Category: Reflection Blogs

I don’t have much left to say concerning how the semester went, so I want to just talk about the topics given for this final reflection. During last class, we briefly discussed why it is important to read literature about mental illness. One of the points brought up by my classmates that I really agreed with was that writing about the experience of mental illness can communicate what it’s actually like to have that mental illness than more scientific writing. By just knowing the symptoms of an illness, it’s hard to know how that actually impacts someone’s day-to-day life. I think that this has the potential to foster a lot of empathy in a reader, especially one who doesn’t know anyone who has a particular mental illness or has never experienced mental health issues. Two of the texts we read this semester, Out of the Crazywoods and Marbles described the experienced of the authors coping with bipolar disorder, which is still a very stigmatized condition. Maybe through reading these and similar texts, people can become more understanding and empathetic towards people with mental health issues.

This class was the first English class I’ve taken where copyright was discussed any further than “don’t copy other’s work, it’s plagiarism”. I didn’t deal with copyright restrictions much with my project, as Ten Days in a Mad-House is in the public domain, but it has been interesting to see how other students have worked to publish their projects within the restrictions. None of us would have had to deal with the copyright of our primary sources if we had not used a website format for the project, but I think the format benefitted the project as a whole. I feel like the ePortfolio site made the digital edition a bit more engaging, and probably helped with navigating annotations for specific lines of text. If someone were to come across one of these digital editions before the original text, and process the text through the additional pieces (critical intro, annotations, etc.) then it would likely change how they viewed the text as a whole. In addition, I now have at least a basic understanding of WordPress and how to format a website. I’m still not sure if I’ll use this site for anything else in the future, but if I do decide to add more to it, I’ll have a basic understanding of how.

To be entirely honest, I haven’t thought much about drafting my ADE critical introduction yet. However, I can try to type out some of my thought process for planning it here, as this seems to be an appropriate use of the reflection blog. I’m happy with my thesis and main points right now, I just need to make them clear in the introduction. In terms of contextual and background information, I still need to work on finding some secondary sources to help with that, as most of the sources I found weren’t very applicable to Ten Days in a Mad-House. I’d like to include some information on mental hospitals and asylums at the time that the piece was written, so hopefully I can find some source(s) that look at those institutions in America, which was something I struggled with when originally drafting the bibliography. A secondary source that was suggested to me by Professor Tuttle, Into the Madhouse with Nellie Bly: Girl Stunt Reporting in Late Nineteenth-Century America worked really well for a secondary annotation, but also included a lot of context for the reporting style utilized in Ten Days in a Mad-House, and how it was influenced by the culture at the time. I don’t have a lot of general knowledge about the culture and gender roles during the 1800’s, since I haven’t read many books or other texts from that period, so I’ll need to find time to do that sort of research.

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.

Recently for class we read Male Hysteria and analyzed The Return of the Soldier based on it. This was an interesting experience, as I’ve never analyzed two texts in such an interconnected way for a class before. The connections me and my classmates made were really interesting, but I had some issues connecting the two texts completely. I read Male Hysteria first, but since I read The Return of the Soldier second, I missed a lot of the parts of the first text that would have been important to the second. Ideally I could have read Male Hysteria again, but unfortunately I didn’t have the time to. I suppose in the future I could make more extensive notes on the texts I’m reading, so I don’t miss anything.

For my first reflection blog post, I’d like to write briefly about a theme I’ve noticed in one of our recent readings in my Madness in Literature class. This will hopefully let me practice writing an analysis of a text before starting on the larger semester project of the annotated digital edition. It seems that we can write this initial post about pretty much anything, so I hope this is an alright topic for it.

The largest text we’ve read so far has been The Yellow Wall-paper by Charlotte Gilman, and one of the themes I’ve found interesting has been the persistence of the narrator’s husband in attempting to get her to doubt her own thoughts and feelings. Several times throughout the story, she states her own thoughts or feelings on her situation (her illness, her “treatment”, the bedroom decor, etc.) only to add in what her husband has told her to the contrary. Even though this is written to be her own personal diary, that nobody know’s she’s even writing, John’s thoughts still take precedent over hers. Because of this, readers can see that John has frequently told her that he knows what’s best for her, despite it clearly hurting her. This ties in pretty well to the common diagnosis of hysteria among women at the time, which was broadly applied to those who presented a wide variety of “unwanted” behaviors in order to strip them of agency, even over their own mind and body. Due to her illness, any of the narrator’s thoughts or feelings are dismissed by John, and she is forced to be bedridden. Both her mind and body are caged.

This theme may appear in other works as we progress through this class, and I’ll probably be using these reflection posts to analyze those texts as well, if we aren’t given any strict outline for them.