Sensational by Kim Todd (good short books .txt) 📗

Home for Females, putting her plan in motion. The first step was to convince a group of strangers she should be committed. After practicing gazing wide-eyed into the mirror the night before, trying to capture what she imagined to be the vacant stare of the insane, she now adopted a different pose as she wandered down the street, and “assumed the look which maidens wear in pictures entitled ‘Dreaming.’”

In the rest of the city, the New York Tennis Club’s tournament went forward, despite the breeze. Dickens fans looked forward to a dramatic reading of The Pickwick Papers by the author’s son in Brooklyn. In the harbor, Alosia, a ship from Naples with six hundred passengers onboard, had landed, only to be immediately quarantined for cholera. The sick were sent to Swinburne Island, those without symptoms to Hoffman Island: defending against the disease was a constant concern; an epidemic had broken out at Blackwell’s Island not long before.

Illustration for Bly’s article in the World, October 9, 1887

“Nellie Practices Insanity at Home.” World, 9 October 1887 (University of Minnesota Libraries)

Once at the boardinghouse, a plain box with shuttered windows, Bly asked a surly blonde girl of about thirteen for lodging. She gave her name as “Nellie Brown,” disguising herself, but keeping her initials. Inside, women with jobs and those seeking them ate an uninspired lunch of boiled beef and potatoes, served by the same brusque girl, then gathered in the back parlor on rickety furniture. As Bly sat, mulling her campaign, the assistant matron asked what was wrong.

“I can see it in your face. It tells the story of a great trouble.”

“Yes, everything is so sad,” replied Bly. No time like the present to start her ruse. She looked around at the other women knitting, tatting lace, listlessly scolding their children, and declared, “Why, they look horrible to me; just like crazy women. I am so afraid of them.”

From there, she was off, saying she was afraid to go to bed, refusing to take off her gloves, claiming a headache and that she couldn’t remember anything, and asking repeatedly, “Where are my trunks?”

Persuaded to go to her room, Bly worried if she fell asleep, she would awake refreshed, all her work undone, so she forced herself to stay up. She thought back over the events of her life, dwelling on old friends “recalled with a pleasurable thrill.” Then she contemplated the future and whether she would “be able to pass over the river to the goal of my strange ambition.” What would she find at the asylum, and did she have the strength to face what she saw? Were all the reports of mistreatment true? And once inside, would her editors be able to get her out?

Meanwhile, her insanity act gave another woman nightmares. Down the hall, someone woke screaming, saying Bly had been coming after her with a knife. In the morning, increasingly wary of this fraught guest who refused to leave, the assistant matron fetched the police.

Officers escorted Bly to the police station house and from there to the Essex Market Police Court. Rival newspapers, trolling the courthouse for human interest stories, took note of the well-spoken young woman, wearing a black sailor hat with an illusion veil and gloves, alternately calling herself Nellie Brown and Nellie Morena, claiming to have been raised in Cuba and educated in a convent in New Orleans. She had only 33 cents and a notebook in her purse. Her dress might be wrinkled, but it was good enough quality, in both material and cut, to prompt curiosity. “Who Is This Insane Girl?” asked the Sun, describing her as “pretty, well dressed,” and able to speak Spanish.

The presiding judge, the man who would decide her fate, was also taken by her outfit and her speech.

“Poor child,” Justice Duffy said, “she is well dressed, and a lady. Her English is perfect, and I would stake everything on her being a good girl. I am positive she is somebody’s darling.”

The courtroom erupted into giggles. There were two types of woman and, despite playing insane, it was important for Bly, as a prisoner and a reporter, to remain on the right side of the line, the side of chastity and respectability. It was the constant lesson of novels, Sunday school sermons, parental lectures, and etiquette books: a fallen woman was ripe for abuse. Duffy’s words implied that she had slipped to the wrong side of the line, that she was “kept.” Bly stifled a guffaw in her handkerchief, making light of the comment, but maintaining her pure status was integral to her safety. And to her ability to experiment. As another undercover reporter would put it: “A good woman can do without blemish to herself many things that a doubtful or foolish one would blacken herself by trying to do.”

“I mean she is some woman’s darling,” Duffy backtracked. “I am sure some one is searching for her. Poor girl, I will be good to her, for she looks like my sister, who is dead.”

Here Bly’s hewing to the line of “good girl” and Duffy’s compassion for someone he recognized as his class—his symbolic adoption—almost undid all of her effort to get committed. When one of the policemen suggested, “Send her to the island,” the matron of the woman’s home, who had escorted her to court, answered, “Don’t! She is a lady and it would kill her.”

Judge Duffy waffled, asking the matron if she could keep Bly a few more days until the court could find her relatives, but the matron refused, and Duffy reluctantly referred Bly to Bellevue Hospital for more evaluation. From there, if doctors declared her insane, she would be sent to the asylum.

At Bellevue, her status started to fall in earnest. The hospital sat on a bleak street, populated by the destitute, diseased, and mentally ill, those waiting to see the doctors or waiting at the end of East Twenty-sixth Street for the ship to Blackwell’s Island. Some, in despair after