Lunatic Balls and Revolutionary Feeling: Imaginings on the Edges of Language
As several reports indicate, Charles Dickens — the famed English writer whose name and work are canonized in English Department syllabi across the globe — attempted to have his wife admitted into an insane asylum¹ ² ³. Not only did the author have a personal vested interest in the maintenance of the insane asylum as a space of social and material control, as is evidenced by these letters and reports, but Dickens would also visit multiple insane asylums over the course of his life. Dickens’ visits were occasioned, from what his own writings suggest, by invitation-only events (hosted at the asylums) that would become known as “lunatic balls,” or dances hosted by the institutions ‘for’ patients/inmates, guests, and institutional staff to gather.
Right now, I am less interested in the multiple histories of the insane asylum — though that is important — and more interested in the historic occasion of lunatic balls as methods of control, surveillance, and, discipline. But, I am not only trying to understand the lunatic ball as a methodological tool of invention on the part of the asylum as a network of institutional apparatuses. More importantly, I want to consider the spacetime of the lunatic ball as a polyvalent and sensorial methodology of revolutionary feeling. In other words, while the lunatic ball is undoubtedly a tool for controlling disabled bodyminds, it is also an occasion that forces us to recognize the ways that disabled people exercise agency, freedom, and revolutionary thought-practice-feeling in and adjacent to hyper-controlled spacetimes of the insane asylum. Dancing and moving on the edges of language and in the corners of the spacetime of the lunatic ball, disabled bodyminds resist not only the normalization of ableist violence but the reinstantiation of normal itself.
In “Mobile Bodies: Triggering Bodily Uptake through Movement,” Jennifer Lin LeMesurier encourages us to consider the study of dance and bodily movement as also “a means of studying relationships of rhetorical impact and accessing or amplifying the nodes of potential formed in those relationships” (293). Taking LeMesurier’s essay as one starting point, a node among a milieu of other nodes one might say, this essay seeks to foreground the following questions as central to the study of lunatic balls in relation to anti-ableist revolutionary possibility:
- What is the historical occasion of the lunatic ball?
- How did the asylum structure and its administrators make use of the lunatic ball as an illusory schema or spacetime that sought to distort the realities seemingly contained within the (permeable) walls of the asylum?
- To what extent can the lunatic ball, as both a spacetime of subjugation and revolutionary feeling, contextualize present and ongoing struggles for disability justice?
The Historical Occasion of the Lunatic Ball
What is the historical occasion of the lunatic ball? Before I attempt to answer this question (if answers are possible), I want to describe the question. Embedded within the question itself is another question: what brought about the need or (more specifically) the desire for the lunatic ball as an event in the present?
In Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault attempts a reading of the lunatic ball that takes place at what is widely known as “The Retreat,” a site of “moral treatment” founded by William Tuke in 1796 in York (England). For Foucault, “The asylum no longer punished the madman’s guilt…but it did more, it organized that guilt; it organized it for the madman as a consciousness of himself, and as a non-reciprocal relation to the keeper; it organized it for the man of reason as an awareness of the Other, a therapeutic intervention in the madman’s existence” (247). The lunatic ball and its historical occasion mark a certain double-bind of madness and/as psychiatry: the illusory publicity of the performance alongside and knotted-up in the public “privacy” secured by the medicalization of confinement. The lunatic ball was at the center of the insane asylum’s function as interlocutor — the medicalization of confinement and the confinement of medicalization. The privatization of punishment was concealed by the ‘publicity’ of the event. Foucault continues:
“There were social occasions in the English manner, where everyone was obliged to imitate all the formal requirements of social existence; nothing else circulated except the observation that would spy out any incongruity, any disorder, any awkwardness where madness might betray itself. The directors and the staff of the Retreat thus regularly invited several patients to ‘tea-parties’…Curiously, this rite is not one of intimacy, of dialogue, of mutual aquaintance; it is the organization around the madman of a world where everything would be like and near him, but in which he himself would remain a stranger…” (249)
“Incessantly cast in this empty role of unknown visitor, and challenged in everything that can be known about him, drawn to the surface of himself by a social personality silently imposed by observation, by form and mask, the madman is obliged to objectify himself in the eyes of reason as the perfect stranger, that is, as the man whose strangeness does not reveal itself…” (249–250).
In other words, the lunatic ball was — at least — a compulsory performance of Otherness, but the work of the performance (and it is a performance) does not end with the Othering of the Other. Foucault analyzes Pinel’s asylum as functioning “by three principal means” (260):
One: Silence: “Delivered from his chains, he is now chained, by silence, to transgression and to shame” (261).
Two: Recognition by Mirror: “It is entirely masked, on the contrary, in the subject, which becomes immediate truth and absolute judge: the exalted sovereignty that denounces the others’ false sovereignty dispossesses them and thus confirms itself in the unfailing plentitude of presumption” (263).
