Previous annotations have explained that the environment of a mental hospital or asylum, and in general the categorization of women’s mental health often was a tool to enforce normative gendered behavior during the 18th and 19 centuries. However, this corrective attitude also extended towards “unwanted” behavior that was related to ethnic background, culture, or language. Briefly while attempting to convince a court judge and police officer that she was insane, Nellie Bly pretended to be from Cuba and spoke Spanish. However, “Although she passed as an ethnic Other only briefly–once incarcerated, she dropped the pretense and spoke in her obviously American English–she took advantage of the ease with which cultural difference could be encoded as pathological difference.” (Lutes). While not a perfect analog, as Germans would not be considered an ethnic Other, this mirrors an instance while in the Women’s Asylum, in which another patient can’t communicate with hospital staff, as she does not speak any English. “Thus was Mrs. Louise Schanz consigned to the asylum without a chance of making herself understood. Can such carelessness be excused, I wonder, when it is so easy to get an interpreter? If the confinement was but for a few days one might question the necessity. But here was a woman taken without her own consent from a free world to an asylum and there given no chance to prove her sanity.” In a way, her inability to speak English is a non-normative behavior in a country that emphasizes it over all other languages. This event seems to take place as Mrs. Schanz is just entering the asylum, but as she continues to live there, and her need for an interpreter is continually denied, she will likely have to slowly learn English in order to communicate with any of the staff or other patients.