Unclaimed Bodies, Feeble Minds in The Ballroom (2016): Anna Hope’s Visions of Asylum

• Main Author: Catherine Rovera
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2017-10-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Subjects: Anna Hope; dance and music therapy; Darwinism; disenfranchisement; eugenics; exposure
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/3779

Set in 1911, Anna Hope’s second novel gives visibility to those who ended up as lab rats in the hands of psychiatrists or would-be eugenicists and whose bodies went un(re)claimed. Through the figure of Dr. Fuller, a staunch admirer of Winston Churchill, Hope exposes the interplay between the medical authorities and the body politic at the expense of those deemed to be mentally defective. Although clearly a work of fiction, The Ballroom is also the result of extensive research into institutional archives, namely medical journals, pamphlets and casebooks, as well as personal records from the patients who were branded pauper lunatics. The present study examines how archival documents may act as fictional tools that bring to light such tenuous and hitherto underexposed lives. It therefore highlights many instances in which ethics and aesthetics entwine, not least through the use of the photographic medium.