Who was Nellie Bly?
Prior to trying to fly across the world, Nellie Bly would make her name exploring America’s asylums. She posed as a maid with an unsatisfactory salary and faked madness to get into the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on New York’s Blackwell’s Island. In the asylum, she sat on hard benches while being roped to another inmate, ate gruel, and suffered ice baths. Apparently, Bly was so good at acting, that in the words of Alice Gregory of the New Yorker,
“She performed insanity so convincingly that her first assigned roommate refused to sleep in the same room with her ‘for all the money of the Vanderbilts.’”
Eventually, she would recount her exchanges with fellow inmates, and tell the truth. A lot of them weren’t even mentally ill — but were just immigrants who didn’t know any English. She began to lose her faith in doctors and confinement in America in general.
Later, she would write a book title Ten Days in a Mad-House that documented her experiences. The book would receive widespread literary acclaim from critics and fame for Bly herself.
But Gregory would have a more nuanced view of Bly, that she was motivated by much more than a mission for justice and progressivism, but a mission, too for fame.
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