ABSTRACT
The asylum is a space in which Gothic elements converge to transform the life, body, and minds of its inmates. From its architecture of enclosure, with dark cells, dirty hallways and walls, and nauseating rooms infested with vermin and human excrescences, to the horrors that occur inside its walls which source from human evil and depravity, the asylum evokes images of Gothic castles, dungeons, or even haunted houses and their evil tenants. The modern psychiatric hospital—appearing in the 19th century with the advent of the psychiatric medical knowledge as a scientifically validated practice—becomes a disciplinary institution for the transformation (alleged cure) of the abnormal individuals: those who violated the social contract not for criminal reasons, but for mental incapacity and madness. Both official and fictional accounts of the asylums describe these institutions as sources of the most hideous transgressions to the humanity of the inmates. Lack of hygienic conditions (paradoxical when it comes to a hospital), cruelty and abuse from the staff members, abandonment of the patients, and bodily degradation lead to the progressive transformation of the inmates into automatons and monstrous versions of their former (free) selves. This transformation—directly tied to the walls that enclose the inmates—resulting from physical punishment, privation, and invasive treatments, goes hand in hand with the mental degradation of the inmates.
The aim of this article is to analyze the asylum (or modern mental hospital) as a Gothic space and as a source of bodily and mental transformation of the inmates in Latin American contexts, specifically in the Brazilian film Bicho de sete cabeças Bicho de sete cabeças [Brainstorm, 2000] and Virgilio Mora’s novel, Cachaza, 1977. These texts, although not traditionally catalogued as Gothic, explore central Gothic tropes and themes in the context of modern psychiatric hospitals. In both texts, the protagonists experience the contemporary horrors of enclosure and the transgression of all humanitarian principles of a medical institution in the hands of the evil staff, which leads to the progressive transformation (both bodily and mental) of our heroes through abandonment, torture, and medication. The images of the transformed, drooling, incoherent patients stand as terrible doubles of the humans they were before their admission to the institution.
