Or, as she herself expressed it, she’d been “placed there by her husband for THINKING.”35
Left alone in the reception room, Elizabeth waited anxiously by the window. Her little candle of hope was still burning, a tiny, precious flame. After a time, she saw Theophilus emerge onto the porch outside. At the bottom of the steps, a carriage waited.
He paused when he saw her standing there, trapped inside by a plan of his own making.
Would he beckon to her? Was she to join him after all?
On the contrary. He took time only to give her “one look of satisfied delight.”36
“Never,” Elizabeth wrote with tight hurt, “had I seen his face more radiant with joy.”37
He threw her “kisses from the ends of his fingers,”38 bowing his “happy adieu.”39 No mention had been made by him of her recovery. He’d never said he hoped she should get better, that he hoped to see her soon.
As far as Elizabeth knew, he was leaving her there forever.
Theophilus bounded down the stone stairs with a much lighter step than his fifty-eight years might suggest was possible. Without giving her a backward glance, he disappeared inside the waiting carriage.
And Elizabeth’s “dying hope”40 went out in utter darkness.
CHAPTER 8
After her husband’s departure, Elizabeth had no choice but to return to Seventh Ward. The heavy door clanged shut behind her with horrible finality. To her surprise, however, the next sounds in her ears were sweet indeed: she found an outpouring of sympathy “from sister spirits who share my fate.”1 Her fellow patients rallied around her, knowing exactly how her powerless position would be making her feel.
They shared their own stories too, and she discovered many had also been committed by domineering husbands. Some, like Elizabeth, had “no bruises, or wounds, or marks of violence…to show as a ground of her complaint”2 but nevertheless writhed “in agony from spirit wrongs.”3 They knew, as Elizabeth did, that sometimes those controlling, invisible bruises were the most painful kind of all.
Other women had been physically abused before being dispatched to the asylum. One woman, committed by her “drunkard husband,”4 was brought to the hospital with “half of the hair pulled out of her head,”5 but she’d still been admitted.
“Of course the husband’s testimony must be credited,” Elizabeth observed sardonically, “for who could desire more to protect a woman than he?”6
One psychiatrist openly defended this common practice of accepting a husband’s word over his wife’s, saying, “The manifestations of [insanity] are often very difficult to apprehend… It is necessary to have heard the private history of these women from their husbands to form an adequate idea of…the absurd ideas which have sprung up in their minds, the monstrous nature of their feelings, and the horrible acts they can commit.”7 After all, in public, a woman might “preserve the appearance of sanity, and seem so reserved, mild, and well-disposed as completely to deceive the most skilful observers.”8 But if a husband said she was mad behind closed doors then, quite simply, she must be.
Elizabeth railed, “It isn’t fair for you to credit [men’s] lies—and discredit [women’s] truths!”9 But that injustice was set in stone in society, as evidenced by the experiences of the women she now got to know on Seventh Ward.
Sarah Minard became a particularly close compatriot. At forty-eight, Sarah was extremely elegant, the wearer of smart gold spectacles. She filled her private room with house plants—something to tend to, given she couldn’t now mother her three children. No wonder she had “premature marks of age upon her head, which grief, not years had caused.”10
Sarah’s husband, Ira, was a wealthy real-estate mogul who’d committed her for her interest in spiritualism—a religion then taking America by storm, with an estimated ten million followers. It was described by women’s rights campaigner Elizabeth Cady Stanton as “the only religious sect in the world…that has recognized the equality of woman.”11 Sarah herself protested, “It is not insanity, it is spiritual religion,”12 but of course her defense did not matter. She’d been in the asylum for at least two years by the time Elizabeth met her.
Elizabeth made friends, too, with Maria Chapman, whose “busy fingers were always engaged with book, needle or pen”13 or with lifting her ear trumpet to her head, the better to hear her friends’ chatter. Highly intelligent, Maria commanded “universal respect”14 on the ward. She’d been sent away for believing the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish philosopher, because her friends did not. As Elizabeth later put it, “In many instances [it] is not Insanity, but individuality”15 that caused women to be committed.