Castles, Witches, and Snake Pits: The Folklore of the Asylum

The Easter Bunny. Santa Claus. Paul Bunyan. The Chupacabra. Bigfoot.

Americans are well-acquainted with folklore. It provides us with a treasure-trove of “just so” stories that explain, entertain, and sometimes scare us. Though we may think that as adults, folklore no longer applies, I’d argue that it still absolutely does.

Take the Tall Tale. Remember Pecos Bill, the “rootinest, tootinest, rip-snortinest cowboy” who ever lived? He boasted of his greatness with every breath. Heck, he could lasso a tornado. In 2016, America first elected a president who’d later claim to have lost in 2020 due to a “great voter fraud, fraud that has never been seen like this before.” The power of folklore lives.

As a student of the asylum in popular culture, I see folkloric elements throughout mental hospital narratives. These elements do more than merely add spice to stories. They drive them, burrow deeply into our subconscious, and even influence real-life legislation and behaviors. Here are a few examples.

The most influential asylum story is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Written by Ken Kesey, this book tells a mythical tale of the West, narrated by a mute Indian named Bromden. It relates the saga of a brash, physically powerful Irish-American hero who enters a prison lorded over by a cruel nurse, whom he proceeds to battle. Kesey’s Oregon mental hospital is essentially a castle, and Nurse Ratched is the witch who rules it. Her goal is to create slaves for use by the Combine, a fearsome bureaucracy that aims to make everyone the exact same. The hero, McMurphy—a knight errant, if you will—must defeat Ratched in her lair. Although the witch ultimately destroys the knight, he manages to inspire a rebellion. Thus, he triumphs, and Ratched loses her power to make slaves of the patients.

Kesey’s folkloric message is one of freedom overcoming oppression, a Cold War spin on the classic "good defeating evil." Like other folkloric tales, the hero must travel into an evil kingdom and do battle against a monster. To push the analogy further, we might even see McMurphy as a trickster, a folkloric hero dating to Aesop and traversing many cultures.

The 1975 movie based on the book is far less folkloric. Director Milos Forman aimed not for myth but for realism. Ken Kesey hated it. He wrote his own screenplay, which was suffused with fantastical elements, such as Nurse Ratched having claws and drawing blood from the walls. His screenplay was rejected.

Kesey’s novel was highly influential to many college kids back in the '60s. It attacked the establishment, which meant not only parents and the military and repressive laws, but also the dragon that was conformity. College kids wanted to break away from the stifling world of their fathers and mothers, of men in gray flannel suits and Betty Crocker housewives. They wanted to be individuals, steering their own fates. Kesey’s folkloric tale jibed with young people wrestling with parental and societal expectations.

There was real-life impact to Kesey’s words and the film that it spawned. Some states restricted access to ECT treatments and tightened institutional commitment laws. The witch and her castle were real enough to create real-world change.

One more example: There’s a great old movie called "The Snake Pit" starring Olivia DeHavilland. The protagonist suffers from mental torments and gets placed in a brutal ward, literally shown as a writhing “pit” of deranged humanity. She is ultimately “saved” by a knight in a suit and tie, the compassionate and tough Dr. Kik. The damsel in distress is freed from the dungeon.

The two above asylum stories do not necessarily correlate with reality. Interestingly, in both cases, the novel and the movie versions are also very different. In Kesey’s case, a myth gets made into a “reality” product. In "Snake Pit," conversely, the movie tidies up a messier, more ambiguous autobiographical narrative (though the book has lots of mythical elements, too). In both cases, it is not clear how the audience would be able to parse out the fictional elements from the factual. But the audience knows that there is a deeper “truth” here, regardless. And that is that asylums are “bad.”

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Folklore taps into what I see as the innate human need for stories that create order out of a complex and scary world. Often, the stories that resonate most are highly mythical in nature. They make black-and-white claims without supplying any actual hard evidence. It’s important that we understand this, that we understand how folklore is everywhere, and in high demand. Once we understand, we can, at the least, take some precautions. Or else, we might fall into snake pits of our own devising.