'Girls and Their Monsters': The Morlok Quadruplets and Mental Health With Audrey Clare Farley
(absolutely heartbreaking)
‘Girls and Their Monsters’: The Morlok Quadruplets and Mental Health With Audrey Clare Farley
3/18/2023 by Eleanor J. Bader
Audrey Clare Farley’s book Girls and Their Monsters: The Genain Quadruplets and the Making of Madness in America “is about people living under fascism, but it’s also about bravery and defiance.”
The Morlok quads—Sarah, left, Edna, Helen and Wilma—with their Oak Park kindergarten and first grade teacher, Miss Etta Goff on the steps of Oak Park Elementary School. (Courtesy photo / General collection / State Archives of Michigan)
When Edna, Helen, Sarah and Wilma Morlok were born in May 1930, their father, Carl Morlok, was horrified that identical quadruplets had entered the world. After all, he thought multiples to be a sign of low breeding. And he didn’t mince words: After his wife Sadie gave birth, his first words made his position clear: “What will they think my wife is, a bitch dog?” The family’s story is told in Girls and Their Monsters: The Genain Quadruplets and the Making of Madness in America. The book’s author, Audrey Clare Farley, addresses the sisters’ earliest years as a singing-and-dancing sensation and zeroes in on their coming of age and eventual descent into schizophrenia. Their experience as long-term research subjects at the National Institute of Mental Health—where the surname Genain was used to mask their identities—provides fodder for Farley’s parsing of psychology’s changing views on the root causes of mental illness and gives readers a window into the racial, class and gender prejudices of the experts who studied and treated them. It also spotlights the pathology at play in the Morlok home and the rigid authoritarianism of the family patriarch.
. . .
The racism of 1930s Jim Crow America was also projected onto the quadruplets. Their public performances stoked fantasies about white innocence and dangerous, dark-skinned others. The girls opened for minstrel performers and sang songs glorifying Christopher Columbus. To me, it was obvious that they were being used as puppets to tell a story about America that hid segregation, racism and the genocidal violence at the core of our country’s founding. Predictably, they were beloved by the white audiences they performed for. But that adoration never translated into real regard for their well-being.
. . . . .
Even today, decades after the Morlok family was studied, many psychiatrists and psychologists don’t recognize the ways that racial or religious prejudices shape us—our fears, our desires, our senses of self. And genetic explanations remain very alluring. This doesn’t surprise me. Narratives that reduce schizophrenia to genetics let us off the hook. They absolve us—society—of our responsibility to build a better world.
. . . . . .
Bader: What do you want readers to take away from Girls and Their Monsters?
Farley: I want to stress that I don’t view the quadruplets only as victims. They looked for and found joy. The book is about people living under fascism, but it’s also about bravery and defiance. Sarah urged me to use their real names rather than the pseudonyms used in Rosenthal’s book. I hope readers will recognize the courage that took.
https://msmagazine.com/2023/03/18/girls-and-their-monsters-mental-health-audrey-clare-farley-genain-morlok-quadruplets/