The Bellvue doctors were convinced that Bly was hysterical, but her whole experience undermined their authority to make this diagnosis. -Kim Todd, Sensational
Blackwell’s Island was not a kind place. This was not common knowledge in New York in 1887, or if it was, no one paid the thought more than passing notice, as the only people condemned there were the insane or hysterical.
Blackwell’s Island was unsafe, rife with fire hazards, moldy food, and unkind staff.
Blackwell’s Island was the place Nellie Bly intended to infiltrate in the name of exposing its faults to the general public.
Once Nellie Bly pitched her stunt to the editor of the World (who paid her a retainer so that she wouldn’t approach a competing paper), she went about figuring out how to infiltrate Blackwell’s Island.
Using a pseudonym (Nellie Brown) and allegedly chasing another woman at a boardinghouse with a knife, Nellie commenced her performance, attempting to act insane enough to be sent to Blackwell’s. The ruse worked, with the police being summoned to the boardinghouse after one night and the judge, for lack of relatives to release her to, sending her to the hospital, then the asylum.
Several doctors found Nellie Bly insane, then several asylum staff members mistreated her and the women she was imprisoned with, until a representative of the World retrieved her. The other women were not so lucky, though perhaps they found some respite in the fact that the odd Cuban girl (part of her cover story) they spent a little over a week with was attempting to improve their material conditions.
Before anything was published about the actual substance of her stint undercover, Nellie wrote an article addressing the press coverage of her alter-ego. Reporters, as was their custom, had crowded the courtroom during her trial, and they had published stories about the mysterious Nellie Brown.
This ouroboros-like media climate culminated in reporters attempting to catch up with the World by “writing about Bly writing about her asylum experience.” Because of the emphasis placed on sensational and salacious stories pioneered by Pulitzer, his own newspaper’s undercover operation was almost compromised by the rest of the New York City newspaper ecosystem.
As stunts go, this one was particularly successful. New York and the rest of the country sat rapt, waiting for Nellie’s next move, and other publications sang her praises. She wasn’t the first reporter to go undercover in search of a story, but she did influence a whole new group of writers to emulate her and seek out their own ways of challenging systems of power with nothing but their words.
Sources
FRITZ, ARTHUR. Nellie Bly Online, nellieblyonline.net/.
RAPPAPORT, HELEN. “The Pioneer Women Journalists Who Inspired a Novel.” Helen Rappaport, 29 Aug. 2018.
TODD, KIM. 2023. Sensational: The Hidden History of America’s Girl Stunt Reporters. Harper Perennial.
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