Month: October 2020

Through the process of drafting a couple of the parts of my ADE project, I’ve slowly started to better visualize what it will actually look like and how each piece with be structured. I think that my focus has slightly shifted since I began working on the project, so I’ll definitely have to review and edit each individual annotation to make sure they all fit together and are cohesive with my thesis. I also feel that some of my arguments in the annotations haven’t been the most coherent, as I wasn’t really thinking about anyone else reading them while they were still drafts. Supporting my points with strong, clear evidence is something I need to work on before each annotation gets published on my ePortfolio site.

I will also need to edit my earlier annotations because, as I’ve gotten further into the project, I’ve continued to learn more about the context surrounding Ten Days in a Mad-House. Through some of our class readings, I’ve learned about some of the ways mental illness was treated at the time, which may apply to Nellie as an “insane” woman in an asylum. I still have more to learn about gender roles in the 19th century, but hopefully I’ll be able to get some more information from my secondary sources and other research.

For this reflection blog post, I’d like to reflect on how the work I’ve done in this class has aided me in learning one of the WGST learning outcomes, specifically 8: Recognize the importance of gender to social and cultural issues, past and present. Most of the works we’ve read so far have focused on women’s experiences of mental illness, or the ways in which mental illness is seen to feminize men. Before taking this class, I hadn’t realized the extent to which a lot of mental health issues are seen as “feminine” or a failure of masculinity, both in the past and present. Today, women are often seen as more emotional than men, while simultaneously those emotions are dismissed as unimportant (historically through the labelling of hysteria, and claiming women are “crazy” or having PMS in the modern day). It’s both fascinating and saddening that this treatment has been going on, in one form or another, for over 200 years. The way that men with PTSD used to be seen as feminine can also be directly connected to the way that public displays of emotion in men is seen as “unmanly” in the modern day.