Customer Reviews

Dorothea Dix: New England Reformer (Harvard Historical Studies)

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I've just read through all the available bios of Dorothea Dix for an upcoming film project, and this book really puzzles me. Why? Let me quote from a positive review, written in a professional historical journal: "What Brown presents is a surprisingly intimate portrait that still acknowledges Dix's many shortcomings--her limited view of women's rights, her blindness on the issue of slavery, and her lingering nativism. Despite Dix's personal limitations, however, Brown recognizes her many successes in convincing parsimonious legislatures to build asylums and putting the plight of the mentally ill on a national stage" (Stephan D. Andrews, Journal of the Early Republic). Sounds good, huh? But there's almost nothing original here; nothing that hasn't been written about by previous biographers. Honestly I can't figure out why Harvard Press spent the money to publish it. (The book seems to have been funded by some special endowment -- even the editors must've figured it would never sell.) To me -- What do I know? -- this is a classic example of academic logrolling, getting other historians to write good things about a book nobody will ever read. There's definitely nobody in Brown's book I can see to make a film of.

Somebody said that a biographer needs to the the constructive enemy of his subject (to balance writers' tendency to fall in love). Brown does a great job with the enemy part. He makes the case that Dix's vaunted reputation as a reformer is inflated, and that she had a hand in pumping it up, assuming credit for the works of others, exaggerating and mythologizing her work at every opportunity. To the degree he gets inside Dix, he presents her as a crabby, obsessive personality. She was more concerned, he argues, with taking credit for nominal accomplishments than with actually changing the lives of the mentally ill. (Why this should be surprising in any political figure, albeit a woman, is a question Brown passes over lightly.) It seems to me that Dix would have to have been a tough customer to take on the peculiar work she did: poking around under the rocks to expose the worst sorts of suffering. She would have to have been equally tough to thrust herself into the political realm against the ingrained prejudice of men. In short, I imagine that she was quite a difficult woman, a holy terror. This comes through in Brown's book; but what made her tick doesn't.

Though Brown doesn't over-dramatize it (indeed, he doesn't dramatize it much at all), Dorothea Dix lived one of the most extraordinary lives in the 19th century, one that included the Boston Unitarian intelligentia during the 1820s and 30s, state politics in most state capitols throughout the North and South during the 40s and 50s, Washington, DC, and friendships with senators and presidents, the worst of the Civil War (when she headed up the women nursuing corps for the Union Army) . . . and then there were the insane. Brown is good, if dry and lapidary, on the exterior movement of her career. And he's good at the political context for her career. Yet, as other reviers noticed, his book is really a life and times, with emphasis on "times," not a nuanced and graceful biography. He never gets inside Dix's head, which leaves one feeling disappointed.

I read all the published Dorothea Dix biographies for a tutorial essay, and this was the worst one. I mean, please, Dix was obviously a massively disturbed woman -- why else would somebody poke into smelly lice-ridden jails and basements looking for maniacs? But Brown writes as if she were Elizabeth Dole. Not!! If you want to get a better idea of how this woman was teetering on the tightrope of her own in/sanity as she became a very influential activist (thus using her own mental instability as a source of extroverted energy), check out "Voice for the Mad," a more sensitive and unsettling biography of Dorothea Dix.

These two reviews move me to write. One says that the author gives Dix too much credit and does not paint her sufficiently as a psychotic; the other says the author does not admire Dix enough. These two unbiased readers alone demonstrate that Brown has written a masterly biography of a complex woman in the midst of a turbulent era. Brown's Dix is a complicated and fascinating figure--not a feminist heroine nor a whipping post for the politically correct. Her career has much to teach us about the aspirations and limitations of 19th century reformers. Brown's book, clearly and elegantly written, thoroughly researched, is the best book on 19th-century reform since Lou Masur's Rites of Execution. Brown has recovered Dorothea Dix, not as a 20th-century reader would have liked to have her, but as she really was. This book is a major achievement.

The first reviewer here says that the author, Thomas J. Brown, gives Dix too much credit and does not paint her sufficiently as a psychotic; the second reviewer says Brown does not admire Dix enough. These two reviews demonstrate that Brown has written a masterly biography of a complex woman in the midst of a turbulent era. Brown's Dix is a complicated and fascinating figure--not a feminist heroine nor a whipping post for the politically correct. Her career has much to teach us about the aspirations and limitations of 19th century reformers. Brown's book, clearly and elegantly written, thoroughly researched, is the best book on 19th-century reform since Lou Masur's Rites of Execution. Brown has recovered Dorothea Dix, not as a 20th-century reader would have liked to have her, but as she really was. This book is a major achievement, and would be a terrific reading assignment in any college class.