Three: Perpetual Judgement: “By this play of mirrors, as by silence, madness is ceaselessly called upon to judge itself…To be efficacious, this judgement must be redoubtable in aspect; all the iconographic apanage of the judge and the executioners must be present in the mind of the madman, so that he understand what universe of judgement he now belongs to. The décor of justice, in all its terror and implacability, will thus be part of the treatment” (265).
More important than the interplay of these three principles of (dis)organization, I contend, is the effect of their continuous circulation: the medicalization of confinement and the confinement of medicalization. It is through the interplay of silence, perpetual judgement, and non-reciprocal recognition that the archival logics of the insane asylum, and the lunatic ball itself, sustain themselves. In other words, to cite Foucault again, “But within the asylum itself, the doctor takes a preponderant place, insofar as he converts it into a medical space” (270). When confinement was medicalized, there was an archival logic prescribed onto it. In the U.S., as one example, that meant “inmate records” were transformed into “medical records.” By medicalizing confinement, the archival logic of the insane asylum guaranteed secrecy under the veil of medical privacy.
The records of lunatic balls that are widely accessible are mainly through reflections published in historical periodicals and newspapers. Likewise, researchers of insane asylums are often limited in their access to records altogether — in many instances, the only sources of information related to the asylum are medical casebooks and official, state-sanctioned or institutionally-sanctioned archives. In other words, most researchers of the insane asylum utilize official records maintained by asylum administration and superintendents to historicize the movements and contours of its development. The following excerpts are taken from historical periodicals that serve(d) as reflections of the authors’ experiences after having attended (usually by invite only) lunatic balls:
“At the prescribed time the music ceased, the dancers resumed their seats, and the almost painful silence recurred.”⁵
“In a few minutes the room was untenanted, and we left it with feelings far less sad than those with which we entered it; for we had seen how much can be done under judicious management, if not always to cure, to alleviate the sufferings of the insane.”⁶
“The same oppressive silence — except when the publican complained, in tones of the bitterest satire, against one of the keepers, or (said the publican) ‘attendant, as I suppose I must call him.’”⁷
“the suspicious patient with a countenance of gloom, wandering round and round strangers, furtively eyeing them behind from head to foot, and not indisposed to resent their intrusion.”⁸
“In the centre of the room all was gravity and decorum, but the merriest dances went on in the corners.”⁹
“The warder, mistaking the character of the hug, hastened to the rescue, and I was at ease.”¹⁰
“If they can be cured, here is their best chance. If not — well, there were the little dead-house and the quiet cemetery lying out in the moonlight, waiting for them when, as poor maddened Edgar Allen Poe wrote, the ‘fever called living,’ should be ‘over at last.’”¹¹
“And the question which would haunt me all the way home was, which are the sane people, and which the lunatics?”¹²
“Melton now understood the situation. This girl did not know that she was in an asylum. They had told her that she was a visitor…Melton was rather disappointed. He had wanted to witness something ‘uncanny.’”¹³
“On returning to my home, I could not but reflect on the moral of what I had seen; if I mistake not, herein lies a germ, from which will spring results even brighter than the abolition of instrumental restraint and of solitary confinement — vast as these advances are toward a thorough reform in our lunatic asylums.”¹⁴
“One sees him presently sitting in a corner of the blue-room with his hands clasped with a despairing grip staring at the floor wildly.”¹⁵
“When the pauses in the music oblige him to converse with his partner, he relapses into a state of intense melancholy; but as soon as the next bars are played, he is himself again. The music seems to act upon him like some wild intoxicating draught.”¹⁶
“Thank Heaven, this dreadful creature is only to be met with occasionally…And it is in such a scene as this that I always feel the greatest pity for the poor tame lunatic, with his wasted energies, his sad stupidity, his miserable orgies.”¹⁷
We can apply Foucault’s understanding of the principles which organized Pinel’s asylum at play in these reflections. The writers reflect on the dominant presence of silence in relation to the music and the social scene. They consistently record their observations of the Othered Others whose bodily movements and affective charges seem to have left some sort of trace. And, more importantly, they make use of the scene in relation to their (mis)understandings of it to characterize the universal character of the insane asylum. These kinds of publications are at the nexus of the discursive circulation of images related to the insane asylum and their “social” events. “We know the images,” Foucault writes in the first sentence of his chapter dedicated partially to the lunatic ball (1988, 241). Foucault explicitly states that “We must therefore re-evaluate the meanings assigned to Tuke’s work: liberation of the insane, abolition of constraint, constitution of a human milieu — these are only justifications” (247). At the center of this illusory schema — one that only seemingly replaces (the image of) constraint with compulsory and heavily policed figures of dancing flesh and bodily (un)freedom — is the lunatic ball. While there is not a singular historical occasion that constitutes the meanings of the lunatic ball, this illusory schema undoubtedly gives such an occasion its steam.
