"Blue Asylum" by Kathy Hepinstall, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 288 pages; $24
Some of the most significant reforms of the Victorian era took place in the treatment of mental illness. Old-fashioned notions -- criminalizing the insane, chaining them up in locked rooms or dungeons, abandoning them to the street -- gave way to a “modern” approach that stressed kindness, a humane attitude and healthy living conditions. The goal was to return patients to society, not turn them into outcasts.
Unfortunately, reforms of the day did nothing to improve the treatment of wives by their husbands. If you married a Southern plantation owner in the mid-1800s, you became his property, just like his slaves and the “300 acres of choice Virginia land” he owned.
And if, in 1864, your husband had you wrongfully committed to a lavish, expensive mental hospital on an island in Florida, you could be held there indefinitely and allowed no contact with your family or friends.
Your treatment, considered progressive and humane, would focus on one thing: to return you to your husband as an obedient wife, no matter what your crime -- or his.
This is the predicament Iris Dunleavy finds herself in at the beginning of Kathy Hepinstall’s lush, brainy Southern gothic novel “Blue Asylum.”
The book examines the subjugation of women, the opposing sides of the Civil War and the rigid social codes of the time via a microcosm of the repressive Victorian society that often drove perfectly sane people out of their minds.
From the moment Iris sets foot on the island’s white sands, Hepinstall sets up an enthralling shell game that keeps the reader busily wondering: Will the real crazies please stand up?
The superintendent and head psychiatrist is Dr. Henry Cowell, a bastion of rational thought who has won acclaim for his famous theory linking “female hysteria and the rise of the suffrage movement.” He is soon revealed to be a self-aggrandizing buffoon bored by his patients, unable to withstand any challenges to his authority, and exhausted by the roles he must play as husband and father.
His son, 13-year-old Wendell, a lonely, sensitive teen whose sexuality has awakened with a bang, believes it’s only a matter of time before he joins the other inmates -- unless God “cures” his shameful secret first.
Ambrose Weller, a traumatized veteran of Antietam and Gettysburg, has flashbacks so violent it takes “four strong men” to hold him down. The psychiatrist’s solution gives the novel its title: To keep his memories at bay, Ambrose is to distract himself with the calming color blue: “Blue ink spilling on a page. A blue sheet flapping on a clothesline. Blue of blueberries. Of water.”
When the blue thoughts fail, laudanum succeeds.
Filling out the cast are a delightfully kooky assortment of inmates whose symptoms are the stuff of dreams or poetry rather than case studies: One man “thinks his loneliness will eat him”; another believes his shadow cures typhoid. An elderly lady who lost her husband dances in the surf with his ghost, while a woman terrified of sunlight hides under her bed. Another patient “thinks Sunday is a wolf” and one gentleman, now blind, shot himself to escape the scent of his lost beloved, which follows him wherever he goes.
Recalling looney bins from “Snakepit” to “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” to “Girl Interrupted,” Hepinstall’s asylum story stakes out familiar territory, right down to the sadistic matron, the often sane inmates, even the recognizable Nurse Ratched streak in Dr. Cowell. What sets “Blue Asylum” apart is Hepinstall’s luscious prose and the tension within each character that keeps the reader maddeningly off balance.
As Iris confides in the doctor, his son, her fellow residents and Ambrose, the truth of her story gradually unfolds through flashbacks, skillfully weaving together past and present. Though Cowell sides with Iris’ husband’s version of her crime, his son Wendell is a far more sympathetic listener, and with his help Iris plots to escape the island.
Danger looms when Iris develops feelings for the soldier, Ambrose. Though she’s all too familiar with the perils they’ll both face in the outside world, she comes to see him as more capable than she first thought and changes her mind about going alone, their romantic future spilling “across her plans like the contents of an inkwell, spreading a stain in the shape of his face.”
Hepinstall makes inspired use of the Civil War as a means to explore notions of freedom, courage and, especially, opposing principals that both prevent and create change.
The intractable North and South and their fight over slavery have brought both Iris and Ambrose to the asylum. Echoes of the war also can be heard in the antagonistic relationship between Cowell and Iris as they debate her sanity. Battle scenes, glimpsed briefly in Ambrose’s excruciating flashbacks, deliver knockout punches of quiet horror all the more affecting for their subtlety.
Despite its embattled environment, a ray of hope gleams at the end of “Blue Asylum,” when the “sad, stumbling, prideful, hopeless” thing we sometimes call love -- for country, for the beloved -- finally opens the door to compassion and understanding.
Born in Texas, Kathy Hepinstall now lives in Austin and is the author of “The House of Gentle Men” (2001) and two other novels.
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