"If you are not already mad, you will be."

It’s amazing how quickly Louisa May Alcotts story, A Whisper in the Dark, can draw you into the narrative. Playing off of gothic tradition this text introduces suspense, horror, insanity, and sexual themes that parallel women’s freedom in a larger sense. Sybil is a beautiful girl with an attitude who is imprisoned in a private insane asylum by her uncle who desires control of her property. The introduction of insanity has the potential to alter our reader reception of the message and I think it can challenge our previous ideas about the important mother/daughter relationship in nineteenth-century society/fiction.

The introduction of the concept of insanity changes the text because how can you trust opinions and ideas of what is going on in the “real” world if the person describing them is unstable. It makes it hard to trust everything said throughout the text because we do not know if things are actually “what they seem”. The text is completely altered also because it is from first person narrative and this person relating the entire story, as we know it, is going insane inside a little locked up room. “To me this room possessed an irresistible fascination. I could not keep away from it by day, I dreamed of it by night, it haunted me continually, and soon become a sort of monomania, which I condemned, yet could not control, till at length I found myself pacing to and fro as those invisible feet paced overhead” (234). Alcott uses the condition that Sybil is put into by her uncle and Dr. Karnac to create the effect of what is real becoming imaginary. Even though Sybil is going insane I questioned the truth of her accounts of life but I did not completely give up the trust I had in her as a character. “You came here for your own pleasure, but shall stay for mine, till I tame you as I see you must be tamed” (212). I did not realize how crucial some parts of the text were in foreshadowing the future until I re-read it. It is made obvious from the beginning of the text that her uncle was going to take control and for once she was not going to be able to have her way. “My uncle stopped laughing, his hand tightened its grasp, for a moment his cold eye glittered and a grim look settled round the mouth, giving to his whole face a ruthless expression that entirely altered it. I felt perfectly powerless. All my little arts had failed, and for the first time I was mastered. Yet only physically; my spirit was rebellious still” (212). I think this passage from the text is specifically important because the Uncle’s and doctors goal after Sybil is admitted to the insane house is to kill and crush her spirit. “Both were apply gratified, and I, poor victim, was given up to be experimented upon, till by subtle means I was driven to the insanity which would give my uncle full control of my fortune and my fate” (240). Even though our main character was going “insane” and it was hard to understand the real world from her point of view only we are shown at the end that she was not mad in the beginning.

Pertaining to the mother/daughter relationship I believe it is just hidden but is still just as strong as any other relationship we have seen. Sybil still longs for her mother and makes that obvious through the text. “My eyes filled as I looked, and a strong desire seized me to know what had defaced this little picture of the mother whom I never knew” (221). Mothers and daughters have a connection and even though her mother is not present it is made obvious that the love and care is still there. “I believed her dead, yet I had seen her, knew where her solitary grave was made, and still carried in my bosom the warning she had sent me, prompted by the unerring instinct of a mother’s heart” (240).

Overall the narrative provides us with a very short view of the “world” in which the characters of the novel are living in because it’s only one persons opinions and beliefs. I think that we are able to trust Sybil because of her character before her controlling Uncle took her life away. I do believe that this story shows the strong relationship between mothers and daughter and the “motherly” instinct overall.