The neogothic former asylum in Cork, once known as Cork Mental Hospital or Our Lady's, was the longest building in Ireland. This 19th-century gothic structure, expanded over time, closed in the 1990s and now stares from the north bank down to the River Lee. In recent years, much of the complex has been converted into apartments, with a developer's website inviting people to 'Live comfortably, live conveniently, live with us.' This invitation seems spectral, conjuring the fretful shades of the unwell and unwilling amid bright mockup interiors.
When Doireann Ní Ghríofa, celebrated poet and author of 'A Ghost in the Throat,' began exploring the derelict site years ago, she recognized it as a place where she herself might have ended up but for historical fortune. 'Said the Dead' is an intimately researched and wildly imaginative study of lives, mostly female, lived and concluded during the hospital's first 70 years.
Historical Constraints and Voices
The book's historical span is constrained by official restrictions. In the archive, Ní Ghríofa must stop reading at a century's distance to avoid breaching confidentiality. Consequently, the Victorian and Edwardian voices she uncovers fall silent in the early years of independent Ireland. Nevertheless, her notes teem with names, characters, adventures, and misfortunes of patients. Bridget, heavily pregnant, emigrated to America but was sent back by her brother upon discovering her condition. Anna Martha, a painter with 'peculiar antics,' pulled a gun on magistrates who wished to commit her. Sixteen-year-old Dora, a great reader of novels beaten into depression by her parents, 'wishes to be dead.' Muriel's husband was Terence MacSwiney, republican lord mayor of Cork who died on hunger strike in Brixton prison.
Doctors and Diagnoses
Behind these accounts are the doctors who treated the women. Their voices are most forthcoming at admission, recording fears and delusions: 'Says that fairies work on her nerves… Said she has changed into many shapes since I last saw her. Said that she will be burned soon, and that people are foretelling it.' Affect and intellect are noted as 'dull,' 'sullen,' 'stupid,' or 'intelligent.' In many instances, these accounts decline into careless repetition: 'No change.'
Lucia Strangman: A Pioneer
In 1896, Lucia Strangman, the first woman qualified as a psychiatrist in the British Isles, arrived at the institution. She serves as Ní Ghríofa's double in 'Said the Dead,' a reader of faces, bodies, and letters, a listener to voices on the edge of extinction. On evidence here, Lucia appears to have been at the humane, inquiring end of early 20th-century psychiatry.
The Reader's Role
Reading is Ní Ghríofa's version of doing justice to these lives, but it is double-edged: a kind of love and a type of surveillance. Early on, her presence on the page sunders; she is an exploring 'I' but also refers to herself as 'the Reader,' who presides over even Lucia and her staff, assuming authority and responsibility for all these dead, vivid souls. Ní Ghríofa's treatment of the patients and their textual remains is never less than sensitive. Like Freud with certain celebrated cases, she uses first names only. But the Reader is also obsessive and susceptible, pursuing the dead out of the written record and into their hopes, regrets, dreams, and extravagant desires. It is these that give this book its extraordinary formal and ethical force.
'Said the Dead' by Doireann Ní Ghríofa is published by Faber (£18.99).