“For clinical experience to become possible as a form of knowledge, a reorganization of the hospital field, a new definition of the status of the patient in society, and the establishment of a certain relationship between public assistance and medical experience, between help and knowledge, became necessary; the patient has to be enveloped in a collective, homogenous space.” Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, p. 196
The Lunatic Ball as Illusory Schema
How did the asylum structure and its administrators make use of the lunatic ball as an illusory schema or spacetime that sought to distort the realities seemingly contained within the (permeable) walls of the asylum?
In “Quotidian Madness: Time, Management, and Asylums in Colonial North India, c. 1850–1947,” Shilpi Rajpal urges us to reconsider the supposedly impenetrable walls of the asylum. They ask, “How did the ‘mad’ live their everyday lives in these alienating spaces? What were the patterns of everyday resistance or acceptance?” (208) Like many historians of insane asylums, Rajpal reminds us that the field of occupational therapy, for instance, was founded upon the institution of the asylum and asylum medicine:
“The moral management system regarded work as being essential for restoring sanity. The occupational therapist, too, relied heavily on work ethic. Occupational therapy was more, in a way, a product of the war economy. Moral therapy structured cure around the notion of time and work.” (214)
So, if the insane asylum structure facilitated a moral management technique of disabled and Mad bodyminds, to what extent is the notion of cure, work, and temporality embedded within lunatic balls themselves? Presented as modes of recreation, lunatic balls were not merely forms of entertainment — as is usually the image portrayed by dominant discourse or mainstream depictions — but were themselves techniques of compulsory participation projected onto and through the bodies of disabled, neurodivergent, and Mad people. In Rajpal’s words, “The asylum walls were more porous than they have been imagined to be” (234). How can historians and teacher-researchers come to understand the lunatic ball as a simultaneously revolutionary and oppressive spacetime of (compulsory) bodily movement and hegemonic spatialization? One possibility I will suggest is an actively anti-ableist and strategic disorientation of the archival logics⁴ that govern the discursive deployment and re-presentation of the insane asylum, its historical reconfigurations, and the spacetime of the lunatic ball.
In order to attempt a definition of “anti-ableism” or “anti-ableist praxis,” I want to first emphasize Talila Lewis’s important working definition of ableism. Lewis reorients the scope of ableism away from static and essentialist notions of disability that tend to privilege white disabled bodyminds and toward a capacious understanding of ableism as necessarily co-constituted by and through anti-Black violence, eugenics, colonialism, and capitalism. Lewis’s definition works alongside other approaches toward disability and ableism, particularly Sami Schalk’s explanation of disability as methodology. In Schalk’s words, “we can understand critical disability studies as a method, an approach, a theoretical framework and perspective — not (exclusively) a study of disabled people. One can study disabled people and not be doing critical disability studies and one can be doing critical disability studies and not be directly studying disabled people” (2017).
Anti-ableism is a praxis (anti-ableist) that must be consistently and constantly reshaped for specific practices and particular contexts. This is not to say that anti-ableism is merely “all relative.” Rather, it is to suggest that in order to practice an anti-ableist methodology, we must necessarily be shape-shifters alongside ableism. Ableism is a shape-shifting ideological project and anti-ableist modes of practice must follow its contours wherever they may lead.
More specifically, an anti-ableist archival practice entails — at least in part — an intentional approach to the pre-non/discursive (re)constructions of “ability,” normative thought-practice-feeling, and — ultimately — what Sylvia Wynter refers to as genres of human being. These kinds of praxis also entail a rebellious archival methodology that simultaneously makes use of colonial, state-sanctioned, and popular media source materials while also remaining fundamentally opposed to the singularity of such materials. In other words, to cite José Esteban Muñoz, “The archives is a fiction. Nobody knows that better than queers — people who have had to cope with the fiction of a socially prescribed straightness. Queers make up genealogies and worlds. So let us write it down” (2009 121). To put this otherwise (always otherwise), an anti-ableist practice of archival disorientation emphasizes both the exposure/critique of archival fictions and the creation/generation of new worlds and new archival spacetime configurations.
In an interview with Thora Siemsen, Saidiya Hartman explains her processes of working with archives. In particular, Hartman reflects that “I think of my work as bridging theory and narrative. I am very committed to a storied articulation of ideas, but working with concepts as building blocks enables me to think about situation and character as well as my own key terms” (2018). Hartman’s work overwhelmingly focuses on the afterlives of slavery in relation to Black women’s political, intellectual, cultural, and intergenerational modes of everyday life. She asks, “There’s another way in which the afterlife of slavery produces a certain set of aesthetic and intellectual, conceptual challenges, and I think one of those for me is around temporality, and how do we narrate time?” (2018) While I will be writing in more detail on the relations between and with/in plantation “logics” of chattel slavery and insane asylums in later pieces, I do want to emphasize the inextricable ties between the two. Most previous scholarship on insane asylums and their broader influences has yet to acknowledge the specificity of the plantation and its articulations that reverberate in and through the insane asylum as both a racialized and violently ableist spacetime configuration.
