Domesticating Insanity 35 and keepers." 37 While most of the panoptical designs patients for asy- lums remained ideas rather than actual buildings, they represent the reformers' thinking not only about social relations in the management but also about "proper asylum." 38 was crucial that the asylum should Private asylums were usually converted houses, But whatever the model chosen, not look like a prison it or even stately homes, called Villa, Lodge, Grove, or Retreat In public — barred windows, high — which had asylums, the apparatus of security gates, chains, and dungeons walls, iron mad- characterized the old houses was disguised At Brislington House in Somerset, inside the twelve-foot wall that surrounded the grounds, raised afforded inmates a pleasant view At the York mounds of earth windows Retreat, double provided security without bars Such structural innovations as the and such disciplinary systems lular unit cel- as regular inmate labor pro- vided a machinery of surveillance and control that took the place of harsher techniques 39 The choice of an asylum's situation about nature, beauty, and paysages was To views of "a fertile were more healthy, facilitated disposal ideas Conolly, the ideal a "gentle eminence," not too high to be remote, but high to provide sites was influenced by Victorian moralises site enough and agreeable country." 40 Gently elevated especially if they were near a stream that of wastes Although the fictional asylum of the Ro- mantic imagination often teetered atop a sublime precipice or on the edge of a Gothic abyss, the Victorian asylum occupied the middle ground that the literary critic George Levine calls scape." English institutions perched on top of mild "the hills realist's land- surrounded by the pastoral details familiar from a Constable painting or a Wordsworth poem Many of them are placed on eminences which view of the adjacent country, the valley, fields wood and field command an extensive of vision embracing hill and water, in their most agreeable combinations; while of grass and tillage, divided by hedges and trees, grazing herds, cottages, and country-seats, form the nearer features of a landscape reposing in the softened light The grounds were of an English sun 41 carefully tended A visiting American asylum super- intendent, Dr Isaac Ray, thought that the gardens, thickly wooded