Mental Insanity in A Whisper in the Dark

I was very surprised when insanity was thrown into the second part of A Whisper in the Dark because it so greatly differed from the first part. Sybil appears to be a very mentally sane girl, who acted much as a young teenage girl would, even if she is vain and giddy. She showed off her social competency through her ability to play men off one another. By inserting this girl who has the wealth and the whole world at her fingertips into an insane asylum the text changes from a romantic fiction into a horror story. The concept of insanity is scary and the descriptions of Sybil’s desolate setting are unpleasant as she describes the “hours of unspeakable suffering, which aged [her] more than years” (Alcott 235). We see the beauty Sybil was so proud of and used as a means of manipulation turn into an ugly “melancholy wreck of [her] former self” (Alcott 236). We pity Sybil and her misfortune but mental health was not well understood in that day and it held many negative connotations, as it does now to some extent as well. The general belief seemed to be “death of the body was far more preferable than that of the mind” (Alcott 236). Sybil was ashamed that she may be going crazy and the readers were as well uneasy about it.

The concept of insanity seems to put the readers on our guard and gives the entire novel a suspicious and scary feel. Especially since the work is written in first person, it makes us distrustful of the narrator of the story and with that makes us question what is really going on. I realized she might really be going crazy when she saw her mother dead (although she did not know that was her mother at the time) and she says, “An awesome fancy that is was myself assailed me… I recalled legends of spirits returning to behold the bodies they had left” (Alcott 237). I knew that this was an extremely strange thought and that the only way this could be true was if this story was a sci-fi, which it clearly isn’t. The fantastical story she made in her mind convinced me that she was not all completely there and therefore made me doubt the truth to the rest of the narration.

As far as the mother/daughter relationship goes, it is crazy how similar Sybil was to her mom. She looked the same, had the same hair, and was placed in a mental ward where she acted the same by pacing back and forth. It really takes the concept of “like mother like daughter” to a whole new level. Perhaps it sheds light on the concept of mental illnesses and how they can be passed down from mother to daughter through genes, or how a mother wants her offspring to not have the same problems as herself. Although Sybil’s mom did not know it was her daughter she was helping escape at the time, she still sacrificed herself to help her so Sybil would not have to live a life as desolate as herself, which shows a mother’s love.