All of this is to say that any archival approach to the lunatic ball must necessarily offer a capacious (re)reading of the archival record(s). Such an approach must simultaneously resist the official, state-sanctioned and popularly circulated record and create new modes of belonging in and alongside the archives. This might mean storying possibilities that may have never made it onto the page or the description. This might also mean looking and feeling for spacetimes of uncertainty in the records we do have access to.
Revolutionary Feeling at the Edges of Language
To what extent can the lunatic ball, as both a spacetime of subjugation and revolutionary feeling, contextualize present and ongoing struggles for disability justice?
In “Clinically Significant Disturbance: On Theorists Who Theorize Theory of Mind,” M. Remi Yergeau writes on the relation between autistic bodyminds, the psych ward, and the oppressive structures of curative medicine that the psych ward — in conjunction with the university — maintain within and through bodyminds of disabled, Mad, and neurodivergent people. It is worth citing Yergeau’s essay in-depth and in pieces:
“As I focus on this gulf, this vastness, my lack — I am drawn to the movements of my body and the office space in which I currently dwell.”
“Do I recount these things? I ask this question on two levels. First, which to recount? And second, can I actually recount, can I actually remember and reliably relay these things to you, my reader?…Can she narrate her own life? Where is the body in theory of mind?”
“Autistic being is predicated on un-being. In order to claim an emotion, we need to have it empirically validated.”
“During my second week as a new faculty member, I was involuntarily committed to the psych ward at the university hospital…I recently dreamed that I was forced into a special education class for assistant professors, my three-inch Autistic Pride button affixed to my backpack, bloodstained and visible. This dream was a waking dream, an unrestful dream, a dream filled with groans and body twitches. The button was how I knew I had a body; the wakefulness was how I knew I had a voice. But that was probably just my autism talking.”
As autistic, neurodivergent, and Mad people continue to speak back to the institutionalization of their/our bodyminds, the histories of psychology and psychiatry dissolve. Not only does Yergeau’s narrative — cited above and alongside so many other narratives— open up multiple and entangled ruptures with/in histories of psychiatric discourse, but their book Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness questions the very presumption of humanness as outside the sphere of autistic being. Helen Rottier’s work on autism and epistemology is crucial in these interventions as well.
Footnotes
- Thulin, Lila. (22 Feb 2019). “Trove of Letters Reveal Charles Dickens Tried to Lock His Wife Away in an Asylum.” Smithsonian Magazine.
- Jack, Ian. (23 Feb 2019). “Charles Dickens Was A Ruthless Victorian Husband. Like my Great-Grandfather.” The Guardian.
- Bowen, John. (20 Feb 2019). “Letters reveal Charles Dickens tried to place his wife in an asylum.” University of York.
- See Brilmyer, Gracen. “Archival Assemblages: Applying Disability Studies’ Political/Relational Model to Archival Description.” Archival Science, vol. 18, 2018, pp. 95–118.
- p. 354. Chambers, William and Robert Chambers. “A Ball at a Lunatic Asylum.” Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, no. 101, 6. Dec. 1845, pp. 353–355.
- p. 355.
- p. 387. Dickens, Charles. “A Curious Dance Around a Curious Tree.” Household Words: A Weekly Journal, vol. 4, no. 95, 17 Jan. 1852, pp. 385–389.
- p. 387.
- p. 351. Davies, Charles Maurice. “A Lunatic Ball.” All the Year Round: A Weekly Journal, vol. 9, 1873, pp. 349–352.
- p. 350.
- p. 351.
- p. 352.
- p. 6. “Our Story Teller: A Lunatic Ball.” Maine Farmer, 22 Oct. 1896, p. 6.
- p. 276. A Convert. “Balls in Lunatic Asylums.” The Lancet, vol. 37, no. 951, 1841, p. 276.
- p. 111. Lewis, W.H. “Tame Lunatics.” Belgravia: A London Magazine, July 1869, pp. 109–113.
- p. 112.
- p. 113.
References
Lewis, Talila A. “Ableism 2020: An Updated Definition.” T.L.’s Blog, 25 January 2020.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York University Press, 2009.
Rajpal, Shilpi. “Quotidian Madness: Time, Management, and Asylums in Colonial North India, c. 1850–1947.” Studies in History, vol. 31, no. 2, 2015, pp. 206–234.
Schalk, Sami. “Critical Disability Studies as Methodology.” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, vol. 6, no. 1, 2017.
Yergeau, M. Remi. “Clinically Significant Disturbance: On Theorists Who Theorize Theory of Mind.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 4, 2013.
