The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

by Emilie Autumn

I will not cry.

‘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!’

Men own a great deal if stock in it. Of course.

tenebrous

Dark, shadowy or obscure.

And, despite my social criticisms of the general approach toward the mentally ill, I do pity the friends of the severely depressed.

coruscating

Flashing, sparkling. A coruscating kaleidoscope of color

fleam,

A handheld object used for bloodletting.

Well, I only find letters from a parallel universe waiting for me in my notebook every morning—a universe that is becoming ever more indiscernible from my own.

What all writing creates?

Oh, and I’m also a girl, which is never a plus in any situation. Children are children; lunatics are children; women are children. This is, after all, why markets and pharmacies stock the feminine products right next to the baby products. Think I’m reading too much into this? Well, fuck you.

degringolade,

As I begged for gentleness in the name of all that was merciful, he explained to me quite calmly that childbirth is painful only because God intended it should be so as a punishment to all women (the falling of Eve and such), and so, obviously, pain connected with any female part related to the process of childbirth, which would include all of them, should be endured to its fullest, with no attempt made towards its alleviation in any way.

was all I could do to stop myself telling the good Doctor that, whilst women may indeed have evolved from monkeys, men have not evolved at all.

Yet, by gaining a thing I am afraid to be deprived of, have I not lost this consolation? Perhaps, then, there is always more to lose, no matter how little one has to begin with.

How much of the world might be connected thus? What secret alliances might be made right under the noses of an unsuspecting public?

Sex trafficking.

Obsessively devoted to their cause, the medical community had first convinced the county heads, and their church officials, that they must increase their vigilance in the watch for any lunatics lying hidden in their boroughs; in turn, the counties and churches instructed their flocks, commoners and gentry alike, to observe their fellow citizens for any sign of madness—any small deviance from the social norm. Ripe for a panic, the public has complied.

fearful of being watched as they are watching others.

and those who point their self-righteous fingers at their neighbors never regret their hasty act, for they never learn the true consequence of what they have done.

It is frighteningly commonplace for families to accuse their own, for they have been assured that any hope of

rehabilitation lay entirely in early detection, and remo...

Juvenile imprisonment.

country’s insane asylums have eagerly taken advantage of the public’s predilection towards fear, and are only too glad to accept the nominal sum they have been offered by our government for each new patient accepted into their care. Naturally, this financial incentive encourages many less-than-upstanding superintendents to commit a greater number of patients than they can reasonably house, and many more than they can even pretend to care for.

Metaphor for prisons. Especially private for-profit prisons. A cautionary statemnt. And Pueblo--certainly as it was when I visited it.

we too are crowded with the influx of new inmates, and this only increases the neglect, the violence, and the unsanitary conditions for all.

There must be a public outcry against it; somehow, the people must know. Something must change.

All they need do is open their eyes, and we will be free.

Why do I get the feeling that they are only keeping me here to find out what happens next?

Would this also be true of parole boards?

Yet, when I think of my fellow inmates, my sisters, those I love and would indeed die for, I feel my heart beating with a strength it should not, by all medical reasoning, be capable of.

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

then, horror . . . horror such as I can never describe . . . several more bodies were piled nearby, naked, one on top of the other. Stockings removed, the girl upon the table was tossed onto this pile like nothing more than a piece of discarded meat thrown out by the kitchen staff. I felt faint, but I could not look away. The bodies were fresh, as though they had been alive only an hour before; their

Holocaust-- the many different Holocausts. The medical experiments etc. are all reminiscent of the Holocaust. Extended metaphor for the inhumanity.

killing the sluts before tossing them into the furnace,

say, not to mention a waste of those precious chemicals you spend every penny on.

cyanide.’

‘I can kill them . . . I can cure them . . . but I cannot understand them.’

That door opens into a chamber fitted with heating elements—elements that can reach a temperature hot enough to turn a horse to a pile of ash in less time than it takes to brew a cup of tea.’ Dr. Stockill’s hand still grasped Veronica’s soft white neck. ‘In one, brief moment, I am going to put you into that chamber.’

even more frighteningly, that we were organized.

saw the brands upon our arms.

The rooftops were shaking, our beautiful scenery crashing down about us. All stood motionless and listened as a deep, yawning groan rose from the very depths of the building we stood upon. This unearthly noise was immediately followed by the sound of crumbling brick and stone. The Asylum was collapsing.

The Fall of the House of Usher.

It had always been a façade—outwardly grand, but, inside, merely mistake built

upon mistake, flaw upon flaw upon flaw .

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 . . .’

The Titanic

Can I survive this place without Emily? Without all of them?

We cant survive without those from the past who paved the way. But Emilie is in an institution--the work isnt finished.

I don’t think I can do it. I don’t even think I want to do it.

“No! I don’t want any more of your fucking drugs, and I don’t want to fucking calm down. I want you to go in there right now and wake everybody up and find out who took it!”

!!!!

like Anne Boleyn’s neck,

It was strange how it all started . . . I was overcome by a sudden and intense compulsion to take a knife to myself. I had never before felt this, nor had I ever imagined feeling it. It came from within me—from some dark, primeval place. No one put the idea into my head. No one told me how it worked. I had never read about it. There was no provocation. It was all me.

Once the desire had come into me, I could not get the idea out of my mind.

I needed a fix of something I hadn’t even tried yet.

I had just embarked upon a path I could never turn back from—a path that would change others’ perception of me, as well as my perception of myself.

That first slice was the severing of my already fraying bonds to those around me.

I was br...

I soon learned that I would spend my life defending myself instead.

It means that I have that within me that can also destroy me.

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?