19th-century US historians have long recognized that both the insane asylum and the home have functioned as sites for disciplining bodies and minds into model citizens. Less attention has been given to the relationship between the asylum and the home and how both used religion to shape their residents into model citizens. This paper examines the synergistic relationship between the Southern home and the asylum and how their reality challenged their idealized archetypes as site of patriarchal authority. It also highlights how religion shaped and was shaped by the ideals of normativity – necessarily gendered/racialized – these sites were built to instill.
Anna Kirkland lived at the nexus between these two disciplinary sites. As the niece of Duncan Cameron, one of the wealthiest slaveowners in North Carolina, Kirkland’s story is an example of how religious discipline was used in the home and the asylum to discipline upper-class white women. Anna first experienced the Southern home as a site of familial belonging, loss, and violence – a reality that challenged romanticized images of domesticity. Her devout mother used her faith to shape the young Anna’s understanding of the ideal home and the role she was to play in it as a future mother, wife, and widow. In adulthood, Anna attempted to reconcile these ideals in her own household with her experiences as a victim of domestic violence and early widowhood.
After becoming widowed, Anna began to display signs of mental distress, including clawing at her palms, insomnia, and a deep concern for the future state of her soul and the souls of her two boys. Her religious concerns, her family believed, were indicative of mania and in need of correction, lest she be lost forever to madness. Anna, too, was concerned that she would be lost forever, cast out beyond God's grace and mercy. With the financial assistance of her uncle, Anna was sent first to the Western Lunatic Asylum in Virginia.
Under the care of the esteemed Dr. Francis Stribling, Anna found herself in a world both new and familiar. Alienists – that is, early psychologists/psychiatrists – intended the asylum to be a place of spiritual respite modeled on idealized bourgeois domesticity. In other words, it drew some of its curative power from its resemblance – in form and function – to the home. Like the home, its purpose was to (re-)mold individuals into normative citizens who had perfect control over their body and mind and, most importantly, in a Southern context, knew their place in the social order. For Anna, looked like appropriate religious instruction, submission to the authority of the paternal superintendent, and performing class-appropriate forms of work and leisure, like knitting socks, gardening, dancing, or going out on carriage rides. All of these elements combined to constitute Anna’s treatment regimen, and all sought to discipline her body and mind into a normative (white, female, upper-class) subject.
Even the apparently secular objectives of Anna’s institutionalization were rooted in Protestant Christian ideals of behavior. Proper feminine conduct, for example, was defined by biblical dictates of submission to husbands/fathers and contrasted with “popish” womanhood, which American Protestants saw as a corruption of feminine virtue.[1] Likewise, Southern Protestants invoked racialized language in their idealization of womanhood. To be a Southern lady – that is, a proper woman – was to be white, and like gender, race was a category of identity that had to be performed to have meaning. The higher one’s social class, the more one’s performance of gender and race was restricted and confined, and the more that hinged on its proper presentation. While white men benefited most from white supremacy, white women were its idealized representation and the vessel for its continuation. As such, white women like Anna were expected to discipline their bodies/minds with their future children in mind.
Madness threatened the proper execution of this performance of gender and race even as it was considered the consequence of it; that is, one of the alienists’ explanations for madness was “overcivilization” and refinement.[2] Still, this propensity to madness could be mitigated with proper discipline. Alienists paternalistically took it upon themselves to issue warnings to the public about risks, including intense emotions, a lack of exercise, and religious enthusiasm. The latter was a particular topic of concern, and alienists railed against the “excessive” religiosity brought on by revivals. Instead, they attempted to instruct patients in appropriate religiousness and made themselves the arbiters of “good” and “bad” religion.[3] For Anna, this looked like attending approved Presbyterian and Episcopalian services and Bible studies that were intended to model this healthy form of piety. This mirrored religious instruction in the home, which was idealized as gentle, protective, and comforting, and was yet another way that the asylum resembled the archetypal home.
My paper highlights the close connection between the Southern home and the insane asylum on account of its shared ideals of domesticity and purpose as spaces of religious discipline. I examine how Anna’s time in the Southern home and insane asylum was shaped by religious discipline and normativity, and how her experiences in these institutions differed from their idealized forms. From this, I conclude that any discussion of religious normativity must necessarily address contemporary understandings of madness and that discourses of madness cannot be understood without reference to gender and race, especially in the US South.
[1] Cassandra L. Yacovazzi, Escaped Nuns: True Womanhood and the Campaign Against Convents in Antebellum America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018).
[2] Mab Segrest, Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum, Illustrated edition (The New Press, 2020).
[3] Wendy Gonaver, The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840–1880 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019).
19th-century US historians have long recognized that both the insane asylum and the home have functioned as sites for disciplining bodies and minds into model citizens. Less attention has been given to the relationship between the asylum and the home and how both used religion to shape their residents into model citizens. This paper examines the synergistic relationship between the Southern home and the asylum and how their reality challenged their idealized archetypes as site of patriarchal authority. It also highlights how religion shaped and was shaped by the ideals of normativity – necessarily gendered/racialized – these sites were built to instill. As the niece of Duncan Cameron, one of the wealthiest slaveowners in North Carolina, Anna Cameron Kirkland’s story is an example of how religious discipline was used in the home and the asylum to discipline upper-class white women.