Fashioning Madness: Clothing in American Women\u27s Asylum Narratives, 1925-1965

Aimee M. Allard\u27s dissertation, Fashioning Madness: Clothing in American Women\u27s Asylum Narratives, 1925-1965, is an analysis of institutional, personal, and handmade apparel in women\u27s asylum memoirs, journals, and autobiographical novels. It traces this distinctly material motif through five narratives published in the United States between 1925 and 1965: Jane Hillyer\u27s Reluctantly Told, Marian King\u27s The Recovery of Myself: A Patient\u27s Experience in a Hospital for Mental Illness, Mary Jane Ward\u27s The Snake Pit, Lara Jefferson\u27s These Are My Sisters: A Journal from the Inside of Insanity, and Sylvia Plath\u27s The Bell Jar. Allard argues that despite pervasive references to institutionally-assigned clothing (straitjackets, day dresses, and numbered nightgowns), patients\u27 personal wardrobes (dresses, pajamas, and accessories they brought with them from home), and self-made garments (clothing repurposed from institutional materials such as bedsheets), few studies address institutionalized women\u27s clothing nor consider its broader implications. Thus, Fashioning Madness seeks to bring scholarly attention to this important thread within American women\u27s asylum narratives of the twentieth century. Drawing from Stacy Alaimo\u27s work in women\u27s material memoirs, Leigh Gilmore\u27s theory of feminist autobiographics, and Joanne Entwistle\u27s reading of fashion as a form of embodied communication, Allard suggests that the clothing worn in the institutional setting became a canvas upon which modern-day madwomen fashioned their identities when other means were denied to them. She traces this self-fashioning back to nineteenth-century writer and asylum reformer Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard, a woman who literally inscribed messages onto clothing, secreting away her words inside of the double underwaists she sewed for her children. A century later, institutionalized women metaphorically inscribed the clothing in their narratives with messages of their own. At a moment when we have yet to destigmatize mental illness, it is especially important to look to the words of women labeled hysterical, disturbed, or hopelessly insane. Transcribing trauma, redressing the body, and refashioning the self, Hillyer, King, Ward, Jefferson, and Plath turned to clothing in order to navigate the unique experience of being institutionalized in America, these women\u27s narratives bringing a critical lens to the everyday practice of dress in the decidedly not-so-everyday setting of the asylum