The Lunatics’ Ball: Some Backstory and the Invitation List

Our suburban New Jersey household in the nineteen-sixties was a dark one, my depressed mother sleeping all day, my parents bickering every night over cocktails. Evenings devolved into my mother’s tears, my father’s tight-lipped rage, “do-it-yourself night” dinners for my younger brother and me. My beautiful, mercurial, very young aunt, whom I call “Maddy” in The Lunatics’ Ball, was a source of light and warmth and energy for me. She was the ally and mentor I desperately needed.

After college, I spent four years in Europe before returning to the U.S. for graduate school. I had long since left behind my unhappy family and the stultifying suburb where I grew up when Maddy was diagnosed as bipolar. It was the late 1970s, pre-internet, before google searches of medical conditions. I didn’t know anything about bipolar mood disorder. Maddy didn’t seem to know very much about it herself, or to think that keeping up with medication or treatment was necessary. In the 1980s I moved to the opposite side of the country, became immersed in marriage, new motherhood, and a new job as an English professor. Then Maddy committed suicide.

A year later I was diagnosed as bipolar myself.

The Lunatics’ Ball was inspired by Maddy, my realization of how much I missed her and how little I understood the madness we share. Would it have helped if I’d known more? Would better treatment have saved her life? I wondered what would have happened to us had we lived in a different time. What I could learn from other “lunatics” who preceded us. How it would feel to admit our kinship with these spiritual forebears.

Maddy was 47 when she died, and it wasn’t until I was almost 47 that I started to write about her. I still wasn’t ready to divulge that I was bipolar to colleagues or students or any but my closest friends and family members. But I felt I had to write about Maddy. It was as if she was knocking at the door of my dreams, whispering to me as I slept. “Tell our story.” Some mornings I woke with my heart pounding, straining to remember what I’d just seen in our latest dream encounter. Each time I published an essay about Maddy, I thought I was finished. And then I started a new one.

The meaning of “our story” expanded to encompass many stories after I discovered the Willard Suitcases project online—Jon Crispin’s stunning color photography installation memorializing the hundreds of abandoned suitcases and trunks discovered in the attic of the Willard State Lunatic Asylum, left behind when their owners died. (See Sierra Bellows’ article in American Scholar, which includes two of Jon Crispin’s photos of Madeline C’s trunk, the subject of one of my essays.) I immediately wanted to unpack some of those suitcases, try on the clothes of women long gone, imagine their lives. I became curious not only about the Willard patients but also about the many lesser-known lunatics whom I seemed to encounter every time I opened a newspaper or book. Friends sent me names and stories. They multiplied, my lunatics, and I started to look backward, wondering about the nineteenth- and twentieth-century inmates in other lunatic asylums in the U.S. and Europe. Their voices blended with the fairy tales I read in childhood and the myths and poetry I studied in graduate school.

From the beginning, I filed these essays and flash in just two folders on my desktop: “Who I Am” and “Who We Were.” They’re like a family, these other lunatics, I am one of them, and I’ve felt compelled to address them by their first names, to mourn their fates, and to celebrate their achievements. I struggled to give shape to the familiar histories of famous women. In order to explore other women’s histories that had been lost or only partially told, I developed hybrid forms of writing that combined research with fictionalized speculation and lyric riffs and imaginative improvisation. (I’ll say more about hybrid writing forms in a later Substack.) I had to relive two psychotic breaks I thought I’d buried. By coming out as bipolar and assembling these stories, I hope to open a space for fellow lunatics free from the stigmas associated with mental illness.

Here, in the order that they appear, is the list of women at my lunatics’ ball. In some cases, we get only a glimpse of them. (I’ll say more about individual “lunatics” in future Substacks.) There are many more I would have liked to invite, but the ballroom was already too crowded!

Mary Frances Heaton (1801-1878)

Lorina Bulwer (1838-1912)

Fanny (???-????, Blackwell’s Asylum lunatics’ ball, 1865)

Rebecca Arnold (????-1897)

Louise Augustine Gleizes, aka “Augustine” (1861-????)

Ida Bauer, aka “Dora” (1882-1945)

Jeanne Beaudon aka Jane Avril (1868-1943)

Lucy Ann Lobdell, aka Joseph Israel Lobdell (1829-1912)

Alice James (1848-1892)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)

Emma Gregory (1887-1912)

Elizabeth Faribault, aka Elizabeth Fe Alexis (1882-1928)

Lizzie McNally Halliday (1859?-1918)

Violet Gibson (1876-1956)

Mary Todd Lincoln (1818-1862)

Ida C. Craddock (1857-1902

Elizabeth Packard (1816-1897)

Vivienne Eliot (1888-1947)

Zelda Fitzgerald (1900-1948)

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

Lucia Joyce (1907-1982)

Madeline C. (1896-1986)

“Mary Roberts” (1877-????)

Audrey Munson (1891-1996)

Rosemary Kennedy (1918-2005)

Rose Williams (1919-1996)

Naomi Ginsberg (1894-1956)

Trudy Drucker (1926-1997)

Eunice Kathleen Waymon aka Nina Simone (1933-2003)

Janet Frame (1924-2004)

At some point I decided that I’d published enough of The Lunatics’ Ball essays, more than a prospective publisher might want me to. Here’s an excerpt from one of the unpublished essays, “Cinderella at the Lunatics’ Ball”: “I keep returning to Harper’s Weekly’s account of the ball at Blackwell’s, the fiddler—one of the patients ‘lost in ecstasy in the sounds which he produces,’ and the lively dancers, cutting “every variety of ‘pigeon wing’” In the pigeon wing, the dancer raises his or her leg and shakes it. The dancers sound pretty proficient, none more than one inmate singled out by Harper’s Weekly: ‘Now and then there darts out one who enchains the attention of all her acquaintance by her excellent execution of the most difficult pas. Miss Fanny L— may be considered to have carried off the honors of the evening by her Highland Fling, Sailor’s Hornpipe, and Spanish Cachuca.’

Miss Fanny L—!

I can’t stop wondering about her.”

The detail here is from Toulouse-Lautrec’s painting “At the Moulin Rouge, the Dance” (1890), which does not depict a lunatics’ ball, but this dancer reminds me of Fanny. Also of Jane Avril, the most famous dancer at the Moulin Rouge, who claimed that she made her debut as a dancer at le Bal des Folles (the annual lunatics’ ball at La Salpêtrière Mental Hospital) when she was a young patient in Jean-Paul Charcot’s hysteria ward. Even if you don’t know her name, you’d recognize Jane from Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters and paintings.