“She Was the Mad Woman”: Misdiagnosed Madness in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “Her Story”

Abstract

Harriet Prescott Spofford’s female protagonists are complex women who often aim to appear as good mothers and wives, sometimes at the cost of denying their sexuality and creativity as they tend to their families and become burdened with responsibilities. The persistent myth that women found fulfillment only in marriage and motherhood, Spofford seems to suggest, failed to reflect the reality of all nineteenth-century women. This essay will examine the female protagonist in “Her Story,” which is one of the brilliant short narratives in which Spofford questions gender roles and expectations in the period’s patriarchal society. At the same time, it contributes to the national discussion about mental illness and asylums, pointing out how women, just like “lunatics,” were deprived of many rights and liberties and how their bodies, minds, and behavior operated in accordance to social presumptions and were even often controlled by figures of authority. The protagonist’s desires and circumstances are viewed through her “madness,” which Spofford offers, to some extent, as a politics of survival. However, central to the story is the identity conflict experienced by the transgressive, music-loving woman who follows the period’s gender-specific expectations, trying to adjust into the role of wife and mother, while also assuming some of the professional responsibilities of her husband. As a consequence, she suffers from anxiety over work, family, and marriage, which leads to physical and mental exhaustion evident in the symptomatic paranoia and violent outbursts that are misdiagnosed as her “madness.” The story thus focuses on the problems faced by modern women.