And, lest we should ever forget, the surgeon’s assistants have permanently branded our upper right arms with these classifying codes by means of a simple needle and black ink. With hundreds of inmates now tattooed like criminals, we are easy to identify, and no one need bother us with a proper name ever again. People have names, and we are not people. We are bodies. Numbered parts. Nothing more.

I should have felt pain, but everything has become pain to me, and thus little is worthy of note. I should also have felt shame, or at least indignity, but dignity is dead, and shame implies the loss of a thing I have not had for some time.

He is just like the Count, I thought. They are of the same breed—our disdain is wasted upon men such as these. They thrive upon it, and our disgust is the sauce they savour it with. I will show him nothing, do what he will.

‘You,’ he said, ‘are a terribly real thing in a terribly false world, and that, I believe, is why you are in so much pain.’

‘It matters not why you should care, my Lady, for care you do, whether you choose to admit it or not.’

There is a Quiet Room just off the hallway—a padded cell, soundproof, with a tiny, letterbox window, like in the movies. When it is empty, I slip inside and shut the door behind me. I sit, facing the wall, and I know that I don’t belong here yet. But, in a week, I will. For we do not go to the asylum to be cured. We go to the asylum to die. This is not the bitter voice of one solitary crazy girl. This is the truth.

If she could not slip back into her delusions, I thought I should die. Too much of reality. Too much of truth. I wanted none of it.

If Veronica was mad, her madness was a gift to us that made us less so.

I stared as hundreds of inmates, in an act of astonishing acceptance, lined themselves up along the roof’s edge and began to jump—some alone, many holding hands, their skirts billowing about them, soft curls flying every which where through a sparkling midnight sky. It was breathtaking. Suicide, I thought, is a cold, ugly, desperate thing, and, when it happens, it is always lonely. Suicide is not the poetic act that our painters portray. But the truth is that, in this moment alone, it was.

The last of the inmates took their places upon the ledge, and we all joined hands. I called out to them for the last time. ‘Goodnight, sweet Ladies, goodnight . . .’ And then, we jumped.

What right have I, I thought, and still do think, to be depressed when there are people in this world who suffer so much worse in their lives than I?

How is it that it is considered perfectly acceptable that I am harmed by endless external attacks, in infinite ways—from abuse, from rape, from this patriarchal culture in which females are spiritually slaughtered the moment they are ripped from the fucking womb, from the mundane cruelties of life that affect us all—and yet I have no right to harm, even superficially, myself?

It does seem a bit backwards to me that I must treat myself as a precious object when nobody else does.

But I am not allowed to forgive myself, even if I wanted to. I am not allowed to forgive myself, because no one will forgive me.