Book: The Painted Bridge
Author: Wendy Wallace
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review by Julie Tomlin
Haunting photographic portraits of asylum patients were the spark for writer and journalist Wendy Wallace’s first novel that exposes the horrors experienced by those women who didn’t live up to the standards of Victorian respectability.
The black and white pictures, taken by physician and photographer Dr Hugh Diamond and Hugh Hering, a professional photographer in the 1850s, led Wallace to Bethlem hospital in Beckenham, south London.
Like the photos and the patients’ notes she saw there, The Painted Bridge is a window into a time when “insanity” was a label applied to a whole range of aberrations from acceptable behaviour, be it “overwork” among working-class women, hysteria among the more gentile classes, epilepsy or “puerperal insanity” – what we would call post-natal depression.
It was a time when photographers like Hering, inspired by the influential physician and amateur photographer Doctor Diamond, were exploring whether the new science of photography could contribute to the understanding of mental illness through the study of faces and physical demeanour.
It is in this period that Wallace places her story about Anna Palmer, a young woman who is tricked by her husband Vincent into going to Lake House, a private establishment where its owner, Querios Abse, subjects her to increasingly barbaric treatments.
As she explored the mental health system of the 19th century further, Wallace was able to piece together the social and economic factors that contributed to the suffocating, claustrophobic nightmare Anna is forced to endure.
With untrained staff – some of whom were former patients – and growing competition from larger institutions, there was often more focus on the income that the patients brought in rather than on getting them well enough to leave.
Wallace brilliantly conveys how vulnerable the women were when all their families or spouses needed to have them committed were the signatures of two doctors.
With so little personal autonomy and a restrictive set of assumptions about appropriate behaviour, the prospects for a woman deemed to be suffering from “hysteria” or “dementia” were truly terrifying.
Wallace took her inspiration for the institution Anna finds herself in from Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath, its gardens and unique false bridge, which is a powerful metaphor in the story.
Within the confines of Abse’s crumbling ivy-covered mansion, Anna is forced to challenge the subjective-dressed-up-as-rational judgment that she is insane.
It is here too that we find Tabitha Batt, locked away by her family because of “moral insanity” after she chose to live with the man she loved. Also a whole cast of fascinating women who bring to life the figures who are staring into the lens in the photographs of Dr Diamond and Hering.
Naive and prone to dreams and visions, the issue of Anna’s state of mind isn’t as Wallace says “an open and shut case”. It’s the way that Anna, a fascinating heroine, confronts not only those around her but her own failure to accept reality that makes The Painted Bridge such a powerful book.
Despite the historic insight it offers, it never feels like a history lecture or even a sentimental story about the suffering of women.
This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in the Camden New Journal.