The Complexities of Ratched's Charlotte Wells and the Portrayal of Black Women’s Mental Health

We are first introduced to Charlotte Wells when she harasses a violinist performing in public, insulting him, and boasting about her own success and supposed musical genius. She proclaims, “You’re nothing! You’re no one! You don’t get to walk away from me. I am Ondine Duquette. I played for the King and Queen of England; do you hear me? I am Ondine!” (Eyerich, 2020). Just from watching this scene, one could conclude that the character ‘Ondine Duquette’ is arrogant, rude, and hostile. I was immediately surprised to see that the first Black woman introduced seemed to be so blatantly reminiscent of the Angry Black Woman and Sapphire stereotype. However, this didn’t seem to be the case as the episode progressed.

            In the very next scene, we see Charlotte Wells sitting in Dr. Hanover’s office at Lucia State Hospital. She solemnly introduces herself and explains that she’s been experiencing lapses in her memory. She goes on to say that two years prior she was diagnosed with melancholia (which today would be called clinical depression) and that she tried to take her own life. Dr. Hanover references that in a police report she referred to herself as Ondine Duquette, confirming that she was arrested for her public outburst. Charlotte admits to him that she doesn’t know who Ondine Duquette is and that she’s even never seen her – but that she hears her voice. She begins to sob, and Dr. Hanover tries to ask if Ondine speaks directly to her or to other people. Charlotte suddenly stops sobbing and begins to speak in a very childish tone, referring to herself as ‘Baby Taffy’. Dr. Hanover continues to ask more questions, until a third alter is triggered – a paranoid man named ‘Apollo’ with a deep hatred for Adolf Hitler. Apollo believes that Hitler is after him, and Charlotte becomes more frantic until she lifts one of Dr. Hanover’s office chairs into the air and smashes it to the ground.

            In the next scene, we see Charlotte is being restrained by hospital staff and Ondine Duquette has taken over once more. As Charlotte is sedated, she is finally released from her alters, and Dr. Hanover explains to her that she was misdiagnosed. He tells her that “a trauma in your past caused your psyche to split – we need to get to the root of this trauma...” (Eyerich, 2020). We later learn during Charlotte’s first session with Dr. Hanover that before being hospitalized for her misdiagnosed melancholia, she experienced an extremely traumatic event. On her way home from attending a lecture, Charlotte was abducted by a group of four young white men and taken to an abandoned house, where she was verbally abused, beaten, and locked in a closet for nine days. When a policeman finally arrived, he told her that he would only let her go if she promised not to press charges. After the retelling of her abduction and Dr. Hanover’s hypnosis treatment, Charlotte seems to have made progress towards healing from her trauma.

            Following her treatment, we get to see more of who Charlotte truly is – a soft-spoken and gentle woman, and it appears that she will reclaim her sense of self and gain authority over her multiple alters. This changes when Dr. Hanover is fired and he decides to take Charlotte with him to a motel in secret, believing that only he can permanently cure her of her disorder. However, Charlotte is triggered into having another episode when there is a knock at the door and Dr. Hanover forces her to hide in the closet. After being let out, Charlotte physically attacks him, and she then takes an unseen object and brutally stabs him to death in their motel room. Charlotte awakes disoriented on the bathroom floor with blood on her hands, and she finds Dr. Hanover’s body and realizes that she has murdered him. As a result of her guilt and shock over killing Dr. Hanover, Charlotte later takes on a fourth personality imitating him. While under this alter, Charlotte returns to the hospital weeks later and shoots and kills two hospital staff, and by the end of the season, we never again see her revert back to her original self.

            Overall, I had a very positive response towards Charlotte Wells’ character, and I believe that if her character was expanded upon more that she could be a more positive representation of Black women in media. I felt very empathetic towards her for several reasons: she seemed to be very confused about the state of her own mental well-being and her misdiagnosis at the previous hospital, she suffered severely from a violent attack which was likely fueled by racism, and she’d been traumatized so badly that she attempted suicide, developed dissociative identity disorder, and suppressed her memories to cope with the trauma. I appreciated that even as a Black woman with dissociative identity disorder in a psychiatric hospital during the late 1940s, Charlotte was allowed to be vulnerable and fragile, and she was being cared for rather than being forced to care for herself on her own.

            However, Charlotte’s positive qualities as a character seem to fade into the background when her multiple personalities begin to dominate more during her limited time on screen. While we as viewers know that it is Charlotte underneath the surface of these alters, and we clearly recognize that she has little to no control when she is emotionally triggered, we are still being presented with the visual imagery of a mentally unstable Black woman becoming both verbally and physically aggressive, and by the end of the series her outbursts have escalated from swearing and public harassment to outright murder.

            The depiction of Charlotte Wells is complex because we get to see the unique experience of a Black woman coping with an immense amount of psychological trauma and receiving the care that she needs to heal, but we also end up seeing the very tragic and violent impact of that trauma. For those already concerned by the portrayal of Black women in media, Charlotte Wells’ character also calls into question the harmful effects of media portrayals of Black women experiencing mental health struggles, as well as media portrayals of mentally ill people as inherently dangerous and violent. I think that while the vulnerability illustrated by the character of Charlotte Wells’ does some good, I also believe that she perpetuates negative implications about Black women who experience mental illness, and I believe that her severe acts of violence dangerously suggest that those with dissociative identity disorder are to be feared and avoided. While she herself may not perpetuate the stereotype of the Angry Black Woman, for individuals who are not as considerate of her mental well-being and how it affects her, it may appear that she is portraying Black women in general as violent and emotionally unstable.