Caroline Reilly is a writer from New England.
Thomas Lanier Williams III was away at college when he received a letter from his parents informing him that his sister, Rose, had undergone a lobotomy — one of the first of its kind to be performed. She was just two years his senior, and they were inseparable; like twins. After her lobotomy, she wrote to her brother from the hospital: “I’m trying not to die, making every effort possible not to do so. If I die you will know that I miss you twenty-four hours a day.”
Her brother would later come to be known as Tennessee Williams — one of the greatest American playwrights and, for the duration of his life, his sister’s caretaker and closest companion. Rose spent most of her life in sanitariums; her official diagnosis was schizophrenia. She was arguably Williams’s most instructive muse, his dearest inspiration. Shortly after doctors drove a knife through her brain, Williams wrote “The Glass Menagerie,” modeling the play’s female lead — Laura Wingfield, a nervous and disabled young woman — after his sister. In “Suddenly Last Summer,” his heroine is forced to undergo a lobotomy; in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” in “Sweet Bird of Youth,” in “The Rose Tattoo” he created women like Rose — who Rose could have been, who she was and who she became. Few writers have grappled with the anguish of female existence with the clarity and complexity of Williams; few have granted broken and brutalized women the humanity — even glamour — that Williams saw them capable of.
The first time I saw a meme about a lobotomy, I thought about Tennessee Williams; the first time I saw a tweet about the glamour of sanitariums, I thought about Rose.
It’s become a common social media discourse: the memeification of lobotomies; the romanticization of sanitariums. The hashtag #lobotomychic has 9.3 million views on TikTok; a tweet that reads “I wish it was 1952 so my husband could just take me to get a lobotomy” earned more than 26,000 likes. “Back in the day your husband used to pay for your lobotomy, now thanks to *feminism* I have to pay for my own,” says another user to a chorus of more than 11,000 views. Then there’s this love letter to the trend from i-D magazine, which calls it the “duckface of a nihilistic era” and heralds the “dissociative pout” as the new it-girl go-to for selfies. The article unpacks the aesthetics of sullen eyes and swollen lips — all without once mentioning why women who were lobotomized actually had that vacant look in their eyes; why dissociation for them was a constant state of being. Then there are the viral TikTok makeup tutorials on how to get the lobotomy-chic look. If you’re an ASMR girlie, maybe you’ll enjoy this “drive-through lobotomy” simulation where a creator in cherry earrings and bright purple eye shadow and a stethoscope around her neck pretends to lobotomize the viewer while delivering a dreamlike, coddling narration.
Lobotomies were popularized in the 1930s and were considered a viable treatment for conditions such as schizophrenia until they fell out of favor in the 1950s; the last one in the United States was performed in 1967 on a patient who died from the procedure. Early lobotomies were performed by a surgeon drilling or cutting a hole in the skull and severing the connection between the frontal lobe and the thalamus. This was later replaced by a technique where a tool similar to an ice pick was thrust through the eye socket and into the brain.
In addition to being used on patients with mental illnesses, lobotomies were used on anyone doctors deemed warranting of one. This included people with intellectual disabilities, gay and queer people, and, most commonly, women. By 1952, there were an estimated 50,000 lobotomies conducted in the United States and Canada; the majority in the United States performed on women, according to a 2018 study. Healthy women were lobotomized; sick women were lobotomized; disabled women, depressed women, anxious women, sexual women. Women were institutionalized because their husbands found them too opinionated or too independent or too assertive; they were lobotomized for everything from anxiety and depression to ulcerative colitis.
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Smearing Vaseline over the lens of history is hardly a phenomenon unique to lobotomy chic. Consider the widespread romanticization of the ’50s and the appeal of a Norman Rockwell America — all without the very critical inclusion of the racial and gender inequity that marked that time in history. Just as it is wrong to divorce pencil skirts and classic cars from segregated water fountains, so, too, is it wrong to divorce lobotomy chic as a trend from the horror of its reality.
Share this articleSharePut simply, this is not just about making light of the past, about being insensitive to the generations that came before us — but about having such a myopic view of society that you fail to see the ways in which the legacy of these horrors lives on. While the specific practice of spearing a woman’s brain for being disabled, opinionated or anxious is no longer done, the use of medicine as a weapon for the subjugation of women persists. Consider the forced sterilization of women being held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers; consider the practice of nonconsensual pelvic exams on anesthetized patients; consider the use of long-acting reversible contraceptives, also known as LARCs — intrauterine devices (IUDs) — as population control.
Now consider a T-shirt that reads, “I got my lobotomy at Claire’s.”
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why lobotomy chic came en vogue, but in a lot of ways, it makes sense. Women are exhausted — constantly ricocheting between ideals of living foisted on us and then sold as our own desires. In the mid-2010s, Girlboss feminism was preaching liberation through capitalism — beating men at their own game by playing according to their rules. Organizations such as the Wing — a co-working space for women where we could answer emails perched on pink couches in rooms kept at a warmer-than-average temperature because that’s what women like — were sold as utopias. I think a lot about the tweet that reads, “i don’t want to be a girlboss anymore, i want to take pictures of the cows while my husband drives me to my lobotomy,” which earned almost 20,000 likes.
But if the saying goes, “I do not dream of labor” — I also do not dream of lobotomies.
I’m sure there are people reading who think I’m taking this too seriously; who think I’m hypersensitive or overreacting. That I’m being dramatic. I understand that it’s easy to argue that these content creators and meme makers aren’t actually talking about the atrocities committed in sanitariums or forcibly having our brains carved out of our skulls. I understand that sometimes, to survive pain, we have to turn to humor. But I don’t think that’s what is happening here.
Sometimes, I consider what my life would look like if I was born when Rose Williams was. Years before I’d be officially diagnosed with endometriosis, the symptoms were already taking hold: constant bleeding, passing out from pain. But before I heard the word “endometriosis” from a doctor’s mouth, I heard so many others — “promiscuous,” “too thin,” “overreacting,” “hysterical,” “it’s all in your head.” Just a few decades ago, I might have been a candidate for a lobotomy, too. I picture Rose and me side by side in our recovery beds, eating our bland hospital crackers, without the full use of our prefrontal lobes.
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