Lyddie: Voices from the Field - Chapter 15 Mental Illness

Lyddie and her family encounter many health problems, including fevers, injuries, and the mill girls’ coughs. Those illnesses reflect the hard physical labor, poor food, and extremes of hot and cold that they experience on the farm and in the factory. Living on the edge of survival, this hard work wore down people’s bodies and spirits.

Having a shuttle hit her head and catching a serious fever is dramatic, but the hardest health challenge Lyddie faces is probably her mother’s mental illness. When Uncle Judah decides to sell the family farm so he can send Lyddie’s mother to a mental hospital, the Brattleboro Retreat, Lyddie’s dream to reunite the family on the farm comes to an end.

Lyddie does not know much about the Battleboro Retreat. Had she been able to visit her mother there, she might not have felt quite so bad about her uncle’s decision. Like the Lowell mills, the Brattleboro Retreat reflected the changes brought about by the early industrial revolution. Those changes made it harder for families to care for people with disabilities at home. Asylums arose at this time to provide an alternative. Quakers, like Lyddie’s kind neighbors, the Stevens, played a leading role in their design. In the Quaker tradition, the Brattleboro Retreat aimed to provide a safe, supportive space for people with mental disorders to recover. Still, that care was expensive, and families often resisted the idea that a loved one belonged with the “crazy folk.”

Lyddie believes, as did most people then, that families should care for their sick loved ones no matter what the sacrifice. She is angry at her uncle for being unwilling to make that sacrifice. From the beginning of the story, Lyddie has made clear her dislike of Uncle Judah and Aunt Clarissa; he is “mean” and she is “crazy.” So, the decision about her mother seems like one more act of their unreliability and meanness.

But Lyddie has also experienced the struggles of caring for her mother. At the beginning of the story, when they are living together on the farm, Maggie’s unpredictable moods and strange religious ideas frighten her children. Lyddie is afraid to leave her younger sisters Agnes and Rachel home alone with their mother when she and Charlie do the farm work. Maggie’s mental problems reflect her own hardships, being abandoned by her husband on a remote mountain farm with very small children to raise. Fearful of ending up at the county poor farm, Maggie makes the difficult decision to go live with her sister Clarissa. After two years, Clarissa, who is described as being not too “stout” in the head herself, has found caring for her sister too much.

Lyddie loves her mother despite her “crazy” ideas, and she wants desperately to earn enough money to take her out of the asylum and reunite her family on the mountain farm she loves so much. She does not get that wished-for ending. Lyddie cannot provide full time care for her mother and surviving sister and also earn a living. Eventually, a letter arrives telling Lyddie that her mother had died in the Brattleboro Retreat; we can hope the Quakers cared for her better than Judah and Clarissa had.

By the story’s end, Lyddie has learned that this industrializing world is hard on people’s bodies and minds, even as it opens new opportunities. Her mother was not as strong as Lyddie; but as Lyddie weathers her own emotional and physical challenges, she seems to grow more forgiving of other people’s weaknesses. She chooses independence and education as the best way to stay strong amid the pressures and uncertainties of her life in a rapidly changing America.

About the Author

Nancy Tomes, Distinguished Professor of History, Stony Brook University