And There You Go
There is one singular example of metaphor in the book that sums up the entire experience of the author. Nellie Bly was commissioned to go undercover as a mental patient at an asylum in order to expose the truth. And the truth hurt big time:
“The insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island is a human rat-trap.”
The Irish Girl
One patient the author describes requires metaphor to convey the full extent of her suffering. It raises the question, indeed, of whether the girl was truly insane or whether she had been driven to near-madness by religion:
“Her horrible cry, morning and night, `I am damned for all eternity!’ would strike horror to my soul. Her agony seemed like a glimpse of the inferno.”
Psychological Torture
Metaphor and simile are engaged throughout as a necessity to fully describe the effects of psychological torture upon the author. Life inside the asylum means turning one’s back fully upon everything they are used to outside. But the outside can never leave one’s mind and that becomes the energy of the torture:
“Old friends were recalled with a pleasurable thrill; old enmities, old heartaches, old joys were once again present. The turned-down pages of my life were turned up, and the past was present.”
Army of Nurses
The nurses in the asylum were the matrons. These women were put in charge of taking care of other women, but sex and gender divergence seem to dissipate entirely within the walls of such a place. Women to sound just like men in the darkness of night:
“Every half-hour or hour they would walk heavily down the halls, their bootheels resounding like the march of a private of dragoons, and take a look at every patient.”
She is Awake
In one sense, this is the story of a privileged woman living in a bubble of celebrity becoming awake. Her experience inside the asylum awakens here to the reality that she had dismissed in her ignorance as little more than fiction:
“The many stories I had read of abuses in such institutions I had regarded as wildly exaggerated or else romances, yet there was a latent desire to know positively.”
